“FLIGHT IS BUT AN INTERPRETATION OF FALLING UPWARD.”
LANFRANCO ACETI
Commissioned by IPER Festival delle Periferie and RIF Museo delle Periferie, in collaboration with Tevereterno Flight of the Crocodile is a performance and public installation by Lanfranco Aceti, developed over a three-year residency and forming part of a four-part cycle: A River of Crocodile Tears, The Crocodile’s Home, The Crocodile’s Lament, and Flight of the Crocodile.
In Flight of the Crocodile, the improbable occurs: a creature of water and sediment—heavy with myth and memory—rises into the sky above Rome. The crocodile—prehistoric, displaced, and uninvited—soars not by design but by necessity. Its flight is not graceful. It is grotesque suspension. A public hallucination. A rupture in the sediment of historical certainty.
The work unfolds within a mytho-political cycle that also includes A River of Crocodile Tears, The Crocodile’s Home, and The Crocodile’s Lament—an exploration of erasure, exile, and memory centered on the Tiber River. Once known as Thebris in its Etruscan incarnation, the river was forcibly renamed Tiber after the masculine Roman deity Tiberinus—an act of patriarchal overwriting, a linguistic conquest that replaced fluid origins with matriarchal roots in the word Albula, the ancient female name of the river. The crocodile emerges as a surviving witness: a relic of older cosmologies and liquid identities buried by empire.
The installation’s title, Flight of the Crocodile, pivots on the double meaning of “flight”: to ascend, and to flee. The crocodile is both intruder and refugee. It flies not because it can, but because the ground beneath it has become uninhabitable. Its ascent is absurd, involuntary, and strangely moving—a metaphor for every body forced to defy its own nature in order to survive.
Suspended above the Eternal City, the crocodile becomes a dissonant figure of resistance—too ancient to belong, too strange to be claimed. Echoes of Frida Kahlo resound—“Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”—infusing the work with both longing and irony. The crocodile also channels the fugitives of Toni Morrison’s novels, for whom flight is escape, forgetting, and refusal—yet here it is also a flight of fancy, a burst of creativity suspended between unreality and madness.
This is not flight as liberation, but as forced reconfiguration. Not transcendence, but refusal. The crocodile does not seek the heavens—it flees erasure. It is myth in exile. A body unmoored from its river, its name, its past.
Flight of the Crocodile marks a turning point in the quartet: a surreal break from the sedimented flows of A River of Crocodile Tears, and a prelude to the estranged return of The Crocodile’s Home and the mourning of The Crocodile’s Lament. In this unnatural flight, the work confronts us with the grotesque beauty of survival and the violence of transformation—a creature hovering between worlds, between stories, between buried cultures and remnants of what was and what can no longer be.
Production Team:
Teresa Viola, Seamstress
Image Captions:
Image 1: Lanfranco Aceti, On the Altar, 2025. Sculptural installation and performance. Tempera, acrylic, Tiber’s mud, and cement. Dimensions: variable.
Image 2: Lanfranco Aceti, Untitled, 2025. Print on fine art paper.
Image 3: Lanfranco Aceti, Untitled, 2025. Print on fine art paper.
Image 4: Lanfranco Aceti, The Flight of the Crocodile, 2025. Performance. Photographic print.
