Roman Walls

First they made zealots.
The zealots inscribed stone tablets as a form of communion, the ritual of faith.
They bonded through labor, toiled and toned.
They believed in some ideal, some end to their torment.
So they made stone tablets.
Hundreds, thousands of them.
They lined the city with the tablets until the tablets became walls.
But when the barnacles were introduced, they became tourists to their own crafts.
They no longer had to chisel with painful precisions, afterall, under whose authority were they to inscribe with such confidence? Whose ideal?
So communion became communication, debates, arguments, rants.
Their calloused hands softened and became susceptible to wine glasses, while their thoughts and speech were readily lubricated by the alcohol.
They roamed the walls they built with vigor, fetishizing over grooves of precision, but ultimately dulled by rain and moss.
They communicated without faith, form or rituals, as there were no more stone tablets to turn.
For a month every year, the YSOA students visit Rome. Tourists retracing the steps of masters who had come before us, matching their itinerary and aspirations, roleplaying the architects whose work we had studied for years. In preparation for this pilgrimage, we had read their accounts, studied their drawings, and perhaps fetishized the world they inhabited. Only through drawing could we move beyond these inherited perspectives and begin to see the city for ourselves. We arrived in Rome as visitors, and we left with a new form of attachment to a place that was not ours.