Forever Overhead

Forever Overhead is a film showing a man diving from the ten-meter platform of the indoor pool at the Foro Italico in Rome. The work is inspired by the fresco in the Tomb of the Diver at Paestum (c. 480 BCE), painted on the inner ceiling to accompany the deceased on his otherworldly journey. The figure is echoed by Angelo Canevari’s 1937 wall mosaics in the pool. Forever Overhead alludes to the idea that the plunge crosses the threshold to another condition, like the death depicted in the Roman tomb, as well as being a quotation from David Foster Wallace’s short story of the same name—included in the collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2000)—and centered on the experience of the plunge as a teenager’s initiatory passage.