Monthly Dispatch
from VILLA ROMANA – 01/2024
by Elena Agudio

This epistolary tradition started a year ago. As soon as a new constellation of people and of agencies moved into the Villa - as an exercise of institutional as well as an intimate rumination on the process of transformation of Villa Romana into A House for Mending, Troubling, Repairing -, we felt urged to share monthly dispatches in the form of domestic reports. For a trip around the sun, these letters to you formalised as news from home, to echo the meditations of Chantal Ackerman in her eponymous film, or – to say it more precisely – as news from a place in which various collective processes of home-making were unfolding. Rummaging through the dispatches of 2023, you can hear the voices and retrace the contours of the many people who contributed to the life of this artists’ house, you can drift along the multiple narratives that were articulated by the inhabitants of this garden, you can even smell the herbs and spices that had been continuously cooked in our communal kitchen – and in the ones of our Villa Romana Fellows 2023, who happened to be not only the most inspiring artists, but also inimitable chefs ;)!

Now a new cycle has begun, and much is about to happen. We won’t break this tradition, but we will make it more choral, multivocal, and multi-formatted. In our newsletter you will therefore not just read my informal words and thoughts as director about life in the house and our programme, as much as they already condensed and synthesised collective practices and exercises. The Monthly Dispatches of 2024 will instead be articulated by the entire team and inhabitants of Villa Romana as a tool to share our multilayered soundscape. You will be able to read recipes, read tales from the plants in the garden, hear sonic impressions, witness takeovers by the fellows of Villa Romana.

With these buzzing images and tones, we want to embrace a further experimentation with the ecology of a full-fledged and plural domestic life, one that is grounded on commonality and sharing, togetherness and (sometimes literal) co-cultivation.

As the story continues to unfold, we glimpse into the days just gone and into the ones about to come. January was a month of reshuffling: recovering, replanting, readjusting energies and ideas, restructuring rooms and moods. In a time of in-betweenness, still holding our breath to metabolise the departure of Diana, Samuel, Jessica, and Pınar while excitingly awaiting Tuli, Ruben, Sergio, and Monai, we took care of infrastructures and plans to sustain the months to come. Like the bees in the garden, in these very cold winter days, we have been showing up little, but we have never stopped working, warming up the house. (Quite literally as we just finished important fire-drill exercises to make sure a house for troubling is also safe house for doing so!)

Over the last six weeks, Ala and Victor, as every year in this time of transition between a group of fellows and another, performed magic to refresh the entire house and to keep the garden healthy. The art of maintenance is one of the most precious and most valued, but perhaps often invisible or unnoticed or taken-for-granted practices in A House for Mending, Troubling, Repairing, and we don’t just show gratitude but deep respect to those who master it and want to highlight it hereby. While engaging in the various and multiple praxes of “fixing” things, on 8 and 9 January we were honored by an official visit of the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Claudia Roth, who came to Rome and met us in Villa Massimo to learn through in-person encounters about our work, our plans, and our activities. For the occasion, Villa Romana collaborated with Villa Massimo and with Casa di Goethe in Rome to convene a rich panel discussion on sustainability in times of crisis. We are grateful to the speakers who joined Julia Draganović (director of Villa Massimo), myself and Mistura on stage, namely Aliza S. Wong (director of the American Academy in Rome), journalist and writer Francesca Melandri, as well as historian Prof. Dr. Christoper Hein, and we are deeply thankful to the Villa Massimo Fellows and staff, and the warm public that participated in this sensitive and difficult reflection during and on these troubled times.

On 16 January, we were honoured to participate in the opening of Zachery Fabri’s solo show at The Recovery Plan, titled Dear Empathy, and other beverages, curated by Black History Month Florence and also in collaboration with the American Academy in Rome. This brilliant exhibition reckoned with the complexity of our current time and the burden of being an artist in times of conflicts, while pondering the legacies of Italian colonial history. His current project in Rome explores the city’s Monument to the Fallen of Dogali.

While no artists yet moved in the house, we nevertheless had the pleasure to weave collaborations with sister-institutions like the Fondazione Pistoletto, and we shortly hosted Maria Lanko, co-founder of The Naked Room in Kyiv, as well as co-curator of the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennal.

We also welcomed a new collaborator and trainee from the University of Freiburg, who will stay with us and accompany our work until mid-May: we are happy to have you with us, dear Maike!

As you may have seen already on our Instagram, we have started unveiling little surprises for you, as the announcement of the winners of our Garden Residency Programme Testing Grounds, curated with Marleen Boschen and supported by the European Union: between April and June artists Saverio Cantoni, Yuni Chung, and Gabriella Hirst will be staying here with us, in dialogue with our fellows and working in the garden as their studio. We are also happy to share with you that thanks to the support of the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures, next March we will be able to host for a month artists Zineb Achoubie and Lorenzo Sandoval! They will be intersecting their collaborative research on weaving and storytelling with our programme focused on the reappropriation of the domestics as a space of imagination and mending: collaborating with local textile laboratories, while interacting with the artists in the house and with our community, their work will involve the physical and symbolic act of stitching and weaving together as a reflection on narratives of restitution and cultural repair across the Mediterranean sea.

We don’t want to reveal too much, but as you can sense much is moving and a lot is being cooked, while our yearly programme is being launched.

Black History Month officially started, and on February 16th and 17th we will celebrate it with a breathtaking exhibition opening and a public programme that we really suggest you not to miss. Check all details below in the SAVE THE DATE column please, keep an eye on our social media, and come and see us asap!

We are more than thrilled as in the next days our Fellows 2024 will be finally arriving at the Villa, while other amazing artists will be staying for shorter time to participate in the programmes we are offering for the month of February: among them Leo Asemota, Helena Uambembe, our alumna Lerato Shadi, Tewa Barnosa, Amalie Elfallah and NiccolòAcram Cappelletto.

We are kicking off 2024, and we want you here with us!