Domestic Exercises. Homework for a Sustainable Togetherness // Open Studios 2024

Villa Romana Fellows 2024:

Rubén D'Hers, Tuli Mekondjo, Monai de Paula Antunes, Sergio Zevallos

and with the participation of:

Ana Alenso, Saverio Cantoni, Mallory Lowe Mpoka, Charly Bechaimont,
Lila Loisse, Niko de Paula Lefort

On the occasion of the Open Studios 2024 and the blurring of the boundaries between the private space of work of the artists and the public institutional space, the Villa Romana Fellows  2024 inaugurated an exhibition to present their new productions and works in progress, curating a conversation between them as cohabitants of this house, as fellows sharing a path of their artistic, existential, and personal journey.

During the time of their residency, the artists of Villa Romana have been trying out and concocting strategies of cohabitation that foster space for reciprocal listening and mutuality while also allowing multiplicity and un-domesticated and critical forms of collective imagination. In this exhibition, the artists become a chamber of resonance for each other. Their work is intertwined in a conversation that goes beyond the reverberating, the dialogic, and sometimes even the parasitic relation to each other that they perform. It composes an open partiture that branches off in other and multifarious directions. Into trajectories sometimes explored and other times yet to unfold. Confabulations between the private and the common space of their encounters, which might possibly simply get interrupted before generating something. Or not.

Domestic Exercises. Homework for A Sustainable Togetherness showcases the work of the Villa Romana Fellows 2024 and of other guest artists that currently live in the house or lived here throughout the year. More than an exhibition, we could say, this collection of contributions presents itself as an ecology of artworks that unfold the idea of an inner garden based on the principle of cultivation. Each piece having its own life and specificity, but all sustaining each other – in some cases even grafting into each other. An inner garden that has been growing spontaneously inside the house, but that also refers to the secret garden of each artist’s intimacy and disposition.

In a world ravaged by much grief, where the climate crisis, the wars and the conflicts, the public health crisis, the economic asymmetries and the social injustices are on a daily basis confronting us with pain, we are of the idea that more than cold institutional spaces we are in real need of spaces for healing, like kitchens and living rooms. Spaces where the labour of reflection and of repair could develop hand in hand with the emotional labour that comes with it. We are interested in grappling with the role of art institutions, not only for their capacity of becoming spaces of aggregation but also “domestic” laboratories for sustainable togetherness. Places that afford themselves the practice of “fare i conti in casa” (literally meaning “doing the maths at home”, but also “facing our own problems”) , and confront the histories of oppression, the crimes and the trouble that we perpetrated as societies as well as celebrating the achievements towards new ways of being in the world which are not only ecological, but anti-colonial, post-capitalist, queer, and symbiocentric. Art institutions as open spaces of debate and collaboration for crafting new ecological and socio-political imaginations and practices.

With its public programme Domestic Exercises throughout 2024, Villa Romana has opened itself to the city as a place of encounter and exchange. It reflects on the possibility that "bringing the domestic back to the centre of artistic production means rethinking the idea of 'home' not as a mere domain of private life, but as a tool for constructing public life," as writer and scholar Giulia Palladini has invited us to do.  

This exhibition is another collective gesture towards this reckoning; it offers a moment of critical reflection and of introspection, as a community of artists. An occasion of being singular plural, to carry responsibility together as hosts and guests of the same house, rehearsing society.

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