Eternal City

Magnificent History, screenprint on paper, 70x100cm, 2025

Eternal City, galvanized steel, fridge magnets, fictional text, 2025

Installation view during the exhibition find me some words for in between (part of European Month of Photography, 2025), UdK Quergalerie, Berlin

Exhibition documentation: Tobias Kruse

Eternal City is a fieldnote from Rome in August, composed of collected objects and fragmented writing. The work unfolds as a heat-struck dérive through thresholds of perception, historical residue, and fading surfaces. It uses blue as a temporal color to explore the tension between observation and disorientation in an overexposed city.

The project approaches Rome as a place saturated with images and desires that exceed any single image. The fridge magnets I collected became a key motif; they are banal domestic objects but in essence represent how we often choose to remember a place, a time. Unlike postcards, which are designed to travel and communicate a curated view, these objects remain close, embedding an imagined place within the rhythms of daily repetition.

Alongside the souvenirs, I developed a fragmented autofictional text shaped by August heat, sleep deprivation, and bodily disorientation. These internal images became the primary material of the work. Refusing familiar tourist iconography, Eternal City reflects on Rome as a self-referential image system, a city that endlessly reproduces itself, folding history, cinema, and desire into a continuous surface.