CAMILLOS

BRIDGE

Giulio Camillo was a sixteenth-century Italian philosopher whose explorations of human memory led him to construct a “memory theater” said to possess magical powers: those who entered it would emerge with a memory of all the world’s knowledge. The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo was originally staged in the brick vaults of the Brooklyn Bridge anchorage.

A contemporary commedia dell’arte troupe guides the audience through the labyrinthine vaults — evocative of the paths through Camillo’s mind. The bridge is the principal metaphor of the drama­tic work; it is also the centerpiece of the installation. Camillo’s Bridge spears three successive chambers of the anchorage with two discrete structural units that cantilever from opposing walls: they reach toward each other but never touch.

The Brooklyn Bridge’s historic status prohibited the installation of mechanical fastenings into the existing walls. Instead, the two separate halves of Camillo’s Bridge are tensioned into place against the thick masonry walls and exploit existing apertures to form a rigid structure. Each side consists of four loose compression members and cables that rotate the members against the masonry in order to make the structure stable. Each unit penetrates an adjacent chamber and terminates in a rotating chair. The theatrical installation produces a Janusian moment — a gap that is no longer “here” but not yet “there”— like a synapse twenty feet in the air that can only be bridged, tentatively, by the human stride. The project is an exploration of structural minimums and the aesthetics of danger.

The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo was written and directed by Matthew Maguire of Creation Production Company, with music by Vito Ricci, and was commissioned by Creative Time.