Roger Ballen, born in the United States, has spent the last thirty-five years of his life photographing the suburbs of Johannesburg, getting deeply in touch with the extremely submerged world disconnected from ordinary life, composed of the *shanties* (tin shacks) and its inhabitants, often referred to as “freaks.” His encounter with this world has profoundly conditioned his aesthetics to the point of becoming its symbol, and from this encounter comes an even darker dimension, composed of shadows and over which hover ghosts of an indefinable past. In Rome, on the 2016 Rome Commission, Ballen built his own shack, which connects his story to that of the Roman suburbs that were the subject of visual investigations of neorealism. The shack is Ballen’s way of entering Rome, violently with his aesthetic; it is a place of the archetypal mind that contains both Rome and Johannesburg.