I THINK ABOUT THE ROMAN EMPIRE EVERY DAY is a media-archeological poetry film that responds to the viral 2023 social media trend revealing an everyday male preoccupation with the Roman Empire. While the meme often circles around humorous gender norms, the work traces its deeper cultural currents: Rome as a mythic ideal in certain, often more conservative spaces, but also as an ongoing civilizational substrate shaping basically everything from law, architecture, social norms to collective imagination.
Combining machinima, TikTok dance video performance, and TEMU readymades, the project juxtaposes playful digital reenactment with critical reflection. Using 3D scans of Roman artefacts, AI-generated sequences, and performative elements, it questions what it means to live in the successor states of empire, how historical power structures subtly endure, how an imagined Rome shaped virtually all of European geopolitics starting with Charlemagne, how imperialism and cultural narratives, ideals of civilization, and political visions still pivot around Rome.
It examines how Rome’s legacy is continually rewritten – romanticized, weaponized, or deconstructed – depending on the ideological context: A layered reflection on continuity and control, on modernity and myth. After all, the filmmaker, too, thinks about the Roman Empire every day.
LANGUAGE : Latin COUNTRY : Switzerland YEAR : 2025 DURATION : 03 DIRECTOR, WRITER, PRODUCER : Katia Sophia Ditzler
Director statement : I like to make art that is funny and ironic, and in the case of this film I also wanted to work with memes, popular culture and subconscious undercurrents.
Bio : Katia Sophia Ditzler, *1992, is a transdisciplinary media artist, writer, and filmmaker whose work fuses experimental cinema, poetic text, immersive media, soundscapes, performance, and philosophical inquiry. With formal training in creative writing, transmedia arts, cultural anthropology, and philosophy from various institutions in Leipzig, Berlin, Moscow, Kyiv, Yogyakarta, Melbourne, and Zurich, she constructs complex symbolic systems that explore political myth, propaganda, memory, and power. Her texts. films, installations, and hybrid works have been presented internationally at festivals and exhibitions across Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Australia. She is based in Berlin, Zurich, and Bochum. She also hitchhiked from Germany to Singapore when she was 19/20.
Pebbles Underground is focused on showcasing and promoting experimental, avant-garde, underground, and no-to-low budget projects by artist-humans from all over the world. Absurd, uncanny, witty, humorous, slow-video – all are welcomed, and loved.
Pebbles Underground is an independent project not funded by any government or corporation, and we intend to keep it that way. Main source of funding is personal donations from humans organizing the project, who are artists themselves, and the main drive of the project is formed by the energy and involvement of the organizers, and the public.
