The workshop invites participants to engage with visual prompts from the Ancient Graffiti Project Archive and contemporary graffiti in Rome. Inspired by these materials participants will be invited to contribute drawings and texts to the wall. The project aims to provide a historical and practical understanding of ancient graffiti culture and an opportunity for collective authorship, whilst exploring the cultural value of contemporary graffiti today.  After a brief introduction to the research and a visual presentation of ancient and contemporary graffiti in the museum's auditorium, the workshop will take place at the foyer entrance and will continue until the end of the Live Live Live! program.

Eloise Fornieles and Alessandra Tafaro are currently fellows at the British School at Rome.

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The workshop will take place between the museum's auditorium and foyer.

Participation is free of charge and no reservation is required.

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Eloise Fornieles is an artist and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the The British School at Rome. Her current practice-led, fine art research project explores the intersection of three historical expressions of political protest in Rome: ancient graffiti, the talking statues and the pioneering feminist collective Rivolta Femminile. These apparently diverse historical practices and traditions are linked by the opportunities they provided for marginalized subjects to speak to—and against— the extant structures of power. Fornieles has extensive experience exhibiting and performing internationally in galleries, museums, project spaces and festivals and will have a solo exhibition at the British School at Rome, November 2025.

Alessandra Tafaro is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the British School at Rome. By focussing on a corpus of metrical inscriptions and graffiti from Rome and Pompeii, her current project, Inscribing Anonymity: Unauthored Poetry in Roman Epigraphic Culture interrogates how anonymous authorship reshapes our understanding of identity politics, gender negotiations, political discourses and modes of authorship. Before joining the BSR, she was postdoctoral researcher at the University of Macerata and Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick. She was also recently a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge in 2024. Her first monograph, Inscribing Flavian Rome. Epigraphic Strategies in Martial’s Epigrams, will be released in print by Oxford University Press in October 2025. The book explores the complex interfaces between epigraphic and literary texts, reshaping scholarly understandings of early imperial writing culture. 


Cover image: Eloise Fornieles & Alessandra Tafaro, The Writing is on the Wall, 2025. Ph. Eloise Fornieles. Courtesy of the artist, and British School at Rome