TRACES OF LOSS / Competition for the Monument to the Fallen of Nassiriya, 2006

Traces of Loss confronts the monument as a site of national narrative, trauma, and contested memory.
A long corten steel body, incised and wounded, becomes the vessel of a sequence of spaces: moving from collective archive to intimate threshold, from official imagery to the corporeal weight of loss.

Suspended walkways, crossed one person at a time, vibrate under the visitor’s weight. Their deliberate instability evokes the fragility of grief, the solitude of war, and the impossibility of monumental closure. Light cuts through the corten like open wounds, making the memorial pulse at night.

The project resists triumphalism. It holds memory in the body of the material itself—rust, water, and air.

Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Lazio Region, Province and City of Rome