Site 2 The Protestant Cemetery
First used for burials in 1716, the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome is widely known as the Protestant Cemetery. Located at the edge of the city walls in Testaccio, it is reserved for Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims and atheists who lived and died in Rome. People and cats share paths shaded by cypress, fruit trees and flowering shrubs that lead to the graves of Shelley, Keats, Gramsci and unknown others lost to time. After visiting the cemetery many times, I decided to make a book that spelled out my translation of the meditation Book 4.35 from The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius . I photographed the names on seventy different tombstones. Using individual letters taken from these names, I made a bookwork, Transitory , with marginalia written by several hands. A photograph of each letter is printed at the top of each page. The location of the grave and the identity of the person with the dates of their life is printed at the bottom of each page. As an example, the A in Transitory is taken from the tombstone of the artist Jannis Kounellis, 1936-2017. The Zone, Row and Plot number of his grave is printed in brackets (1.1.20) below. Throughout the book, images of the surfaces of grave stones become the spaces between words. The things of the world - plants, seeds and pine cones found in the cemetery - become punctuation for the meditation. Erin Ciula, a book binder in Florence, made ten leather-bound books with the meditation that I then circulated among a network of people I know who live in Rome and others who have visited the Protestant Cemetery. I asked each person to respond to their experience of being in the cemetery by adding their marginalia to the book. They wrote about their feelings and memories, some making drawings or adding photographs to individual pages in the books. I like to imagine Transitory, with marginalia written by several hands used as a guide for a meandering walk through the cemetery, a story told in fragments. Now the books themselves have travelled. They are in the collection of the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.
Transitory things, we are ephemera in memory; both the rememberer and the remembered.
from the top right, above: View of Protestant Cemetery Transitory, with marginalia written by several hands , ( A page, Jannis Kounellis), 2018 Transitory, with marginalia written by several hands , (marginalia by Ron Benner), 2019 Transitory, with marginalia written by several hands , detail of installation, 2022
all images Janice Gurney
24 on site review 46 :: travel
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