Monthly Dispatch
Monatsbrief der VILLA ROMANA – Oktober 2023
October has always been the penultimate month of our Fellows’ residency. Together with the inevitable autumn blues, we cannot deny that this is an emotional moment for us all, especially as this was our first experience of growing together as a house and team. But we want to understand such rituals of passing also as a form of jubilation, because transformation is part of every healthy organism and we certainly have changed a lot over these past ten months. October in particular was a month of flows – water, rain – that seemed to converge into streams and ultimately rivers; quite literally these days as heavy rains poured onto Tuscany and forced many people to evacuate their homes. But we tried to make the best of the noticeable change of season: harvesting (olives and special fruits like pomegranates, kaki, and Chinese pumpkins), travelling together, witnessing the amazing works of our fellows be seen by a steady drizzle of visitors. The month began however with a dramatic event that stoked fear, anger, and confusion in the (art) world and among our fellows. In Israel and Palestine a violent conflict re-erupted, whilst destruction and terror in other geographies of the world to which our Fellows are connected continued to inflict their scars. The escalation of violence left our community almost paralysed and certainly aphasic initially, unable to find words that weigh the long history of complex interactions leading to the attacks and counter-attacks after 7 October. It feels as if things will not be able to return to how they were before, and like so many things in the world, this transition is painfully inevitable. We talked and wrote with friends and colleagues, read a lot and tried to inform ourselves as a community, reaffirming to one another and to others that we stand together in solidarity with those who suffer, and against brutality, terrorism, and fear. We decided therefore to keep working even harder, making space for dialogue, finding moments for talking to one another and also at times simply holding each other as emotions erupt that we cannot control. Our aim is to maintain precisely a process of mending, troubling, and repairing – ever and more painful than before an acute nexus of practices – in which we can cultivate our shared humanity in a climate of destruction. Whilst we raise children, produce works, cook, and produce an atmosphere of co-habitation, we believe, with Toni Morrison, that in times of dread, artists should not stop or silence themselves. As she put it: "There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art." (Toni Morrison,“No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear,” The Nation, 23 Mar. 2015)
Shifting into the Tuscan autumn for us also meant digesting the many positive responses to the Open Studio exhibition and the many visits from journalists, friends, artists, neighbours, academics that graced us. We tried to decelerate rhythms for our Fellows in particular so that we could cherish the little time left together – sometimes forced to do so by the inevitable viruses and flus that befall this time of the year. But time didn’t come to a standstill, of course: during the second weekend of October, we launched a series of encounters, ceremonies, and performances in the garden as the central part of the programme of a house is a house is a home.
Marleen Boschen, Leone Contini, and Daniela Zambrano Almidòn came back to the Villa, living together and encountering another wonderful guest who we hosted for a few days: writer, artist, and curator Madeleine Collie; whose work carefully explores ecosystems in flux, across diverse geographies and artistic investigations, expanding the way we experience ecological narratives. We held encounters, exchanged seeds, and forged time capsules for them to survive the cold season. We cooked while practising story-telling, we hosted a series of ceramic and seed workshops with children (in collaboration with the association Onuka founded and animated with so much care and love by Ukranian artist Anastasiia Yermishyna). In sum, we engaged in processes of community-making. The Pachamanca ceremony was one of the strongest moments in this regard, with many members of the Peruvian diasporic community in Tuscany joining us and celebrating fertility, the richness of mother earth, and conviviality. As part of this ritual, Peruvian musicians accompanied the re-creation of a food-ritual in which various vegetables and meats were buried and cooked with hot stones, covered in layers of bay leaves from the garden and soil, before smoking away for a good hour. Researchers from other places of the world came to visit us to study this ritual together, creating a moment of amazement but also a connection to a community that is very present in Florence and Tuscany itself.
On 7 October, the archive of Villa Romana opened its doors to the public for the first time, with Carlotta Castellani guiding us through many relevant documents and materials that we selected to imagine together a way of recounting the history of the institution and the house Villa Romana with new research perspectives and prospects. This collaboration with the Associazione Dimore Storiche Italiane for the second edition of “Carte in Dimora Arte in Dimora 2023 – Archivi e Biblioteche: Storie tra Passato e Futuro” represented a great opportunity and helped us connecting to engaged archive scholars and researchers.
Throughout the whole month, we also worked incessantly on our healing garden project: since last spring, our garden team and some of our fellows started planning and designing a new medicinal plants patch in dialogue with our ecologist-collaborator Isabella Devetta. With the arrival of the fresher and more humid season, we could plant seeds and seedlings, repurposing the field area adjacent to the gazebo. Come visit us on a regular basis, to follow the process of growing and transformation of our garden (and of our knowledge of the power of plants) throughout the next seasons!
The cooling down of temperatures and moods also helped us focusing more intensely on our full-fledged ecological transition as institution, giving us time to push forward more carbon literacy actions and internal workshops, consulting with experts, economists, and architects from local and international contexts, and taking the first steps for a final building analysis and ESG (Ecology, Society, Governance) reporting. The next months and years will see us putting in a great deal of effort to drastically reduce the environmental impact of our house and institution whilst not losing sight of the longer-term changes that will need to be implemented so that the infrastructure of the house allows for a more sustainable future. Do not hesitate to reach out to us for any questions or suggestions, we believe that the change must be societal and start from the collective engagement of our whole artistic community.
To keep thinking through the transformative potential of our house “politics”, on 27 October, we hosted For an indomitable domestics, a moving lecture by critical theorist and writer Giulia Palladini, in which she invited us to embrace the domestic space as an outpost for rethinking what a home might be, helping us uncoupling it from the realm of private life and make it an instrument to think and build public life. It was essential and useful to sit together collectively, and reflect from such a theoretically rich perspective on the practices of radical conviviality and transformative domesticity that we have been experimenting with since a few months. Thanks a lot for joining us, and for actively participating in the process! We have already made plans for more exercises of thinking and practising domestics as a political strategy.
October was saturated with presentations and performances by our Fellows on the local art public scene: our dear Jessica Ekomane hypnotised a large and very engaged public at the Museo Centro Pecci on 13 October, with a mind-blowing performance organised with the Florence-based initiatives ooh-sound and Nub Project Space. A unique setting, in the recently newly redesigned spaces hosting the collection of the museum, and a highly sophisticated curation of the sound tech provided an immersive spaceship-like sound experience that Jessica orchestrated.
Last 28 October, our beloved Samuel Baah Kortey opened There Are Times Like These, a meaningful and inspiring solo show at the art space run by the collective of Black History Month Florence (BHMF): The Recovery Plan. From the very first day of his arrival, Samuel engaged in intense and rich conversations which unfolded in insightful collaborations with various members of the large community around BHMF. This exhibition showcases much of the research behind the production of his impressive forty-metre-long canvas on view now at Villa Romana until 19 November, expanding again his studio practice outside the doors of the Villa, as a gift to the community. During the opening, Samuel recounted the emotional path of weaving new family relations in another country – and we can only second his observations: Villa Romana is there to stay, and whilst the formal fellowships do come to an end eventually, our relations with alumni continue to thicken a texture of solidarity across the entire world.
We transitioned into the new month with a dedicated screening of the film Aşît - The Avalanche by our Fellow Pınar Öğrenci at the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut (KHI) – Max Planck Institut, followed by an insightful conversation moderated by Costanza Caraffa and Gerhard Wolf. Watching the film again, together, in these days of pain and destruction, not only represented a very meaningful occasion of collective reflection on displacement, survival, and resistance; but also offered us the privilege of discussing with an engaged group of scholars, researchers, and intellectuals. The event moved us deeply, giving us strength and inspiration for the days to come and allowed us ritually to appreciate the time that lies behind us and to thank the KHI for its continued collaboration with our residencies.
Whilst people continue to be dispossessed and oppressed, losing power and dignity in a world haunted by the recurring of dramatic violence, our community and collective body grows stronger. Our house for mending, troubling, and repairing continues to be a home-base to encourage one another, learn, and offer pathways into a livable future.
SAVE THE DATE: NOVEMBER!
Our exhibition a house is a house is a home stays open to the public until 20 November 2023. Opening times are: Wednesday to Friday, from 10am to 6:00pm, and by appointment.
19 November 2023
14:00 at Villa Romana
Echoes from the Outside
Brunch and Lecture
For the cycle ‘A House for Mending, Troubling, Repairing’ and on the occasion of a house is a house is a home finissage, Övül Ö Durmusoglu and Barbara Casavecchia propose a conversation focused on the outside - the en plein air, the orchard, the garden - and the outsider position historically imposed upon female healing practises linked with situated botanical knowledge. The Orto Botanico in Florence, one of the oldest in Europe, was founded in mid XVI century, at a time when the names of witches burned on the square overlooking San Miniato’s abbey were officially recorded in the Florentine archives. “With the marginalization of the midwife, the process began by which women lost the control they had exercised over procreation” (Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 2004, p.89). The conversation between two curators, colleagues, friends coming from the Mediterranean basin reflects on possible ways of re-imagining versatile connections with that ‘outer’, Other-ed space, through different voices of artists Diana Policarpo, Elisa Giardina Papa, Marwa Arsanios, Tabita Rezaire, Pınar Öğrenci and Jumana Manna revolving around technologies and histories of care, and digital and ancestral memory in close connection with soil. It will initiate a long term engagement with the living and co-habiting grounds of Villa Romana.
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