VILLA ROMANA - HOME
VILLA ROMANA - HOME

Monthly Dispatch
from VILLA ROMANA - March 2023

Difficult to believe, but March already came to its end, while April slowly started blooming. This past one has been a busy and intense month at Villa Romana. One after the other, all the fellows arrived in the house: the imagined encounters have transformed into embodied experiences and the life inside the Villa has woven into a texture. A texture that has been crafted collectively. After a few days to attune to the place and its (historical) spirits, but also to each other’s rhythms and agencies, the fellows and the team convened to discuss the future 10 months of co-habitation, pondering policies of respect, practices, and codes of sharing common spaces, and sensitising each other to fundamental ecological urgencies of which to be mindful. Very soon internal workshops will be held to elaborate and publish together a protocol of anti-discrimination and reciprocal respect, and a protocol of sustainability, to create more awareness about the carbon dioxite impact of everyday activities at the Villa, and to implement strategies for reducing emissions on an individual, community, and institutional basis.

We established regular internal gatherings, open to the public: a communal lunch on Wednesdays, which serves as a general meeting and a moment of internal reflection as much as of conviviality, and a Knowledge Sharing Session every Tuesday evening, a self-organised and self-curated evening by the fellows of Villa Romana in the glass pavilion. Please reach out to us if you want to partake some of these appointments, and if you have proposals!

At the moment we are cooking a lot, exchanging recipes to implement our programme and our institutional reflections, and rummaging through the archives and in the sophisticated minds of our residents, our team members, and our guests. Our guest Chris Cyrille and his research on the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists provoked important conversations and grounded some of the boldest first exchanges between the fellows. On 15 April you are all invited to Which Kind of World Are You Preparing Us?/Quelle sorte de monde nous préparez-vous là?, the public programme conceived by Chris to reactivate the Congress and to re-actualise the questions that were at the center of that historical gathering.

We are also happy to share the news that the double exhibition of George Senga and Jermay Michael Gabriel curated by Black History Month Florence and Lucrezia Cippitelli is prolonged until 11 April 2023. Hurry up and don’t miss the opportunity of visiting it if you haven’t done so yet!

The soil is soft and the spring arrived, the garden is calling for attention, and many are the actions that we have planning and that will be implemented during the next couple of months. This month, long-term collaborator and artist Leone Contini visited the Villa, worked with the fellows, and planted some cucuzza sicula and some Wenzhounese pugua seeds, which might sprout soon. Some seeds and seedlings are on the way, and caring hands too. In a couple of days you will receive news about it, we wish to keep some Easter surprises for you…

To follow us and be updated about our activities please keep an eye out for our social media platforms! Our website is in the process of being redesigned and restructured from scratch: you will find materials and updates when navigating it, but at the moment our main channels and tools of sharing are Instagram and Facebook. We have implemented a series of introductions, beginning with short portraits of our team and inhabitants and makers of the Villa Romana world on Mondays. From next Wednesday onwards, we are also starting a series from and in the archive of Villa Romana, while soon the fellows will do takeovers, being featured and featuring their narrative on the next months of co-habitation.
Very soon we will share some of the most exciting news :), and will shake you with a rich and exciting programme to be experienced and lived, here in radical presence, but also from afar.

Join us!
 

APPOINTMENTS IN APRIL

Tuesday 4 April: Knowledge Sharing Session #3 in the Glass Pavilion. Starting after the sunset.
With the fellows of Villa Romana and short-term guests, among which HKW curator Paz Guevara, artist Surya Gied, and writer Angelo Wemmje.
 

Tuesday 11 April, Starting at 7 pm.: finissage of the double exhibition: Comment un petit chasseur païen devient Prêtre Catholique by Georges Senga and of David and other feats by Jermay Michael Gabriel.
On the same day we are hosting also the Knowledge Sharing Session #4 in the Glass Pavilion, with the fellows of Villa Romana and shorter-term guests, among which artist and curator Marleen Boschen, and artist Daniela Zambrano Almidon. The fellows will self-curate their fourth session of knowledge sharing. After that, Marleen Boschen will introduce us to some of the curatorial ideas behind the actions which will be implemented in the garden of Villa Romana over the coming months. Daniela Zambrano Almidon will make us familiar with a project we are planning to run here in the coming months: a proposal for a community art of agriculture and Andean cuisine. A collective discussion will follow.


Friday 14 April: Event around Massimo Ricciardo’s book Encounters In An Archive with a listening session by Leila Bencharnia.
Villa Romana and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz invite to a joint initiative around Massimo Ricciardo’s book Encounters In An Archive. Objects of Migration/Photo-Objects of Art History edited by Costanza Caraffa and Almut Goldhahn. A month after the n-th tragedy in the Mediterranean, the migrant boat disaster of Crotone last 26 February, Villa Romana feels urged to articulate a deeper reflection on the thanatopolitics of water migration in the Mediterranean Sea. We will host a listening session by artist and cultural worker Leila Bencharnia, a 40 minute-long sound piece and sonic experience under the title Witnesses of Water. This will be followed by an open conversation on the power/violence of archives and taxonomies with Elena Agudio, Jonas Tinius, the fellows and the team of Villa Romana together with Massimo Ricciardo, Costanza Caraffa, Almut Goldhahn and the cultural mediators Luda Berhe, Pinto Manuel Francisco and Ebrima Saidy of the Amir project.
From 7pm.


Saturday 15 April: Which Kind of World Are You Preparing Us?/Quelle sorte de monde nous préparez-vous là? Reactivating the Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers. A public programme curated by poet and exhibition storyteller Chris Cyrille.
From 6pm to 8pm.
With interventions by Chris Cyrille, the fellows of Villa Romana Samuel Baah Kortey and Jessica Ekomane, by Bocar Niang, Mistura Allison, and other guests. The evening will end with a DJ set.


News for the second half of the month will follow.

Gerard Sekoto, poster designed for the Second Conference of Black Writers and Artistsin Rome, 1959