Tangles of time. Soil perturbations as instruments of potential relationality for transition in the project.

The original morphology of Rome has been profoundly altered by human interventions over the centuries, including earthworks, rubble piling, filling. These actions have hidden structures such as the ditches, originally present on the surface. Backfill soils, consisting of human-made material stratified over time, form a new geological unit characterised by permeability. Water accumulates in these materials, flows through preferential paths, and, while shaping the subterranean landscape as it transports matter, it fractures and generates voids called chasms. The dialogue between above and below occurs through a fracture or threshold that allows the passage between Gaia and Ctonia. The earth is understood as a place of coexistence between human and non-human entities, or earth-beings, with matter acting as a dynamic interface. The materialist approach recognises the geological layer as a source of energy and evolution, marking the end of one phase and the beginning of another. In this perspective, rupture is also constitutive, implying the embrace of impermanence, vulnerability, evanescence and disruption. The 'punctured space' becomes a condition of existence and modernity characterised by fluidity and fragility, similar to the bodies inhabiting the asphalt surface. To establish balance, the world can be seen as a metastable space in which energy accumulated and generated over time can unhinge and subvert the conventional stigma. Recognizing the world's complex interactions and seeing the ground alive, disruption becomes a tangible starting point. 'Solid' layers are tilted and bent by forces operating over immense intervals of time, indicating that the earth is in continuous formation. Thinking of things as objects excludes the formative process that generate them, shaping and modifying them over time. Time, 'weather', is understood as agent, a fluid medium, a sphere of forces and relationships that constitute the meteorological world (phase transitions). Arnold Berleant, describes the earth as subject to continuous change because it is un-stationary, both rapid, sudden and slow and settling. Coexistance between humans and 'earth-beings' is proposed as a necessary scenario, in which metamorphosis allows for the overcoming of binary relations and the imposition of radical, solutionist positions. The suspension of the project that familiarisation with fluidity entails the willingness to engage in and correspond with ongoing processes. If the project continues to be rigid, immobile to the fluidity of matter, suspension is instead proposed as a listening, to perceive a state of consciousness induced in us by the external world through the senses or any affective state arising in the soul. The rupture is the fissure in which it materialises, and in a tangible way manifests itself. Welcoming the rupture means subverting the gaze. Looking at the city of Rome from this perspective, thinking of buildings as floating in this moving sea, prompts us to think of figures of architects and urbanists such as sailors, who try to orient themselves, to understand the forces that move flows, magma, particles, winds, bodies. The surface we inhabit, though seemingly hard, succumbs to elemental forces, cracking and crumbling, revealing the earth and inviting life.