Nassim Sani

City of Trophies

“City of Trophies” is a curatorial project that explores the relationship between the formal properties in monuments and their inherited value through cultural assimilation, conquest, trade, political transition, and the passage of time. Inspired by the John Soane Museum, the ‘Newsoanian’ museum displays collected objects and narratives from an uncovered historic city. Museum's collaborators, archaeologists and architectural historians seek to understand the city’s rich history by investigating the metamorphosis of its most significant monuments over time. The exhibition is positioned as an effort to reconstitute the relationship between a culture’s unveiled histories and the evolution of its architectural forms.
Newsoanian Museum Map – a map of the exhibition spaces
The collector’s room displays objects which relate to historic trades and political conflicts taken place in middle-eastern and mediterranean regions. The collected objects originate from trades of the ancient Silk Road and signify the historic moments where monuments were appropriated through cultural transitions, battles and mythological references. Models and objects are fragments of evidence that mark the historic transitions over time.
The historian investigates an event in the history known as the apocalypse of the 12th century BC. The seapeoples who were partially responsible for the collapse of the major civilisations, are speculated to have resided in the Nuragic settlements found in today’s Sardinia. Through political and diaspora, the seapeoples borrowed and transmorphed mediterranean and middle-eastern typologies into the architecture of their monuments.

Monuments have often been preserved for their cultural and historic value. At the same time, due to their symbolic value, monuments were often subject to adaptation and cultural appropriation to convey political and cultural statements. During political transitions, some monuments were borrowed and appropriated as war trophies in order to signify the nation’s triumph over an enemy. Through periods of transformation, monuments evolved into symbols, becoming markers of time and vessels for narrating events in history. This metamorphosis of monuments occurred alongside the evolution of histories and cultures across time.

The Map Room exhibits a composite map that speculate the city’s formal adaptations over time. The palimpsest of such adaptations make up an impossible map of the City of Trophies.
Created from the composite map of the city of Trophies, these city fragments highlight the evident layers of transformation of monuments over time. These fragments include models and paintings of an industrial complex adapted from an Assyrian domestic settlement, a civic space evolved from the Greek tholos typology, and a citadel complex with Nuragic origins.
The Contested Histories Hall reveals points of intersection among multiple histories resulting in objects with multiple origin stories.
At the end of the exhibition, visitors exit through the giftshop. The gift shop spaces become a part of the form-making process hence are souvenirs. At the same time, the space is flexible and fluid, it expands and changes as more fragments are added to the exhibition. You may experience many different versions of the giftshop depending on what you have explored in the museum. Gifts are pure forms that are scale-less, hence exist simultaneously as objects and monuments.
Gifts are souvenirs, tokens of memory and consumer products which can be purchased and 3d printed in any scale. Gifts may vary from authentic historic objects, to games and toys, or everyday commodities.
The exhibition's auditorium is screening the film "Sufi Dance" featured along the rest of the exhibited histories and narratives. Using the metaphor of "Sufi Dance" and the notion of enlightenment, this film explores the evolutionary cycles of architectural form through history. This film portrays the metamorphosis of monumental forms which slowly fade into icons and enter our field of collective memory. Somewhere in the paradoxical realm of permanence and impermanence, these forms are reborn as everyday objects and collectibles.

Monuments represent the architectural ‘trophy’; a symbol that carries the impression of its successive histories. The meaning behind past narratives embodied within the architectural form is dissonant with our current context. These narratives are often erased through the demolition of the architectural object or tropified through rigid conservation practices. This project presents an alternative to these practices; an opportunity to create new architectural forms which emerge out of their successive histories and are reshaped through responding to their present cultural context.