Monthly Dispatch
from VILLA ROMANA – End of Year 2023

As 2023 comes to a close, we want to thank you.

It has been a year of transition, a year of inhabitation and cohabitation, which required a lot of adaptation and fresh looks. Your support for our new team and fellows has been overpowering and humbling, therefore, again, we give thanks.

With gratitude for things past comes action for things ahead, and, well, it has not been an easy year. So we wish you, for these days “in-between the years” (zwischen den Jahren), strength, peace, and joy so that you may all passage, or “slide” well into the new year.

The last two months have been marked by our witnessing and troubled observation of a world in crisis, at war, faced with violence, and the unbelievable flaring up of anti-Semitic, anti-Arab and xenophobic sentiments around the world. We are troubled by these developments that polarise our societies, and which evidently are of particular concern to us a German institution. Together with artists, artistic communities, intellectuals, and cultural workers we have been speaking, sharing pain and hope, engaging in attempts to understand the situation and to carve out ways forward. We wish those who grieve, and who might not be in the spirit of celebration, a solemn and replenishing time.

The last two months have also been a sad time for us in the Villa, since we saw the departure of our first fellow intake since Elena Agudio took over the direction of the house. Samuel, Jessica, Diana, Pinar – you will all be missed! After ten beautiful and rich months together in Florence, one by one, they started to leave the house and the city. As probably was the case every year until now, and as it may always occur in the future, we found ourselves somewhat unprepared for the departure of what had become a domestic community. After more than 300 days spent under the same roof, in the same garden and under the same sky, it doesn’t come natural to just turn the page, celebrate and get ready for the new chapters. As things around us seem endlessly to accelerate, we therefore needed to make space for a moment of slowness, of separation, of reckoning with relations that had been built – between us, the kids, and all other living beings in the house. A cycle ended, a circle closed, as this first year at Villa Romana ended.

We give thanks to all the people that walked this long route together, those who have been inhabiting the house and its programme, those who keep sharing the work here, and those others far away but intimately connected to our spirits and agencies. As the proverb says: “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together”. And we will keep going together for the months and years to come, to build and grow our community further, and to make our togetherness more and more sustainable.

If you can support us, we need you and generosity!

Amidst the arrangement for artworks to be safely stored, transported, shown to collectors, curators, and critics before wrapping them up – we also slowly prepared for the period until February 2024; a period in which the house might seem to stand still. Seem, indeed, because it is a period of restructuring, of repainting, and repairing, of mending and restoring the house for more nails, paint, sound, life in the house.

But we want to look back with gratitude, and so we invite you to join us in celebrating again moments of beauty and richness, to scroll through our selection of images, and to watch this evocative short film that we produced for the Open Studios 2023, which gives you a good sense of the tapestry of intensities produced by our fellows 2023.

Villa Romana Florence: a house is a house is a home / Open Studios 2023

We want to dedicate a few paragraphs to share with you some of the more concrete things that happened during the last weeks, in November and this beginning of December. The first thing we want to share is that we have continued to work towards the decarbonisation and sustainability of the institution. We are happy to share that Villa Romana became one of the members of the municipality initiative “Firenze per il Clima” (Florence for the Climate), supporting the ecological transition of the city in which we live and operate as a cultural institution and as citizens, actively contributing to its ambitious programme towards climate neutrality.

While we participated to the first encounters of this local and long-term venture, and we implemented internal workshops on carbon literacy and an energetic analysis of our building and institution with the Terra Institute, we also travelled to Bamberg in Germany for a closed gathering on sustainability organized by the ADIR (Arbeitskreis Deutscher Internationaler Residenzprogramme/ Working Group of German International Residency Programmes), to strategise with colleagues about environmental urgency and about possible joint actions to shape as a network.

As we were getting close to the end of our exhibition a house is a house is a home, the house warmed up, with wonderful guests that came to see us and visited the show, and to spend time in the villa. We partnered with the outstanding cinema and contemporary art festival Lo Schermo dell’Arte, for its 16th edition rich of special events and with a wonderful selection of works, and we hosted some of their guests.

On 19 November, on the occasion of the finissage of our exhibition, as last appointment of the series A House for Mending, Troubling, Repairing, we were honored by the presence of curators and writers Barbara Casavecchia and Övül Ö. Durmusoglu, who presented the conversation Echoes from the Outside, on the role of witchcraft and the labor of women to keep unfolding the medicinal and political power of plants.

The last days before the departure of our Fellows, different groups came to catch the last chance to chat with them, among them the 4A Lab: Art Histories, Archeologies, Anthropologies, Aesthetics led by Dr Hannah Baader from the KHI (Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz), who generously contributed reflections about their research and about out programme, being particularly inspired by the work we do with testing grounds and our garden. Our Samuel Baah Kortey and Mistura Allison both had the opportunity to lecture and present their important research at the NYU, The New York University in Florence, as part of a series organized by The Recovery Plan.

Following a renovated collaboration with other German institutes and artists’ residencies in Italy, which implemented exchanges and reciprocity in hosting with the Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venice, Villa Massimo in Rome, and Villa Vigoni in Loveno di Menaggio on the lake of Como, in these months we travelled to meet them and to get closer to each other’s research. On 29 November, in particular, Villa Massimo kindly organised a reception for our fellows, and opened its doors for our team. As much as we build on the local and international community of Villa Romana, we believe that interconnection, interdependency, and reciprocity can just make our work stronger and impactful!

In December, our entire office closed its doors to the public to keep focused on the final systematisation of our archive of events for 2023 and on our soon-to-be-launched new website, while developing new ideas further and structuring funding applications to make our exciting plans for 2024 real!

We are grateful for the great support that comes from the board of Villa Romana and from its community of members and alumni. Last 11 December, many of us convened to celebrate the end of this first year together, warmly hosted by the Kunsthaus Dahlem in Berlin: we give thanks for the beautiful engagement and we are wishing more occasions of collective celebration of Villa Romana and its artistic imaginary.

Stay healthy, keep dreaming, and continue to follow our path!