Ready To Drink Inside An Installation? This Surreal Bar In Rome Lets You Do Exactly That

A Roman Holiday is incomplete without ruins, adventure and drinks at bars graced by the radical painters, writers, and architects. With today’s bar championing hedonistic immersive experiences, a bar on the west bank of the Tiber River in Rome follows the sacred rituals of the erstwhile bars that masqueraded as literary and artistic laboratories. Donning equal parts baroque and metaphysical ambience, the bar transforms into a gesamtkunstwerk. Posing as an esoteric installation cum drinking establishment, this bar is carved by British sculptor Clementine Keith-Roach and painter Christopher Page’s trompe-l’œil illusionism. Lodging at Villa Lontana’s—‘Faraway Villa’—new space on the white waters of Trastevere, the bar is monikered ‘Bar Far,’ a succinct echo of its host.

The conspirator behind this hallucinatory netherworld is Vittoria Bonifati. She is the founder of the non-profit, sovereign project space, whose headquarters were historically outside the city walls to the north of Rome. Established in 2018, it is devoted to exploring the links between ancient and contemporary practices in the visual arts and sound. To shorten the physical distance between the gallery and the urban public, its new outpost has been renovated in collaboration with Studio Strato.

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In Between The Vestiges Of Time

Formerly a Mithraeum and, before that, a speculated Pangan site, the bar conjures a metaphysical vibe, posing questions of existence and identity through the dismembered reliefs clutching its walls. “Bar Far offers a playful space to contemplate such questions, a space to talk and drink amidst paradoxes and contradictions, a metaphysical space in which, who knows, we might find answers at the bottom of a glass,” remarks Vittoria Bonifati, Founder of Villa Lontana. The eerie accents carry a nostalgic echo of the historic artist bars. From the green interiors of Antico Caffè Greco to the smoke-stained walls of the Colony Room Club and the anarchic cabaret spirit of Cabaret Voltaire, they were sanctuaries where radical ideas were born during political upheaval.

Sculpted with recycled architectural fragments stacked atop one another amid fragments of ancient rubble, it dons a catacomb-like ambience. Originally conceived to be an installation, it is a functional bar that resembles a mad scientist’s laboratory, with the artists Keith-Roach and Page taking turns behind the bar themselves. “The effect is an environment that is at once church and tomb, prophecy and ruin, heaven and hell,” remarks Bonifati.

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A Parlour Trick

A red neon sign clues you inside the netherworld, acquiescing to the nightlife. Inside, the installation unfolds as a condensation of paradoxical elements, neatly arranged beside each other, sometimes transforming into a perfect space for an impromptu event. The odyssey begins in a cavernous hallway adorned by a gamut of plaster limbs, arms, hands and two palms clasping ecclesiastical-style candles. “Keith-Roach’s plaster cast reliefs dramatise the building itself: body parts emerge from walls and combine with construction materials—brick, pipe, timber—appearing not only to adorn but also to build Bar Far, like infrastructural Caryatids,” muses Bonifati. Ditching the usual jovial vibe of bars, it is drenched in haunting illusions and ambiguity.

The jovial ambience surfaces only at the barstools and the austere bar counter. Elsewhere, lower bodies with legs support tabletops, a procession of hands support a bench, and pipes parlay as sconces holding candles, which are lit after sunset as the lights are dimmed. The sunset finds its echo in a circular portal crafted from plaster and wood opposite the bar, where a red centre glows, encircled by interlaced plaster arms draped in chains and punctuated by a solitary breast.

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A Liminal Uncertainty

At the far end of the bar, a series of arches choreograph a sight that is not for the faint-hearted. Rendered in blazing reds and molten oranges, Page’s murals evoke the illusion of a portal to a realm beyond the ordinary. This lexicon of vaguely infernal strata uncanny trompe-l’oeil murals conjures the effect of a subterranean world ablaze, where molten rivers thread through shadowed archways and the familiar dissolves the boundaries.

‘Bar Far’ is a portal probing the collapse of old worlds and the emergence of new possibilities from their ruins. The installation’s molten reds, dismembered reliefs, and cryptic trompe-l’oeil murals conjure a liminal world that is equal parts mesmerising and unsettling, a testament to the radical spirit of the historic artist bars that inspired it. The exhibition came alive through live performances. It opened in December with poet Florence Uniacke, artist-soprano Nyla van Ingen, and musician Lukas De Clerck, who fused text, image, and sound. De Clerck revived the ancient aulos with a contemporary twist. In February, poet Jahan Khajavi and filmmaker-artist Ben Russell further animated it: Khajavi’s verse explored devotion, obscenity, and corporeal candour, while Russell treated Bar Far as a metaphysical film set to conjure a soundtrack that seeped from the walls.