Villa Romana
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It took a bit longer to formulate this dispatch. It did because in the last weeks we cooked without interruption, marinating and pondering different ingredients to follow the recipes that we have been meticulously preparing for the last months. And hosting people and guests. So here comes our letter from Villa Romana in the form of a recipe. A recipe written between the tables and the kitchen of our Trattoria Guaiana.
Wash your hands, prepare all the spices. Keep them within your reach for the whole read. Start cutting the plantain, the pecorino, the tomatoes, and the taro. Peel the cactus.
Let the ingredients get familiar with each other. They actually naturally do, but some of you might need a moment to internalise that and prepare your body to register their different tastes and textures.
Take a moment for yourself.
Look back with us into the past weeks of our programme.
Mai. The way of spelling the month of May in German evokes concepts of timelessness and atemporality, if pronounced in Italian. Mai, never. But May is instead always the time when so many things transform, happen, and evolve. This year they did so in the backdrop of an international and humanitarian crisis that was painful to witness.
For us in Villa Romana, the past month and weeks have been especially meaningful and rich. As one of the most important dates of the year, Labour Day always opens a new season and sets the tone for a climate of respectfulness of each other’s work and reciprocal support. After more than a year of working together, the new team of Villa Romana found a beautiful flow of interconnectedness and synergy, and the climate in the house is one of a polyphony in unison, everyone pulling strings and energies in the right, collaborative, direction.
The house has been full, with the Fellows being very active in their studios, and the garden residents experimenting and testing grounds in the garden. Monai de Paula Antunes, one of our Villa Romana Fellows, is in particular navigating both the space of the studio and the garden as a receptacle and a vessel of ideas and practices: she is doing it often together with her two daughters, and with the other kids of Villa Romana, while her husband, the sound artist nikoLFO, is taking so much care of planting and nourishing our seeds and many plants.
At the beginning of the month a jury organised by ERIAC selected the next ERIAC/Villa Romana residents: among the jurors were Maria Lind, Timea Junghaus, Daniel Baker, former ERIAC/Villa Romana resident Robert Gabris, and myself. Amidst different strong applications, the jury agreed unanimously on selecting unanimously the two artists: Charly Bechaimont and Lila Loisse. They will be living with us in the Villa next September and October, and we are so excited to welcome them soon.
Go back to your sliced ingredients, and start preparing the encounter between the different elements by following the open-source recipes that you find on our Trattoria website. This requires a lot of work and quite some experience, we are suggesting you to attune to chef Prince Asford’s suggestions!
In the meantime, find a second to be with us and to taste a bit of the mood that has been growing in Villa Romana. These were the last weeks of school for Florentine children. The kids of Villa Romana were keeping their parents very busy with many presentations and recitals, things that made us happy while at the same time quite exhausted ☺.
We also had one of our most important occasions of the year, hosting in the Villa the Kuratoriumsitzung of the association Villa Romana. We have been blessed by the presence and warmth of our board and by the careful attention of the members of the Kuratorium. The whole house has been in ferment. We would like to use the occasion of this letter to acknowledge the support of some amazing people that really make the ground of Villa Romana a fertile and stable one. All the artists in the house and the team could celebrate with us a beautiful and renewed togetherness.
While you test your capacities in cooking something that you probably never prepared before, acknowledge your talent and start interpreting, using spices following your own intuition – and at your own risk. It is known that the world is divided between those who come from cultures that cultivated a deep knowledge on how to cook some spices (cultures that are still fighting to preserve a certain secrecy about this knowledge), and those who have access to all the possible spices in the world, but do not really know how to use them, or how to valorise them. Analyse and internalise your position, hence take a political stance while cooking – or keep your sensitivity active in that regard. Start simmering.
On May 20th and 21st, we had the privilege to be invited by scholar and curator Ane Rodríguez Armendariz at the Real Academia de España en Roma to share perspectives, practices and ideas of care with other residency projects. A meaningful experience and occasion to learn from each other and push for a discussion on the state of the arts in artists residencies, and the meaning of running such institutions in our times.
On May 30th we opened in Berlin – at the artist-run space after the butcher – the exhibition Greater Than The Sum of Our Parts, celebrating the incredible work of the Villa Romana Fellows 2022, intertwined with echoes of the Fellows 2023. The opening presented the first of two chapters, with the participation of Neda Saeedi, Haure Madjid, Jessica Ekomane and Samuel Baah Kortey. On June 30th, we invite you for a finissage and on July 4th for the opening of the second chapter, with Jasmina Metwaly, Alexander Skorobogatov, Diana Ejaita, and Pınar Öğrenci. The exhibition reflects on crucial concepts and practices that we embrace here at Villa Romana: interdependence, fellowship, and polyphony. It ponders forms of togetherness that generate excess, and at the same time sustainability, articulating modes of reflecting on multiplicity that cannot be explained as a mechanical accumulation or addition of things. In this getting together of works and people, we ask: How can we account for the extra, the more-than, the greater-than, that situation which is generated when fellows, companions, interdependent beings create something that exceeds the mere addition of those things. This is the alchemy of encounters. The generativity of the spirit of something; that which binds things together what would otherwise fall apart. (read the full curatorial concept of the exhibition here).
Your recipe now just needs attention for the final phase of it. You can taste the flavour and keep interpreting the recipe until you reach that texture that your palate is ready to enjoy.
Compose your dish, and think about the way in which you present it to your guests.
On the Italian Republic Day, last June 2nd, we finally opened our project Trattoria Guaiana, A domestic exercise of Villa Romana, conceived and put together by artist Niccolò Moronato, chef Prince Asford, and researcher Alice Jasmine Crippa. An occasion for us to reckon with a forgotten colonial project wanted by Ferdinando I de’ Medici in 1608 and then abandoned by his successor, his son Cosimo II. Three of our Fellows this year are German citizens with a Latin American origin; two of the people caring for the house are Italian: none of us was familiar with this story and we are grateful to have been given a greater amount of food for thought by the guest artists. In the curatorial note of the project by my colleague Mistura Allison Trattoria Guaiana: on footnotes, glitches and creolisation, she ponders: “The violence of colonialism on food is not merely a historical footnote but an ongoing process that shapes contemporary culinary practices. Colonial powers, in their quest for control, did not only subjugate people but also disrupted and reconfigured local food systems. This disruption is evident in the ways indigenous ingredients and culinary techniques were appropriated, transformed, and often devalued in favour of European tastes. Sidney Mintz's seminal work on sugar highlights how the colonial demand for sweetness led to the exploitation of African labour and the alteration of agricultural landscapes in the Caribbean (Mintz, 1985). This narrative of exploitation and transformation is a critical backdrop to understanding Moronato/Asford/Crippa’s practice, which also seeks to reclaim and recontextualise the culinary traditions of a Guaiana Toscana.”
It is basically impossible to try to translate in words the multisensorial experience that this project mobilises. What is certain is that the experience is not just a rational one of encountering the research, getting granular on the history, and eating at the Trattoria, but it is a stronger physical and emotional one, made of the different traces of new tastes, smells, and situations that get registered in the memory of your body; and that eventually will stay with you for long. Alongside the lunches and dinners that the Trattoria served, the programme also consisted of a series of talks and interventions, amongst which:
(on 26 July there will be an upcoming screening of Il Moro (2021), by filmmaker Daphne di Cinto)
After a full week of events and tables, the Trattoria remains open as an installation and as the setting for interventions by our Villa Romana Fellows, who are triggered to activate the space by enriching it with further criticality and positionality.
Come and visit us until 14 July, and keep an eye on the upcoming events!
SAVE THE DATE!
ECLITTICA. EXERCISES OF COSMIC ALIGNMENT
The next appointment is on 21 June, mark it in your calendar!! We will celebrate the summer solstice with a series of exercises and incantations: performances, vocal interventions, garden workshops, concerts and live music by the artists of the house of via Senese 68, and by some guests. On the longest day of the year, we will pause, observe, and try to re-attune to cosmic orders that are bigger than us: the ecological devastation and the general crisis that we are experiences right now in the world, urge us to look beyond “our garden”, beyond our anthropocentric arrogance, and to re-pair a relationship with higher cosmic orders and rhythms that we seem to have impoverished throughout the centuries.
The Villa Romana Fellows, the garden residents as well as guests such as Antonina Nowacka and nikoLFO will tune a full programme starting from 4pm till late night in our garden.
The project is realised in collaboration with ooh-sound e Nub Project Space.
PEPITE - Sonic Nuggets
from the Radio Papesse's Archive
A few years ago, as Pollinaria guests, the Futurefarmers mapped Abruzzo's ancient grains: the Solina, but also the Ruscia, the Rosciola, the Senatore Cappelli, grains that have traveled, in space and time, have mutated, have found a home elsewhere. Still cultivating them today are a few farmers who have reintroduced seeds and practices of sharing and exchange that don't match national and European seed certification laws. Radio Papesse followed them for a summer and produced La Banda dei Grani Antichi, a series for RAI Radio 3 RAI's TRE SOLDI, and talked about them at MaXXI, with Radio Instabile and together with agronomists, farmers, artists, radio and commons experts.
(After)Wordby Mistura AllisonThe word this month is Glitch*.
I've been reflecting deeply on the concept of the glitch, particularly through the lens of Legacy Russell's work. The glitch, in its essence, is a disruption—a moment where the expected flow is interrupted, revealing underlying structures and biases. This idea has become a lens through which I examine the complex interplay between history, culture, and power, particularly in the context of colonialism and its enduring legacies.
In reflecting on Italian colonialism, the glitch becomes a tool to question the sanitised versions of history that permeate public consciousness. It challenges us to confront the erasures and omissions, pushing us to acknowledge the brutal realities of colonial exploitation and oppression. This disruption is not merely an academic exercise but a necessary act of remembrance and resignification.
The concept of authenticity in food is another area where the glitch reveals deeper colonial legacies. Culinary traditions are often romanticised as pure and untouched, yet they are profoundly shaped by histories of forced and voluntary encounters. Who has the authority to define what is traditional or authentic in this context?
By employing the glitch as a method, we can dismantle the myth of culinary purity and authenticity. We can start to appreciate food as a living archive of cultural resilience and adaptation, where traditional dishes are not relics of the past but dynamic embodiments of historical encounters and exchanges.
The glitch encourages us to embrace the unexpected and the anomalous, to see these moments of disruption as opportunities for critical engagement and transformation.
In our ongoing exploration of these themes, may we continue to seek out and amplify the glitches that challenge our assumptions and expand our horizons.
*thank you Legacy Russell
Platano Mantecatoby Trattoria Guaiana
Ingredients:
- 250g boiled ripe plantain
- 60-70g aged pecorino cheese
- 1-2 medium-large sage leaves
- 6g smoked soy sauce
- Salt & pepper to taste
- Breadcrumbs to taste
Process Notes:
1. Cut the plantain with the peel still on into pieces about 3-4 cm thick. Discard the ends and boil in salted water for 15-20 minutes, until soft. Remove the peel, roughly drain, and let air cool.
2. Place the plantain along with all other solid ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth.
3. Gradually add the smoked soy sauce, adjusting to taste. Alternatively, you can use an umami sauce of your choice.
4. Add pecorino cheese, pepper, and/or breadcrumbs to taste until you achieve the desired consistency and flavour balance.
5. Generously spread on warm bread, focaccia, or Tuscan schiacciata. Alternatively, adjust the consistency with breadcrumbs and use it as a filling for fresh pasta.
The Villa Romana e.V. maintains the Villa Romana and the Villa Romana Prize.
The main sponsor is the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Other sponsors are the Deutsche Bank Foundation, the BAO Foundation as well as - project related - numerous private individuals, companies and foundations from all over the world.
Villa Romana e.V. is supported by:
