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Villa Romana Fellows 2021
Pauline Curnier Jardin, Lene Markusen, Musa Michelle Mattiuzzi, Giuseppe Stampone

Pauline Curnier Jardin, Lene Markusen, Musa Michelle Mattiuzzi and Giuseppe Stampone are the 2021 Villa Romana Felllows. They were nominated by jury members Susan Philipsz, artist and professor at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts; Peggy Buth - artist and Professor for Media Art at the Leipzig Academy for Fine Arts, Anselm Franke - curator and director of the Department for Fine Art and Film at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of the World's Cultures) in Berlin and Marinella Senatore - artist. For the first time in the history of the Villa Romana, one of the 2021 prizes will be awarded to an Italian artist. Moreover, the cooperation between the Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut and the Villa Romana has been deepened with the joint invitation of Musa Michelle Mattiuzzi to become an International Research Fellow. The Villa Romana Prize has been awarded by the non-profit Villa Romana association since 1905 and includes a ten-month residence at the Florentine artists' house, a stipend and a publication.

Pauline Curnier Jardin was born in Marseille in 1980, lives in Berlin and Amsterdam. She works with installations, performances, film and drawings, and was presented with the Preis der Nationalgalerie in 2019. Her works operate with visual, in part grotesque, narratives from the worlds of theatre, cinema and myth. She constructs optical operas, ethnographic peepshows and brightly coloured, yet dark music films. In 2017 she presented her installation Grotta Profunda, Approfundita at the 57th Biennale in Venice. She has participated in numerous international exhibitions and festivals at, among others, Tate Modern, London, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Performa 15, New York, the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris, Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Haus der Kulturen der Welt /House of the Cultures of the World, Berlin, Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

Lene Markusen was born in Denmark in 1973, studied, lives and works in Hamburg. She takes a quotidian-ethnographic and cinematographic perspective in her artistic-filmic work. Films such as GRAD (2004) or Sankt – Female Identities in the Post-Utopian (2017) reflect the extensive and conflict-ridden transformations taking pace in female lives and their worlds of work and consumption through a post-utopian, feminist and narratological perspective. Lene Markusen recently published the art book Sisters Alike. Female Identities in the Post-Utopian. In recent years, she has participated in exhibition projects such as Books on Films, Spector Books /Cineding, Leipzig (2020), New Alphabet School, # Caring. Agro-zentrisches Denken: Wege zu einer kollektiven biografischen Imagination?, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2020), Postcosmetic META-morphoses, BeFem Festival, Belgrade (2019) and The Body as an Indexical Reader, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA), Moscow (2018). From 2011 until 2017 she was a professor at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg.

Musa Michelle Mattiuzzi was born in São Paulo in 1983, now lives in the Brazilian city of Salvador. She is a performer, author and researcher. Her work is particularly concerned with the body of the black woman and how it is designated an exotic location. She explores colonial wounds and the development of an anti-colonial poetic. In 2016 she participated in the 32nd Biennale of São Paulo and published her text merci beaucoup, blanco! as part of the Political Imagination Workshop. In the following year (2017), she took up a place in Athens with the Capacete Residence Programme - documenta 14 and won the prize for the best short film at the X Janela Internacional de Cinema de Recife with her film Experiencing the Flooding Red. In 2018 she participated in the São Paulo Biennale once again as part of the project Afro-affective Affinities. From 2017 to 2019 Mattiuzzi collaborated with the exhibition project Liebe und Ethnologie – die koloniale Dialektik der Empfindlichkeit (nach Hubert Fichte) (Love and Ethnology – the colonial dialectic of "Empfindlichkeit"(after Hubert Fichte)), which was concluded in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

Giuseppe Stampone was born in the French town of Cluses in 1974, now divides his time between Rome and Brussels. His artistic work – whether in the form of detailed, miniature biro-drawings or roomy, spatial installations – is characterised by a critical engagement with the so-called achievements of western civilisation and its consequences, such as racism and exclusionism. He reinterprets incunables from European art history and interrogates the role of the artists, their education and their collaborations. In 2008 he – together with Maria Crispal – initiated the network Solstizio (www.solstizio.org), where artists, researchers, foundations and associations engage with global themes such as the environment, social conflicts and sustainable economies. Stampone's works have been exhibited at international exhibitions, museums and biennales, such as the 2018 Biennial of Architecture in Seoul, South Korea, the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), the Biennial of Kochi-Muziris, Kerala (2012), the 11th Biennale in Havana and the Liverpool Biennale (2010).

The Villa Romana Fellowship includes a ten-month residency at Villa Romana in Florence, free use of an atelier and a monthly stipend. It is organised by the Villa Romana Society and funded by the Deutsche Bank Foundation and the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, as well as other private benefactors.

Villa Romana in Florence is a place of contemporary artistic production and international exchange. Since 1905, the core function of Villa Romana has been the Villa Romana Fellowship. It is often awarded to artists at the beginning of their careers and has thus co-written the history of modern art. Through exhibitions and a broad range of events Villa Romana interacts with producers and the public, placing itself on the international artistic scene and promoting communication with the cultures of the Mediterranean area.