WELTRAUM traces the unexpected history of a very particular building in Rome. What today houses the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the UN’s largest agency, was originally planned as the Ministry for Italian Africa, a prestige project of Benito Mussolini’s government. Construction began in 1938 yet ceased when Italy entered World War II in 1940, and only continued when the FAO moved in in the early 1950s. A fascist stronghold was now transformed into its very opposite: a collective institution for many of the world’s diverse nations.

Again and again, Timm Rautert was drawn to the irony of this enormous building, and specifically to its many meeting rooms in which different countries have strangely recreated their native identities—workspaces not as they might look in Rome, but in Nigeria, Australia or the Netherlands. In this book, Rautert juxtaposes photographs of these interiors, eerily empty of people, with portraits of members of the Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s militarized finance and customs police, in full regalia. This conceptual interplay shows the world less as it is and more like model-like stagings, a fictionalization of the factual.