Monthly Dispatch
from VILLA ROMANA – August 2023
The month of August was slow, long, fast, hot, busy, calm, festive, dry, mellow, inspired and inspiring. The only thing that was not was boring. It was an atypical Italian August, in which things usually simply do not happen or pause for a long while. Here in Villa Romana, things happened otherwise, at times upside down.
The office kept working on a daily basis, plotting and programming, preparing for the upcoming big event of 16 and 17 September. Some of us were gone for the summer break, but the ones that stayed continued to shimmer, sustaining the exuberant as much as composed life in the house. The month started with the children’s Takeover, a week in which seventeen children with different backgrounds, ages, languages, and talents occupied the programme of Villa Romana, literally taking up our space and daily routine – phhhw, we managed to keep the office out of their space of action ;)! As the Berlin based collective Archipel e.V. stated: Their presence troubled the usual inhabitation of the Villa (..) and filled the house, and especially the garden, with truly transformative play and joy. The week-long experiment enabled a unique and groundbreaking laboratory for dynamic conviviality and public domesticity, where children’s timeless play of creation-and-destruction-and-re-creation allowed for a generative purposelessness, an endless folding and unfolding of worlds that inspired new forms of relationality, of artistic thinking, and social engagement in the house. We give thanks to the kids: Francesco, Fabrizio, Maria, Nour, Nuria, Obeida, Lila, Joia, Lia, Edoardo, Jacopo, Linda, Samuele, Samuel, Enea, Cosimo, and Cosimo. And we express great gratitude to the artists, curators, and educators that mediated the programme: Archipel e.V. (Monai de Paula Antunes – artistic director-, Florian Bendsen, Silvia Noronha, Niko da Paula Lefort), Dudú Kouate, The Rediscovery Planet (Marzia Duarte & Ilaria Cavallini). The house is still resonating with the voices and the agencies of the children! And the kids who are inhabiting the house are now experiencing the whole environment with a different kind of flavour. After that brimming moment of vivacity and intense creativity, the weeks turned more focused and calmer. Some fellows travelled, some team members took holiday, but the garden team and the open studios crew kept the ball rolling: while Victor and Ala were off, our artists, curators, and practitioners involved in the garden team cared for the garden and made sure that all plants and beings were surviving the very high temperatures and the drought. We managed pretty well, and we are very happy to have grown closer and more intimate with our green companions.
In the hottest days we also found time to rummage into the archive with art historian Carlotta Castellani, the person and scientist who has been studying the archive of Villa Romana for longest time, and who a couple of months ago, was invited to lead research in perspective of our upcoming 120 years anniversary. In the past and coming weeks we are selecting historical photographs and documents for you, to get you more familiar with the long, unique, and rich history of this artists’ house: on biweekly basis we are publishing a column on Instagram, in our upcoming exhibition we are showcasing a curated selection of historical materials, and on 7 October we are participating to the national archive day, opening up our folders and drawers, and offering guided tours with Carlotta Castellani and the team of Villa Romana.
As a paradoxical exercise and a patience training game, in these weeks we have been also incessantly dealing with bureaucracy, which of course is never an easy task but in August becomes more a kind of a riddle. This year the Open Studios in fact are happening with an intervention in the public space of Florence (read the news below!) and with a larger exhibition and programme at Villa Romana.
Make sure you won’t miss the biggest appointment of the year, coming up very soon!
SAVE THE DATE!
OPEN STUDIOS 2023
16 - 17 September 2023
a house is a house is a home
16 September - 19 November 2023
Villa Romana is delighted to announce the reopening of Villa Romana as A House for Mending, Troubling, Repairing with the launch of Open Studios 2023 and a house is a house is a home exhibition. The house opens its doors to a wider public, on 16 September with an exhibition and public programming running until 19 November. During the opening weekend of 16 and 17 September, current Villa Romana Fellows Diana Ejaita, Jessica Ekomane, Samuel Baah Kortey, and Pınar Öğrenci, will open their studios to showcase a peek into their artistic process.
The house will speak across the ideas and works of the Villa Romana Fellows, in dialogue with invited artists who carry on the spirits and transmit the echoes of the history of Villa Romana and its current transition: among them Emeka Ogboh, Archive Ensemble, Radio Papesse, Álvaro Urbano, Shannon Bool, Zara Julius, Stephany Nwobodo, Aline Benecke, Erik Tollas, Ivana Franke, and Daniela Zambrano Almidón as well as Leone Contini – the last two who have established the garden team together with curator Marleen Boschen, agronomist Isabella Devetta, and members of the Villa Romana team.
a house is a house is a home, opens giving centre stage to the work of the four fellows who have been inhabiting the casa since February 2023. They have been participating and balancing the process of transition and continuity of the institution over the last months. Their presence, artistic research, and active engagement have been fundamental to the reframing of the agenda of Villa Romana, and have paved the way to some of the most substantial reflections articulated in this show. As curator Mistura Allison notes, they have embodied and multiplied the echoes vibrating in the Villa and beyond it, channeling past and future agencies of this artists’ house while at the same time digging into their own research and practice.
While the artists are opening their studios over the vernissage weekend, a multiform and growing exhibition is also taking space in the rooms of the Villa, to support the reverberating of the echoes in a multidirectional way. And to plant seeds. As the house is lived, experienced, and animated by the artists and the team living in it - and by the many friends that are participating in its everyday -, in the same way the exhibition is conceived as a living organism: not something static and crystallised, for visitors to walk in and experience unaltered over the weeks, but a porous assemblage which is transforming, moving and growing according to the rhythms of the house and the needs and moods of its inhabitants.
Because as A House for Mending, Troubling, Repairing the villa is not a space for contemplation but one for action and relationality, of transformation and habitation. In a house, tables are often turning, chairs are relocated, items get moving, lost and sometimes reappear. Moods are also shifting, as sun, shade, and light change the form of the house and its experience across days and seasons.
a house is a house is a home, and its walls are not static but at times they can talk and dance, crumble and dust, shelter and oppress. Across cultures home is a never definite concept, but an experience. An experience that, beyond the West, is mostly collective and does not exhaust itself within the individual or the nuclear and biological family borders. It represents instead a chain of interconnected and ever inclusive intimacies, framed around interdependency and conviviality.
Home is not just a building, a place, or a physical unit, but rather a temporary outcome of permanent processes of negotiation, through which social norms and power structures are pondered, and unequal opportunities and resources in the distribution of ordering work may arise. This is what we address.
A House for Mending, Troubling, Repairing stands for a space embracing dissent and open to collective reflection; a place where normativity and canons are challenged; a house where artistic experimentation goes hand in hand with social repair.
The participating artists are:
Diana Ejaita (Nigeria/Italy), Jessica Ekomane (Cameroon/France), Samuel Baah Kortey (Ghana), Pınar Öğrenci (Turkey), Emeka Ogboh (Nigeria), Shannon Bool (Germany), Archive Ensemble (Germany/Italy/Senegal), Aline Benecke (Germany), Zara Julius (South Africa), Stephany Nwobodo (Nigeria/Italy), Radio Papesse (Italy), Álvaro Urbano (Spain), Ivana Franke (Croatia), Erik Tollas (Hungary), Daniela Zambrano Almidón (Peru), Leone Contini (Italy).
Programme
Friday 15 September 2023
12:00 Press Conference at Villa Romana (RSVP needed: office@villaromana.org)
Saturday 16 September 2023
11:30 Opening of This Too Shall Pass - Tutto Passa by Emeka Ogboh at the Piazzale degli Uffizi, with the artist and the curators.
16:00 Opening of a house is a house is a home exhibition
17:00 Welcome speech by Elena Agudio, Director of Villa Romana, and Mistura Allison, Curator and Project Coordinator of Villa Romana
17:15 Guided tour of the Open House and Open Studios
18:00 Performance by Diana Ejaita (in the Garden)
19:00 Lecture-performance by Zara Julius (in the Glass Pavilion)
20:00 Barbecue with Emeka Ogboh and Samuel Baah Kortey
22:00 DJ Set by Emeka Ogboh
Saturday 7 October 2023 (as part of Florence Art Week 2023)
10:00 - 13:00, 15:00 - 18:00 Guided tour of the archive with art historian Carlotta Castellani
13:00 - 15:00 Seed Bunch, seed exchange and seed vessel-making workshop
17:00 Orto Continuo presentation and performance by Leone Contini
with the support of Italian Council
Sunday 8 October 2023 (as part of Florence Art Week 2023)
13:00 Pachamanca / Cosmic Pot: Andean Community Food Action by Daniela Zambrano Almidón
Click here to read the past dispaches.
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:
