Francesca Pionati

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DATOWN
Two-channel video, HD+minidv, 3’16’’, 2024
Despite all the efforts to turn the city of Rome into a contemporary global capital, an efficient megacity dedicated to production and consumption, the Eternal City seems to keep embracing its steadfast decline and rejecting a broader and structured project of gentrification and digitalization.

As of January 2024, two Data Centers have been constructed in Rome. The first one is in Via del Tecnopolo, in the neighborhood of Case Rosse, a notorious tuft extraction site of Ancient Rome. The second in EUR, Esposizione Universale di Roma, a neighborhood conceived by Benito Mussolini’s regime in 1935 and never completed. 

Data Centers are normally built on pre-existing infrastructures (e.g. power plants, railways, maritime routes) for obvious reasons: power and wealth stratify themselves. In Rome, as well, everything exists on top, on the side, or inside something else.



Are local dwellers aware of the socioeconomic changes that certain areas of the city are subjected to? Who is paying the price for these modernization processes? Who will be affected by them in the future? Can we resist them?

We conducted a series of interviews with residents of Case Rosse and EUR, investigating their perceptions and beliefs surrounding the ongoing transformations of their urban environments. Adopting the persona of a Roman e-girl who creates educational content about her city, we re-enacted fragments of these lived experiences, opening a critical reflection on the intended audience for these narratives and the forms of storytelling  that make them legible or relevant.

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