VILLA ROMANA - HOME
VILLA ROMANA - HOME

Monthly Dispatch
from VILLA ROMANA – April 2023

The past month at Villa Romana was like an intense long and deep breath. With the coming of the spring season, the brimming life in the house has started to grow stronger and bloom, like agencies in the garden have begun to take action. The cold surprised us by leaving and then suddenly coming back, again and then again, in a quite unexpected cycle. But who surprised us more radically are the inspiring and generous people that came to visit us, so numerous in these weeks!

For April’s beginning, the entire team has been busy decoding a plausible but quite dazzling message by an inhabitant of the house, who was announcing the sudden visit of an unforeseen and illustrious guest. The irony of the mise-en-scène has pushed up to keep in mind that next year we will have to keep being creative, but that we won’t be fooled again :)!

On their way to Olevano Romano, we have been blessed by a stop-over of artist Surya Giedand writer Angelo Angelino Wemmje, who will be spending three months as Villa Massimo fellow at the Casa Baldi (Stipendium der Deutschen Akademie Rom Casa Baldi). At the beginning of the month, Lene Markusen, a former Villa Romana fellow of 2021, came back to the house to keep working with some local practitioners and develop a performance piece which will soon be presented in various locations in Germany. She enjoyed the changed atmosphere of the Villa and intercepted much curiosity while rehearsing with her collaborators in the garden and in the exhibition rooms of the ground floor. One of the most thriving presences has been that of Marleen Boschen, who came back to the Villa to start implementing ideas and practices together with the garden team of Villa Romana – a composite group of garden caretakers with core members of Villa Romana as well as professional botanists, seed specialists, and old and new artists friends. With agronomist Isabella Devetta from the association Seed Vicious, we started a detailed ecological survey of the garden, making an inventory of all the different species that are living and animating the green space of Villa Romana, and drafting a biodiversity manifesto. Together with our fellows, we have been starting to imagine a medicinal plant garden that we are planning to start after the summer, when the weather will allow us to plant certain seeds which need a wet season ahead. We have been also preparing the soil for a seed bunch to grow soon (a seed-centered small garden imagined with Monai de Paula Antunes, and realized with the help of Leone Contini), while we are receiving rare seeds from different corners of the world, posted by a large community of agropoets and artists.

Villa Romana’s garden is becoming home to an inspiring ecological community, a space for sharing, for growing exchanges across lifeforms and cultural communities. Over the coming months and years, in conversation with the fellows and the alumni of Villa Romana, we want to nourish a space of collective care, learning, and healing – learning together from those who carry knowledges about how to care for land and soil. Quechuan artist Daniela Zambrano Almidón also arrived to Villa Romana with gifts, starting to grow plants that will become a living recipe book of Andean chilies, maize and tomatoes.

Mid-April also offered us a lot of inspiration, with two events which mobilized a lot of reflections and forces. One has been a collaboration with the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence around the publication of the book Encounters In An Archive. Objects of Migration/Photo-Objects of Art History edited by Costanza Caraffa and Almut Goldhahn: an open discussion to continue - and to complicate - a conversation began by the previous director Angelika Stepken around the work of the artist Massimo Ricciardo. Artist and cultural worker Leila Bencharnia was invited to perform a listening session, a 40-minute-long sound piece and the sonic experience Witnesses of Water. The listening moment was followed by an open conversation on the power andviolence of archives and taxonomies with the artist, the director, 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.

The second important event of the month has been the long-prepared Reactivation of The Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists of 1959 in Rome. After studious research and more recent fruitful conversations with the current fellows of Villa Romana, following study trips to archives in Rome (thanks to Villa Massimo for offering hospitality and support!), our curator in residency, Chris Cyrille, convened an assembly of artists and cultural workers around a question formulated at the time by Aimé Césaire: Which Kind of World Are You Preparing Us? Our fellow Diana Ejaita conceived an amazing poster for the event, inspired by the one designed at the time by Gerard Sekoto, and by conversations with Cyrille and Samuel Baah Kortey. A wonderful crew of guests such as our artist-resident Samuel from the house, Janine Gäelle, and Justin R. Thompson from The Recovery Plan, Johanne Affricot from Spazio Griot, Bocar Niang (at the moment fellow at Villa Medici), Frida Korang from the entourage of Kirykou, and Mistura Allison remotely, joined us, and planted a seed for future engagements of Villa Romana.

The same evening, we announced one of the most important news of these months: from May we are welcoming to the team of Villa Romana Mistura Allison, as curator and project coordinator! Mistura will be moving to the house in the next days, and will support the director and the team of Villa Romana to articulate its vivid programme, all focused around the work of the fellows and the plans for A House for Mending, Troubling, Repairing.

Last but not least, we have been humbled by the interest of some many students and curators who arrived at Villa Romana with (among others) the curatorial courses by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and of the European Institute of Design, one group under the guidance of Irene Calderoni, the other two by Daria Filardo & Martino Margheri and Francesca Verga (new artistic director of Ar/Ge Kunst, together with Zasha Colah). Extraordinary curators such as Paz Guevara from Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and later Lynhan Balatbat from SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin came to visit the fellows and started unfolding conversations that will keep growing in these months.

In the last days of the month, we also re-opened a conversation with professor Anna Lambertini and launched a collaboration with the Department of Architecture of the University of Florence, Bachelor's and Master's programme in Landscape Architecture. The collaboration is meant to support the activities of Villa Romana around its garden and its ecological programme. In the framework of this collaboration, from 8 May, we will host in the Villa the professor of landscape architecture Gareth Doherty from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design.

During the entire month of May we will keep our doors open, to receive ideas and collective meditations to continue "test grounds" in our garden - and in our minds! –, willing to keep growing our ecological community, and to put into practice our agenda focused on sustainability and togetherness.

You can find the previous Monthly Dispaches here

The Villa Romana e.V. maintains the Villa Romana and the Villa Romana Prize. The Villa Romana e.V. wishes to thank its long-standing leading patrons: Deutsche Bank Foundation.

The Federal Government Commissioner for Cultural and Media Affairs.

Other patrons are the BAO Foundation as well as - project related - numerous private individuals, companies and foundations from all over the world. Villa Romana e.V. is supported by: