07.10.2023
Villa Romana: a house is a house is a home / Open Studios 2023
Video
exhibition
Villa Romana was founded in 1905 by an artist for artists, as a space in which to experiment, breathe, and live in togetherness. A place where co- habitation could become an opportunity for individual artistic engagement and communal change.
The open house and Open Studios of 16 and 17 September 2023 mark the reopening of Villa Romana as A House for Mending, Troubling, Repairing.
The house opens its door to a wider public, one not just specifically engaged in art discourses and practices but committed to various forms of active citizenship, research, critical and ecological thinking.
It opens giving centre stage to the work of the four fellows who have been inhabiting the casa since February and March 2023: Diana Ejaita, Jessica Ekomane, Samuel Baah Kortey, Pınar Öğrenci.
While the artists are opening their studios, a multiform and growing exhibition – under the title a house is a house is a home – is also taking space in the rooms of the Villa, and also in the public space, with the work of Emeka Ogboh presented in the Piazzale Degli Uffizi.
Nourishing a hospitable and critical laboratory for artists, activists, cultural workers, diasporic communities, children, animals and plants; the programme envisions an agenda and climate that grapples with the very core of the institution Villa Romana: its infrastructure, domestics, community, locality, and garden. To see the Villa as a home for crafting the tools and practices to face times that ask of us a radical and planetary repair of this asymmetric world.
Villa Romana is not a villa, it is not a museum, but a house. It is not an arcadia but a real place, with its challenges and its cracks; a physical and mental space where to feel safe and at times unsettled, as in life. This is the fundamental and grounding deliberation at the core of the newly started phase of this institution in becoming.
If “a rose is a rose is a rose”, like Gertrude Stein suggested, a house is a house is a home, and is also not always what we are expecting or imagining.
