David Schafer, Colosseum, 2020
Powder coated and fabricated steel, PA speakers, audio playback, misc. hardware
7-10’ x 3’ x 3’ Audio: 05:00

COLOSSEUM

Colosseum addresses the public sphere that we are threaded through in the course of daily life. The installation’s public address speakers announce a spoken word soundtrack, reciting names of institutions, civic services, and retail shops. 

The installation references the ancient Roman Colosseum and it’s embedding within a system of imperial control, providing entertainment while reinforcing power and military dominance. In ancient Rome, spectacle was used as a form of social control—for example, both public executions and gladiatorial games served as displays of sovereign power, reinforcing state dominance through public punishment and violent entertainment.

Michel Foucault examined the mechanics by which human life is structured through enclosures and institutions that regulate behavior, knowledge, and power. He describes how modern societies are organized around institutions of discipline, such as schools, hospitals, prisons, factories, and the military. Each of these enclosures serves to regulate individuals, shaping them into obedient and productive members of society. In Foucault’s thought, architecture plays a key role in disciplining individuals, and extends beyond the prison into all aspects of modern life. As people move from one enclosure to another they are constantly categorized, assessed, and disciplined, shaping what is considered normal and productive. 

Much like Piranesi’s prisons, contemporary urban development and shopping centers—with their lack of clear boundaries, endless passageways, and absence of exits—visually represent this idea that confinement is not just physical but existential. Foucault argues that disciplinary power permeates all of society, and that the dehumanization of the individual is an extended process of bureaucracy and rationalization. These hyper-organized spaces regulate behavior under the guise of efficiency. This has evolved into highly engineered social frameworks and platforms that are algorithmically compressed to maximize profit and density, while excluding specific strata of the public. With newer opportunities for surveillance, from the panopticon to digital tracking and data mining, the authoritarianism of our society is invisibly woven into the new models of the public sphere. 

Jürgen Habermas describes the public sphere as a space where private individuals come together to discuss public matters, forming public opinion, distinct from the state and the private realm. As the bourgeois public sphere emerged in 18th-century Europe, particularly in coffeehouses, salons, and print media, citizens engaged in critical debate about governance and society. Later, public debate became manipulated by corporate and political interests, shifting from rational discourse to consumerist spectacle and passive consumption of media. 

Recent developments have blurred this distinction, with virtual, private, economic, and political powers dictating public space and discourse. Colosseum sonically expresses the overshadowing architectural symbolism of power and its mechanisms of confinement, while challenging our place within them.

David Schafer, Colosseum, 2020, detail
Powder coated and fabricated steel, PA speakers, audio playback, misc. hardware
7-10’ x 3’ x 3’ Audio: 05:00