Introduction

Data Error – Roma Antichità is a series of framed digital collages installed on exhibition walls under the Mannerist frescos of Palazzo Zuccari. The collages were composed by superimposing two antagonistic elements: high-resolution scans of black-and-white photographs from the "Roma Antichità" section of the Bibliotheca Hertziana’s Photographic Collection mounted on archival cardboard, and screenshots of the artist’s computer crashing under the weight of the files – something it often did during his research on the photographs.

As the title of the series suggests, the images invoke a conflation or collapse of different temporalities and, by extension, of different concepts of history. Analog photography was a crucial medium in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the black-and-white photographs represent not only a depiction but also a reification of Roman Antiquity. The culture of this ancient world has only been gradually rediscovered since the Renaissance, becoming a central point of reference for the neoclassical movement since the 18th century. Western historical narratives commonly refer to a founding myth based on Greco-Roman Antiquity – a myth to which conventional notions of art, as well as of Art History, remain tied even today.

Keller’s images show a post-analog collapse and disintegration of this continuity by virtue of a simple technical glitch: the rupture of a personal computer system. The collages bring together two adverse and irreconcilable time periods, and in doing so herald the advent of a new era, in which the timeline of history can no longer be thought of only as horizontal, but also as vertical, diagonal, and perpendicular.
– Christoph Keller

In the adjacent “Sala del Disegno” of the Palazzo Zuccari, Christoph Keller presents some of his books, including his new publication Dopostoria, 2023, as well as the films Anarcheology, 2014, and Storni Morti, 2018.

In 2018/19 Keller was invited by the Bibliotheca Hertziana as the institute’s first Arts Fellow to continue his Anarcheology Museum project and to contribute to the research initiative Rome Contemporary.