William Bell

Via Toledo traces a line through many empires. Created by the Viceroy Pedro de Toledo, the road begins at the Bourbon Royal Palace, skirts the ancient Greek city, and passes the Quartieri Spagnoli. The road continues over Ponte della Sanità to the Capodimonte Palace, the hunting grounds for the Bourbon kings. This 3.4km line connects urban and once-rural environments, crossing places in delicate equipoise. 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 are unveiled to exhibit contextually specific, materially charged artefacts. Understood as seven discrete City Museums, each space houses a fragment of the city, and acts as a measure of the context within which that fragment is contained. These City Museums act as architectures of adjustment, reorienting visitors to the specific concerns of an artefact and its associated area of cultural affect: an amphitheatre is positioned as a locus of cultural communion, a lift and viewing platform as a gesture of urban reclamation, and a vestry as a re-dressing of Chiesa di Santa Teresa degli Scalzi. Through a sectioning of constructed landscapes, the hidden (and often violent) narratives of the city’s history are revealed. Screens, characterised by material swellings, challenge colonial architectural remnants. Veils, distinguished by porous membranes, frame urban relics. Collectively, these architectural elements provide infrastructures for the display of objects and the re-occupation of lost spaces. They invite Neapolitans and the ever-increasing numbers of visitors to the city to see and question the forces which shape the city.

This project was completed in collaboration with Joe Caden.