Joe Caden

Via Toledo traces a line through many empires. Created by the Spanish Viceroy Pedro de Toledo, the road begins at the Porticciolo Molosiglio (once the site of the Arsenale) next to the Bourbon Royal Palace, skirts the ancient Greek and Roman cities, passes the Quartieri Spagnoli culminating in Piazza Dante (formerly Piazza Largo del Mercatello, but re-shaped by Vanvitteli as a memorial to Charles III of Spain). The line of the road continues, under various names, over the Ponte Maddalena Cerasuolo which spans Rione Sanità to the Capodimonte Palace and grounds, the summer residence and hunting lodge of the Bourbon kings. This line connects urban and once-rural environments, crossing zones and places in delicate equipoise. As the culmination of a series of explorations into material conditions rooted in colonial residues and socio-spatial dissonances, Colonial Remnants and Urban Relics seeks to mediate the narratives of power, memory, and place which haunt this path through Naples. A series of urban spaces along Via Toledo are unveiled to exhibit contextually specific, materially charged artefacts. Understood as seven discrete City Museums, each space is designed to house a fragment of the city, and to act as a historical measure of the specific context within which both the artefact and site are contained. 

These seven City Museums are positioned as architectures of adjustment, re-orientating visitors to the specific concerns of the artefact and its associated zone (an extended area of cultural affect) in the city: an amphitheatre is positioned as a locus of cultural communion, a lift and viewing platform are re-framed as a gesture of urban reclamation, and a vestry as part of a re-dressing of Chiesa di Santa Teresa degli Scalzi. Through a sectioning of constructed landscapes, combining real, imagined, lost, and possible conditions, the hidden (and often contested) narratives of the city’s violent history are revealed. The use of chiaroscuro is invoked as a metaphorical device, casting a specific light on the city; the resultant shadows are made manifest as walls, screens and veils, architectural devices dissecting the city. The screens, characterised by material swellings and thickened skins, challenge colonial architectural remnants (Ponte della Sanità, Tondi di Capidomonte). The veils, distinguished by porous membranes and permeable environmental devices, frame urban relics and disturb established visual connections between urban artefacts. Collectively, these architectural elements provide infrastructures not only for the display of objects, but for re-occupying and repairing lost spaces. As a curation of the city-as-museum, they invite Neapolitans and the ever-increasing numbers of visitors (which have swollen since Via Toledo was established as one of the key sites on the Grand Tour) to look again, to see and question the forces which shape the city.