I THINK ABOUT THE ROMAN EMPIRE EVERY DAY

I THINK ABOUT THE ROMAN EMPIRE EVERY DAY is a media-archeological Latin language poetry film responding to the viral 2023 social media trend revealing an everyday male preoccupation with the Roman Empire. While the meme often circles around humorous gender norms, the work traces its deeper cultural currents: Rome as a mythic ideal in certain, often more conservative spaces, but also as an ongoing civilizational substrate shaping basically everything from law, architecture, social norms to collective imagination.
Combining poetry film, TikTok dance video performance, machinima, and TEMU readymades, the project juxtaposes playful digital reenactment with critical reflection. Using 3D scans of Roman artefacts, AI-generated sequences, and performative elements, it questions what it means to live in the successor states of empire, how historical power structures subtly endure, how an imagined Rome shaped virtually all of European geopolitics starting with Charlemagne, how imperialism and cultural narratives, ideals of civilization, and political visions still pivot around Rome.
It examines how Rome’s legacy is continually rewritten - romanticized, weaponized, or deconstructed - depending on the ideological context: A layered reflection on continuity and control, on modernity and myth.
After all, the filmmaker, too, thinks about the Roman Empire every day.