When Pompeii first emerged from the ashes of Mount Vesuvius in 1748, it was not immediately hailed as an archaeological wonder. Its buildings and urban layout – seen in holes dug amidst the vineyards and farmsteads that occupied the fertile volcanic layer – were perceived as small in scale and lacking grandeur compared to other ancient sites like Paestum.¹ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe too, reported on his travels to Italy from 1786 to 1788 that he was amazed by Pompeii’s “little houses without windows, the rooms being lit only by the doors, which opened on the atrium and the galleries. Even the public edifices, the tomb at the gate, a temple, and also a villa in its neighbourhood, are like models and dolls’ houses, rather than real buildings”.² Pompeii, with its variety of domus, seemed to reveal the everyday life of its inhabitants, offering glimpses into mundane domesticity rather than grandeur, and that’s precisely where Deborah-Joyce Holman started for their Digital Fellowship developed for Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters.
In recent years the artist has gradually focused on image-making as the main lens through which to ponder upon the complexities of the politics of representation and its relation with popular visual cultures, capital and western ideology. Navigating the dilemma between invisibilisation and active refusal, through absence, Holman rejects the economy of spectacularisation – be this by employing labyrinthine asemic writing instead of linear storytelling, in their moving image works, or repetition and slowness that subvert the passive consumption of images. They seek the potential of refusal in that mundane domestic sphere which becomes a space for quietness and interiority as well as bottom-up political organisation. In this sense, looking at the Pompeian domus – with its peculiar organisation of space for the public and the private spheres – as well as how this is and has been understood, mediated and interpreted, becomes an interesting case study where the places for everyday intimacy get entangled with spaces of representation and manifestation of power. During their Digital Fellowship, Holman confronted the domestic sphere of Pompeii with its historical representations and its legacies throughout the history of architecture. Already in the 18th century, the symmetry, order and harmony of Pompeian architecture resonated with the neoclassical ideals of balance and proportion and architects such as Charles Percier and Pierre François Léonard Fontaine incorporated Pompeian classic motifs and decorative elements into their projects. However, it was in the 19th and early 20th centuries that the spatial organisation of the city’s private dwellings exerted an influence on architectural thought. The functionalist principles of Modernism found resonance in the practical layout and utilitarian design of the Pompeian domus. Architects such as Le Corbusier admired their efficiency and simplicity, viewing their programmatic closure towards the street, opposed to their internal visual transparency, as a model for modern living.³  Holman considered how these cultural and historical movements hijacked the Pompeian domus, transforming it into a projection intertwined with the soft power that the creative disciplines had within the act of historicising western splendour and its proposed world order. Framing Pompeii rather aims to bring to the forefront that moment of “dolls’ houses” everydayness, as described in Goethe’s writings, and proposes a series of frames in order to posit questions as to whether it is possible to critically move away from the hypermediation through which Pompeii has been mythicised. Holman tries out a different strategy than extracting meaning or projecting new historical narratives, and shifts attention to a dialogue between Pompeii and a personal archive of images through which the artist thinks about representation. The frames, provided with subtitles, stand among a background of layered images that relate to the archaeology of the domestic sphere, its representation and its staging, portraying online sourced images that formed part of the research as well as important filmic references, the artist’s past works and other personal snapshots.
Sharing for the first time their personal archive, Holman taps into their ongoing interest for the relationship between the figure and built space and vice-versa, but also the political dimension of the domestic sphere. One can spot the backstage of Holman’s previous films such as Moment (2022) and Moment 2 (2022), where the domestic space and its glossy staging becomes a peephole into the dimension of memory.⁴ Screenshots of Forensic Architecture’s twitter thread on the destruction of an archaeological site in Gaza raise further questions about individual and collective memory as well as preservation and conservation. Among the filmic references, there is a selection of images from films such as Mon Oncle (1958), North By Northwest (1959), LA Confidential (1997), The Big Lebowski (1998) and Parasite (2019) in which the framing of particularly sleek and modernist architectural languages, especially in domestic settings, are employed as a setting for social commentary and class struggle. The function of modernist domestic architecture has in fact gradually become identified in films with villains, embodying the coldness of power and suppression.⁵ It is interesting to note that Holman’s painting also begins from movie stills, and TV shows depicting moments where all actors – specifically fictional Black, lesbian characters – have stepped out of the view of the camera, allowing an unrestricted view of their staged domestic spaces. As the artist stated, “What interests me is that in these shots, the set becomes a stand-in for the characters, raising questions about personhood, subjecthood and objecthood. The characters are relieved from the burden of representation as the set now becomes a substitute for them. In this way, the paintings become sort of abstract portraits, disconnected from a visible body. This position posits absence as an act of refusal of participation in a process of commodification as it works against capital’s incentives of legibility on which the category of portraiture hinges.”⁶
Similarly, the frames presented to the forefront of Framing Pompeii strangely capture a haunting absence of the typical crowds of tourists. Despite their realness, these are uncannily silent and misleading too, as they belong to a work yet to be realised. The filmic approach is embedded in the treatment of the images, shot by the artist in January 2024 when visiting Pompeii’s House of the Vettii, the House of Paquius Proculus, the House of the Gilded Cupids, Villa Oplontis and the House of the Fruit Orchard. With their washed-out effect and open questions tapping into the act of framing the public and the private spheres, these emerge as an effort against easy comprehensibility, considering Pompeii as opaque and hard to untangle from the layers of mediation throughout history. At the same time, they also point towards a quietness that provides a moment of silence for the inherent absence of life lingering in Pompeii; a quietness that is an inward-facing counter, an alternative to the extrovert and the spectacular, and a nod to the politically charged dimension of the domestic sphere. CA

¹ Eric M. Moormann, The Appreciation of Pompeii’s Architectural Remains in the Late 18th and Early 19th Century, in “Architectural Histories“, 6(1): 24, pp. 1–1, published on the 27th December 2018.

² Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, 1816.

³ Luigi Gallo, “Des réalités d’autrefois et un cratère plein de mystère par dessus”. French Architects in Pompeii, 2015, in Massimo Osanna, Maria Teresa Caracciolo, Luigi Gallo, edited by, Pompei e l’Europa (1748-1943), pp. 345-351, Mondadori Electa, Milano, 2015.

⁴ Moment and Moment 2 are a one- and two-channel film by Deborah Joyce Holman documenting two performers (Rebecca Bellantoni and Imani Mason Jordan) tirelessly reciting for nine hours excerpts of the seminal Cinéma Verité film Portrait of Jason by Shirley Clarke.

⁵ Chad Oppenheim / Andrea Gollin, Lair: Radical Homes and Hideouts of Movie Villains, Simon and Schuster, 2019.

⁶ Artist’s personal notes on their pictorial work.

1-11. Images:

Foreground:

Deborah-Joyce Holman
Freeze Frames 2-8 & 10-13, 2024
digital frames
Courtesy the Artist

Background:

Research Images, 2024
Courtesy the Artist

Home Page Image: Deborah-Joyce Holman, Freeze Frame 11, 2024. Courtesy the Artist.