Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters – the first long-term, contemporary art programme, established by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii – has recently launched a new yearly programme of Digital Fellowships, facilitating artistic and curatorial research within Pompeii's uniquely trans-temporal, multi-species, and deeply entangled context.

Anri Sala is the artist who inaugurates Pompeii Commitment. Digital Fellowship. Curated by Marcella Beccaria, this first Digital Fellowship presents Body Double, a new sound work which Sala made by bringing together recent findings from Pompeii with others from excavations carried out in past centuries. Sala looked at the plaster casts of two victims, produced after the discovery of human remains in 2020, during excavations in the Civita Giuliana area. At the same time, the artist drew inspiration from an ancient wind instrument, similar to a double flute, known as aulos in ancient Greek and tibia in Latin. In the extraordinary heritage retrieved from Pompeii, this instrument has come back to us thanks to finds excavated in 2018 and others which had already been found around 1800. Ideally making perceptible the last breath of the victims, and allowing an instrument that had been silent for almost two thousand years to produce music again, Sala’s work establishes a poetic equivalence between the duration of the music piece and the volume of air left by the bodies in the ash, a space made tangible by the volume of the plaster casts. Complemented by two new drawings expressly made by the artist, Body Double is an elegy dedicated to the ancient inhabitants of Pompeii, a place that keeps coming back from the past to the present, projecting itself towards the future and turning space and time into porous entities folded onto themselves.
The music of Body Double is performed by Stefan Hagel, a scholar who plays a reconstruction of the ancient wind instrument designed by himself using digital technologies.
In anticipation of the presentation of Body Double also in the form of a vinyl LP record, this Digital Fellowship is divided into two parts – Side A and Side A Too – now online on pompeiicommitment.org. Inspired by a vinyl in the analogue world, the curatorial project has developed together with the artist the graphic structure of Side A and Side A Too as if they were the two sides of an LP record in which music tracks follow one another. In both sides the sequence of contents, which also include documentary images of the excavations and finds, was established according to the concepts of double, similar, equivalent, stratigraphic and circular, which are all part of the artist’s work. Published within Side A and Side A Too, the curator’s text covers the project analysing the many artistic, technical, scientific and, above all, human intertwined stories that made it possible.

The production of the vinyl LP Body Double by Anri Sala is kindly supported by Gianfranco D’Amato.