SFX: Roman trumpets– a fanfare for the Emperor.  

NARRATOR:  

Imagine for a moment, being an artist in Rome. All the pageantry! All the splendor! Thousands of years of artistic triumph! What could be more…overwhelming!  

SFX: Transition to modern day sounds  

Forget marble, and grandeur, and all of that. That was the central idea behind Arte Povera, an Italian art movement that literally translates to “poor art.” This artist, Jannis Kounellis, grew up in Greece and then lived in Rome. What he wanted to evoke was not an ancient past, or the immortal gods — but the world as it was, in the city around him. Using scraps from everyday life.  

Finding poetry in discarded objects is something that inspires local artist Nemo Gould, too. We asked him about what it’s like to look for inspiration in the streets.  

NEMO GOULD: 

Broken is good. Something’s function has been removed. But it’s still here. It’s still something. So there’s all this room to reinterpret it. You have to trick yourself into seeing everything as though you’d never seen it before.  

NARRATOR:  

As you look at this artwork, do bits of story cling to these shards? Do you see a door frame? A sliver of gate? Can you let go of their origins completely, and view them as salvaged colors, textures, and forms? 

GOULD:  

The easiest metaphor I can come up with is a jigsaw puzzle. The challenge is to find the relationship between parts and that’s where the jigsaw metaphor comes in. And that’s where the real work is, in choosing those relationships.