La Rossa

La Rossa draws from the dense mythology and religious history of Bologna to construct a visual satire of America’s accelerating fascism.

Bologna is a city layered with symbol: medieval towers that once signaled family power, endless porticoes that frame ritual movement, and churches whose architecture stages belief as spectacle. It is also home to University of Bologna where doctrine and dissent have coexisted for nearly a millennium. Sacred authority and intellectual inquiry share the same streets.

In La Rosa, I borrow from this visual and theological inheritance, martyrdom  and iconography, and redirect it toward the contemporary American political theater. I carried the color orange with me from the American photographs.

The work is satirical, but the satire is surgical. Just as religious imagery once consolidated authority through awe and repetition, today’s American fascist movement constructs its own mythic language of grievance as martyrdom, spectacle as salvation, the leader as anointed figure. By staging these parallels within the architectural and symbolic vocabulary of Bologna, I create a transatlantic mirror. The Old World language of sanctity is used to expose the New World performance of authoritarianism.

The result is not parody for its own sake. It is an inquiry into how myth hardens into doctrine, how beauty disguises coercion, and how spectacle replaces civic responsibility. In a city where belief has been codified in stone for centuries, La Rossa asks what new cathedrals of power are being built in the United States and who is kneeling before them.