A visual show inside an archaeological site: electronic music and archaeology, with neither playing backdrop to the other.
The Horti Sallustiani are an archaeological site: the park Julius Caesar chose as his residence, which passed on his death to the historian Sallust. Bringing a night of electronic music there means working under a double constraint: heritage protection, which demands no contact with the surfaces, no invasive rigging, and agreed loads and routes; and respect for the place, which is a matter of language before it is one of rules.
Then there was a problem of form. The surface to cover was a dome: an unforgiving geometry, because any image designed for a flat plane arrives distorted.
We designed and staged the visual show together with Lisergica, creating the content and directing it live.
The technical work started with a survey of the vault. On a dome you don't project an image and then correct it: you build the content already knowing how the surface will curve it, so the distortion becomes part of the design instead of an error to compensate for. The geometry was drawn to open upward, following the true structure of the vault.
The second choice was one of register. A clubbing event inside an archaeological site can easily turn disrespectful or, at the other extreme, timid. We worked on a cosmogonic imagery of origin, matter, and light that holds archaeology and electronic music together, with neither playing backdrop to the other.
An archaeological site opened to an audience that doesn't usually set foot in it, in a form that never asked the place to lose its nature.
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