Albergo dei Poveri, Naples: Where Time Settles into Matter
With CODAME Featured Artist: Norma Jeanne
In Naples, history does not sit quietly—it accumulates, breathes, and leaves traces. Few places embody this more powerfully than the Real Albergo dei Poveri, one of the largest and most ambitious architectural projects of 18th-century Europe.
Commissioned in 1751 by Charles III of Bourbon, the Albergo dei Poveri was conceived as a monumental act of social architecture: a single structure meant to shelter, educate, and dignify the city’s most vulnerable populations. Stretching nearly 400 meters, the building was designed not just as a refuge, but as a vision of collective care—an architectural body meant to hold centuries of human presence. Though never completed as originally planned, the Albergo remains a vast, haunting vessel of memory, where grandeur and fragility coexist.
It is within this charged space that we encounter CODAME Feature Artist Norma Jeane, in a work that feels both inevitable and quietly revelatory.
Norma Jeane
Napoli, 2025
Inkjet print on framed cotton canvas
190 × 117 × 6 cm
Conceived as a public art project for the Albergo dei Poveri, Napoli is built from what usually goes unnoticed: dust—the most minimal and universal residue of human presence.
Norma Jeane adopts dust as a symbolic material to evoke the memory of place. What remains almost invisible becomes a tangible trace of lives lived, passed through, and layered over centuries. Dust functions here as both matter and metaphor: a continuum between architecture and the bodies, gestures, and time it has absorbed.
The artist gathered dust from historically and symbolically charged sites across Naples, including:
Albergo dei Poveri
Ipogeo dei Cristallini
Maschio Angioino / Castel Nuovo
Each sample was scanned at extremely high resolution, without protective covering, allowing the surface to respond directly to variations in natural light. Through this process, hidden structures, colors, and micro-landscapes emerge—revealing dust not as absence, but as presence.
This original technique was first exhibited in spring 2025 at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, and finds a profound resonance here in Naples.
The result is Napoli: a large-scale, luminous canvas—an expression of the matter of time itself. The work is conceived as a permanent legacy for the city of Naples, returning its own material history back into architectural scale.
All materials used—museum-grade inks and acid- and lignin-free cotton canvas—are certified “fine art” and comply with ISO 9706 standards, ensuring maximum stability and longevity.
In a city where layers never disappear but instead accumulate, Norma Jeane reminds us that even the smallest residues carry the weight of centuries.
More about Norma Jeane
