IN THE MEANTIME
Villa Romana Fellows 2026

12 MARCH - 29 MAY 2026

 

“In the meantime" names an interval: a time between events, between crisis and possibility, between gesture and act. The phrase also carries another echo: that of the mean times we inhabit—years marked by war, instability, and political fracture. This exhibition unfolds within that suspended present, inhabiting it not as paralysis but as a space of attention and encounter.

Bringing together the Villa Romana Fellows 2026 at the beginning of their residency, the exhibition presents a selection of works that introduce their artistic practices to the public and to one another. Some are recent pieces; others are earlier works that outline ongoing research, methods, and questions. Rather than a preview of what will be produced during the residency, In the Meantime offers a point of orientation: a first gathering of positions, materials, and ideas that situate each practice at the moment of arrival.

Seen together, these works form a provisional constellation: different artistic languages, trajectories, and concerns that meet within the shared space of the house. The exhibition marks the beginning of a period of living and working side by side, where conversations, experiments, and collaborations will gradually take shape.

In the Meantime also opens the 2026 season at Villa Romana, under the invitation to embrace a programme of FORMANCES — Rehearsals of the Everyday, which will unfold over the coming months. Conceived as a laboratory of forms and gestures, the programme approaches the everyday not as a neutral background but as a field of repeated actions, roles, and relations through which social life is continuously performed and reimagined. In this sense, the works gathered here do not simply precede what is to come; they inhabit a threshold where practices meet and begin to test the forms that will unfold during the residency.

Between arrival and what is still to come, the exhibition invites us to remain attentive to this shared interval—an open time in which artistic practices begin to resonate with one another, and where the first conditions for future work quietly emerge within the house, the city, and the months ahead.

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