During our residency at the Circolo Scandinavo in Rome, we continued developing the ideas behind our previous installation, Would You Mind Being Around Me While I Work on This?, which explored inner perceptual landscapes within a hyper-stimulated contemporary environment. The residency became an opportunity to begin researching and shaping a second chapter of the work, expanding the inquiry from the architecture of the inner world toward the ways in which psychological states might be mirrored, amplified, and stabilised within monumental historical spaces.
Our research was grounded in site-specific exploration, engaging directly with Rome’s sculptural, architectural, and acoustic environments as potential scenographic resources. A central area of our research drew from the tradition of Roman portrait statuary—composite figures combining individualized heads with idealized bodies. Through visits to institutions such as the Capitoline Museums, the Vatican Museums, and the National Roman Museum, we examined portrait heads, composite statues, fragments, scale, bodily staging, and display scenographies. These observations became references for our ongoing exploration of contemporary hybrid body–architecture figures, performative sculptural structures, and layered projection forms.
