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VILLA ROMANA - HOME

Exhibitions

05 May                     28 May 2021

Se è per la gente, deve essere bello, lei disse

Jeremiah Day

You and your friends are cordially invited to the opening of the exhibition.
Soft Opening: Wednesday, 05 May, 4 to 8 pm
6 pm: Performance Solo & Duet with Greta Bimonte, Andrea d'Amore, Alessandra Palma di Cesnola

Thursday 06 May, 7.30 pm
Performance Solo & Duet with Greta Bimonte, Andrea d'Amore, Alessandra Palma di Cesnola

Wednesday 12 /19 /26 May
Seminars and performance with live-transmission at Villa Romana (program /see below)

Limited number of visitors to the exhibition with mask and according to the distance regulations.
Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday 2 to 6 pm and on appointment


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installation view

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installation view

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installation view

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performance

photos: Ela Bialkowska /OKNOstudio

"That even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination might well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given to them...." H. Arendt; U. Ludz (ed.): Menschen in finsteren Zeiten, Munich 1989, p 9-10.

Villa Romana is pleased to host the concluding stage of Jeremiah Day's series of exhibitions, workshops, performances and public programs If It's For The People, It Needs To Be Beautiful, She Said.

Conceived in dialogue with Angelika Stepken in conversations dating back to 2018, this series includes as partners the Badischer Kunstverein, the Centre de Art Le Lait and is accompanied by a publication produced with typographer and publisher Will Holder. The Florence exhibition was introduced in October 2020 with a two-week intensive workshop and public showing organized in collaboration with PARC (Performing Arts Research Center) Firenze. The accompanying publication will be launched at the exhibition's opening.

Between 2014 and 2020 Jeremiah Day's work consisted almost entirely of live performance and hosting performance workshops, and this sprawling project has taken up the ambition to develop new modes of exhibition making and cultural production from this ephemeral vocabulary. Day's work is defined by the inter-locking of poetic /public /expository as key principle. This concluding chapter returns the focus to the performance vocabulary Day has developed. Often bringing photography and music together with a core of movement-speach-improvisation, Day's performances give shape, embodiment and narrative to specific sites, landscapes and human incidents. Sometimes described as a contemporary form of the classical ode, Day mobilizes human examples as examples to identify with and think through. Day's focus on activists, soldiers, family members is framed by his research into Hannah Arendt's insistence that culture is part of the glue that binds the web of human relations, with the capacity, potential and promise of illumination.

The exhibition is divided into two parts: an exposition and study of video documentation of Day's performance work over the last 15 years, including Day's collaborators like the bands We Vs. Death, Chicks on Speed, the musician Bart de Kroon and the dancer /artist Simone Forti, whose Logomotion technique is at the core of Day's approach. In the second part of the exhibition, the Villa makes a space for live events. Bringing in participants from the fall workshops, Day will present two nights of live performance, with: Greta Bimonte, visual artist and a performer based in Bologna. Andrea D'Amore’s practice fuses dialogue, sharing, hospitality, cooking and convivio to create atmospheres. Alessandra Palma di Cesnola is a choreographer, dancer, teacher of contemporary dance and Taji Quan. Following this, Day will host weekly online interviews, discussions and a concluding performance that will mark the end of the overall project. The live transmission of these dialogues will be online only at Villa Romana.


Programme


SEMINAR 1 – PRESENTATION WITH DISCUSSION AT VILLA ROMANA
Wednesday, 12. May, 8 pm
Simone Forti, Lailye Weidman and Jeremiah Day: 'New Dance' as /and Public Life

Continuing the discussion which started last October at Villa Romana with Adalisa Menghini, here Jeremiah Day opens the conversation further to two practitioners from different generations. New Dance shifted the entire framework of culture, with a focus on individual scaled experimentalism pursued in a supportive peer network, and with one eye always on the question of the greater good. What legacy of that work do we inherit today? Day's mentor and collaborator for over twenty years, Simone Forti has taught hundreds of workshops around the world in addition to her historical work at the intersection of dance and visual arts, and her recent development as a writer. Lailye Weidman is a teacher, dancer and choreographer, whose work with Contact Improvisation goes from her practice as a teenager to her later work as an editor at Contact Quarterly.


SEMINAR 2 – PRESENTATION WITH DISCUSSION AT VILLA ROMANA
Wednesday, 19 May, 6 pm
Full-blooded, full-throated: does culture protect us?
A dialogue with Fred Dewey's General Public - A Fable of Sanctuary

Jeremiah Day is taking up a text by Fred Dewey about the Berlin self-organised cultural institution General Public. In the self-organised art spaces of post-wall Berlin, Dewey – Day's mentor and collaborator for over twenty years – finds a point of departure to re-frame the nature of cultural work. Copies of the publication General Public about the Berlin project room will be available for purchase at a discount price. More can be read about the publication here: https://adocs.de/de/buecher/raum/general-public

Fred Dewey has written widely and conducted working groups on Hannah Arendt across Europe. He directed the literary /arts center Beyond Baroque in LA from 1996 to 2010, helped place neighborhood councils in LA city law. He has collaborated with Jeremiah Day and, as text artist, with Day and Simone Forti. He has edited the book School of Public Life (Doormats /errant bodies).


CONCLUDING PERFORMANCE – LIVE STREAMED TO VILLA ROMANA
Wednesday, 26 May, 6 pm
Jeremiah Day - Last Call: You Don't Have To Go Home But You Can't Stay Here

This video /online performance for the public of Villa Ramona marks not only the end of the exhibition at the Villa Romana, but the end of the broader project totaling three exhibitions, a dozen live events and a publication.


Jeremiah Day studied art at the University of California, Los Angeles and at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam. Coming from performance in the context of visual arts, Jeremiah Day also studied movement, working regularly with the pioneer of postmodern dance Simone Forti. In Day's work political and personal realities intertwine through different techniques, including photography, video and movement. In 2020 Day was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at UniArts Helsinki's Center for Educational Research and Academic Development in the Arts exploring the role of arts pedagogy in public life.

Supported by the NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK - STEPPING OUT, funded by the Minister of State for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR. Assistance Program for Dance

in cooperation with

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