Monthly Dispatch
Monatsbrief der VILLA ROMANA – Juni 2023

These past weeks have been the most intense of the last months at Villa Romana.

Not only the heat and the summer moods have been filling up the house with joy and warmth, but also the wonderful and inspiring people who blessed us with their presence and collaboration contributed to navigating us into another season. A new season for Villa Romana, one grounded and based on sharing, on commonality, and social and relational practices. The month started with most of us – fellows and team – participating in the reopening of the House of World Cultures (HKW) in Berlin: our fellow Diana Ejaita presented Bodies, Tales, and Landscapes. Progression III (2023) in the O Quilombismo exhibition – which we had the privilege to previously see shapeshifting in her atelier at the Villa. So many of the intertwined and international communities that are central to the work we do at the Villa participated in the opening programme of the new director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung; and they did with a radical and radiant presence. We believe that the strength of holding on, shifting canons and transforming infrastructures, comes from the very possibility of celebrating togetherness by practicing friendship and transformative solidarity. This long weekend at the HKW gave us the opportunity of imagining wider and being inspired by the work of many amazing colleagues and practitioners.

Back in Florence, where in the meantime children in Italy already started their three month-long summer holiday (!), artistic life in the Villa became more and more brimming. On June 8th, for the first time this year, we have been grilling and roasting, inviting old and new friends of Villa Romana for an evening of conviviality and festivity. Giacomo Zaganelli, the Florentine and now Berlin based artist who created that massive barbeque / social sculpture which is installed in the garden of Villa Romana, took special care of us and together we grilled for the entire evening while new conversations unfolded. The house started to set up for a programme that we had been preparing for a while: between June 12th and 18th artists and students from the MA in Spatial Strategies from Weissensee Kunsthochschule Berlin (Germany) and members of the collective blaxTAIRLINES - from K.N.U.S.T in the Kumasi College of Art (Ghana) - convened for a week-long seminar and short-residency at Villa Romana. An activation of the expanded studio practice of the Villa Romana Fellow Samuel Baah Kortey, this gathering explored and experimented with practice-based research on forms of commoning and ‘communing’ as possibilities of restructuring social and environmental justice. Under the invitation to practice Beyond Wishful Thinking, the gathering and activation materialised as a possibility of reflecting on forms of emancipatory art teaching and cohabitation. We give thanks to all the artists and practitioners that took part in this enriching and deeply inspiring experience, and who activated the entire space of Villa Romana: its kitchens and garden, its hidden corners, with wonderful projects and interventions: Fernanda Aloi, Franziska Lentes, Cau Silva, Mohamed Ali Oueled Ltaief, Maria Fallada, Farokh Falsafi, Margarete Kiss, Sayaka Shinkai, Philip Hergenroether, Mariana Garcia, Rebecca Korang, Reem Alfahad; and from the blaxTAIRLINES collective, Rosemary Esinam Damalie and Frederick Ebenezer Okai. We especially want to thank our artist in residency Samuel Baah Kortey, co-founder of the collective blaxTARLINES, who mobilised a space of reflection for us in the main room of Villa Romana and installed an art piece produced for the occasion. Because much of the metatheoretical questions and reflections focused on the teaching of professor kąrî’kạchä seid’ou at the Kumasi College of Art and his cogitations on gift-form-of-art and the responsibilities associated with the choice of practicing art, on June 15th we hosted a talk by another "student" of kąrî’kạchä seid’ou: artist Ibrahim Mahama, who lectured about The Quagrey Effect and The Precarious Gift. A beautiful and warm evening full of people, music and food, closing a rich day of presentations that also saw the participation of The Recovery Plan and their guests from the Justice in Geoscience retreat. The workshop with the students continued until the end of the week, and many collaborations and friendships with the team and other artists staying in the Villa happened. Experimental sound artist Lamin Fofana, who also stayed at Villa Romana for a short residency, generously shared his spark and knowledge, and lifted us of his constant participation and deeply inspiring presence.

As announced in our previous newsletter, the other big event of the month was the Midsummer Night on June 21st: a very special and unexampled evening, an invocation to the sun and the stars on the day of the summer solstice. Under the biggest and most monumental olive tree of the Villa, a wonderful line-up of sound performances took place in front of a warm public of people lying down in the grass to fully enjoy the expanded sonic experience. SADI composed a series of sonic landscapes interacting with nature and the presences of the garden; Lamin Fofana impressed us with a set weaving together empowering political speeches, Caribbean and Black grooves, and breathtaking poetry, such as Kumina by Kamau Brathwaite; and in closing our fellow Jessica Ekomane partnered with Afrorack, continuing to explore a self-made technology from a sub-Saharan African context, a collaborative dialogue started some time ago and beautifully celebrated at Villa Romana.

As every year around this time, we hosted the seventh edition of the African Diaspora Cinema Festival directed by Fide Dayo. Four nights of film screenings, music, debates and performances concluded the month. Villa Romana had the pleasure to award one of the films in competition: Can we not be so self-centered and keep our experiences to ourselves? Diasporic remembrances of Fasia Jansen, directed by Aline Benecke. A moving piece on sisterhood and comradeship transcending the concept of community, a film that recognises the energy, labour, and relationships that bind Black people together. A wonderful offering to the life of Fasia Jansen, the Black German activist and songwriter who dedicated her life to different political struggles with an impressive collection of protest songs. As the film director and her crew wrote: "Our longing was to relate to Fasia from a Black queer perspective, to understand her positionality and hence to negotiate ours. We did so by gathering and re-enacting her songs and spirit. Our choir – the Fasia Jansen Ensemble – is a spiritual invocation."

Continuing the thread of supporting the practice of international moving image artists, Villa Romana partnered with Lo Schermo dell’Arte - Cinema and Contemporary Art Festival in selecting participants for their VISIO Production Fund, financially enabling younger generations of artists to develop new bodies of work.

As part of the important work and commitment of safeguarding at Villa Romana, on June 26th we convened with a group of field experts in drafting a "living" Protocol of Anti-Discrimination and Policy of Respect and Cohabitation, that will soon be implemented and published.

The summer suddenly turned resolutely hot, and if on the one hand the mosquitos have made their way to start irritating us too seriously, on the other the chirping of the cicadas has finally exploded, pleasing our ears. And as if the heat is not enough, Frederick Ebenezer Okai from blaxTAIRLINES has started the construction of a big and special kiln that all artists in residency at Villa Romana will be able to use in the future!

Stay tuned, and get ready for the hot vibes arriving from The House For Mending, Troubling, Repairing!

SAVE THE DATES!!!

21 July 2023
LA VOLATA - SHE FLIES
(out of her body not her mind)
wild ceremonies, generous offerings and rituals of passage

Villa Romana is excited to invite you to LA VOLATA - SHE FLIES - a day of programmes taking place on July 21st 2023, starting under tree shadows in the early afternoon and closing with the lights of the stars late in the evening.
The occasion is manifold: a summer celebration in our house, ritualistically closing a season and regenerating for the next, and choosing to do so in connection to an ancient popular Italian feast, A Vuláta, the feast of madness, literally meaning in the Calabrian dialect "flying out of her mind". This festivity joins us in Florence from the deep South of Italy, coming particularly from historical times of Paola and San Lucido, two municipalities of the lower Tyrrhenian Sea. As every popular feast not just invented for marketing purposes, she too has had many incarnations throughout the past century, differently shaped and stretched by the ideologies and histories of her transforming times. In Florence, for us, La Volata embodies the occasion to grapple with diverse fugitive practices and collective rituals of passages, resistance and escape, but also and especially with collective force and work of communities surviving through journeys of solidarity. We choose to invoke her as a metaphor of catharsis, with her healing power of encouraging to temporarily fly out of everyday states of consciousness.
LA VOLATA - SHE FLIES will be a night of conviviality, where music, food, performativity and dancing will be enacted as collective emancipatory exercises to weave together traditional knowledges from territories of the Italian South and their transformation with migrations to Germany together with the experimental artistic research currently unfolding in the house.
Among the guests participating in the celebrations will be: Emeka Ogboh and Chiara Figone, Nando Bruscò, Antonia e Maurizio Alampi, Doris Maninger, Tomás Saraceno, Jasmina Metwaly, Neda Saeedi, Jeanette Bisschops, the collective of Archive Ensemble, Lynhan Balatbat, Aerocene, Maxi Llaina and many more.


The event is curated by Villa Romana in conversation with Antonia Alampi.

31 July – 5 August 2023

TAKEOVER

Between July 31st and August 5th 2023, Villa Romana will be taken over by a program designed, developed, and exhibited with, by, and for children, inhabiting the interface between art and education, while also participating firmly in contemporary art practices and discourses. Artists from the association Archipel, together with the musician Dudù Kouate and the educators Marzia Duarte and Ilaria Cavalinni, will work with children of all ages on a program that embraces children's joy, chaos and environmental experience. Swinging between non-verbal and multilingual communication, the week will be about experimenting on the collective work with the children as much as it will be about the intergenerational artistic research, paving the way for Villa Romana to implement a children's advisory board.

16 -17 September 2023

OPEN STUDIOS and Grand Opening of Villa Romana.
A House of Mending, Troubling, Repairing

As tradition, in September Villa Romana opens its doors and artists’ studios to a wider public. This year the appointment is planned for the weekend of the 16th and 17th, in which we will present the work of our four Villa Romana Fellows – Samuel Baah Kortey, Diana Ejaita, Jessica Ekomane, and Pınar Öğrenci – together with the work of other incredible artists, to compose an exhibition and series of interventions and performances at the Villa and in the public space.

Press here to read the past dispatches.
 
 
The Villa Romana e.V. maintains the Villa Romana and the Villa Romana Prize.
The main sponsor is the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Other sponsors are the Deutsche Bank Foundation, 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: