But also to embrace vulnerability and doubt. To articulate a non-universal agenda, one that is instead always situated and never shadowed by epistemological prejudices.

Led by contemporary critical artistic thinking, Villa Romana further connects to academic institutions and bodies that support similar progressive visions for art and towards a (still) inhabitable planet. Experimenting with discursive and performative formats, (digital) residency programmes, exhibitions, sound and sonority, radio, digitisation, the making and the unmaking of archives, digital networks, and educational platforms, the main focus of the programme and its direction is and will be on forms and practices of:

1. domesticity and conviviality

The poet Harmony Holiday writes that “reparations begin in the body”. We develop Villa Romana from the experience of living and the practice of inhabiting together a domus, shaping a different vision of domesticity and togetherness. The house itself is the starting point from which, concretely and locally, to think hospitability and (be)longing, domesticity and care, but also the connections between ruination and repair, ecology and worlds beyond the West.

For over a decade, I have been working on the role of conviviality, hospitality, carework, and commoning at the independent art and community SAVVY Contemporary, in Berlin. With my colleagues, we strive to decouple the domestics from forms of exploitation and subjugation/domestication, shaping instead visions of non-normative domestic solidarity, which focus on processes of making home in migrant and diasporic realities, and conjure alternative practices of habitation of the world and of coexistence between species. A possibility of coming together in a world that isolates us, of repair as re-pairing and reconnecting disrupted worlds and polarised political imaginaries on a planet ravaged by a global mental and public health crisis.

A first axis of the project therefore focuses on crafting the house into a hospitable sphere that begins to take seriously the role of team-work, food and cooking, communal living, sustainability, corporeality, and hospitality. We have in fact established a series of artist workshops and formats of conviviality that focus on the role of the kitchen in the tradition of the Kitchen Table Talks and radical feminist practices of solidarity that challenge racist, homophobic, and patriarchal norms. These are meant to also underscore the importance of the Villa’s impressive garden as a laboratory for ecological thinking and organic collaborations beyond capitalist labour.

The role of the Villa as the home and residence of artists and the team of the institution is paramount to its identity and embodied life. This programme underlines reflections on living together by working on the role of food and sharing, of storytelling and community engagement, and feminist understandings of family in an expanded way. The role of the inhabitants of the villa with their families is central to this, as Villa Romana underlines support for artists with children, and especially mothers, by focusing on childcare, education, and learning as fundamental pillars. Establishing the residency as a critical institution supporting artists struggling as mothers and parents, we want to create an infrastructural possibility for an every-day community of domestic solidarity. One in which knowledge accessibility materialises on a daily basis through the dissemination of inclusive modes of programming, display, and diffusion that also acknowledge neuro-diversity, illness, physical barriers, and other forms of impairment and challenge.

2. troubling ruination

A second axis focuses on the role of troubling and ruination, dealing with the problematic fascination with European antiquity and the epistemic violence of Western art history. A House for Mending, Troubling, and Repairing puts centre stage the problem of canonisation and decanonisation in the West and promotes research and artistic practices that challenge and rethink European, modern, and white epistemological paradigms. Villa Romana is situated in a city famed for its world-renowned Renaissance art collections and heritage while being also the epicentre of a bottom-up collective movement for the recognition of Black history and non-white agencies. Animated by engaged activists and inspiring scholars, Florence has become a city through which the Black History Month movement spreads across Italy and connects to a wider European and global reckoning with the role of Black life in Europe. Villa Romana collaborates with the founders of Black History Month Florence and partners with more communities creating alternative canons of telling the history of art in the city, and the Italian territory.

Italy is famous for its classical ruins, while also painfully experiencing the ruination of its present ecosystem and social fabric. Ruins are not just the imperial debris of past regimes; they are also durable signs of corrosive toxicities sedimented in the history of the West. Italy is brimming with monuments to its “white” classic and Christian antiquity, but also with capitalist ruins, failed concrete urban centres and peripheries, abandoned villages in the South, cities ravaged by earthquakes and hoping in vain for governmental rejuvenation. Rather than recreating a nostalgic gaze on ruins as cultural patrimony, we seek to engage with life amidst social ruination. While capitalist abandonment and social ruination is a planetary phenomenon, it is a marked feature of Italian identity. Italy’s relation to its South as a territory forcefully underdeveloped and culturally patronised is a fire fuelled by corruption, poverty, and emigration. We ponder and engage with the questione meridionale – the Southern predicament – and focus on life despite abandonment and misery across the entire county. Ruins and ruination, we believe, can become sites and epicentres of new claims to collective life, entitlement, and political projects.

3. Diasporic (be)longing

Italy’s modern history is marked by the experience of migration and new forms of projected (be)longing. For centuries, Italy has been a land of emigration, where millions of Italians left the peninsula in the foundational period of US history and as guestworkers in the European postwar era, especially as Gastarbeiter in Germany. But Italy has likewise been a land of immigration, at the crossroads between Africa and Central Europe, and as a crucial crossing point in the middle of the Mediterranean.

Even if Italy is founded on Diasporic (be)longing, it has struggled with xenophobia and cultural discrimination, even within its borders – the North against the South – and continues to see the social consequences of a politics of fear.

It is an urgency to create institutions as archives and infrastructures in which conflicting Diasporic (be)longing can be heard, discussed, and expressed. Villa Romana has been a central hub for artists from a wide range of nations and places. My colleague curator Mistura Allison and I – with very different positionality respectively – have worked extensively with the global African Diaspora of intellectuals and artists, and with a multiplicity of diasporic communities. Collaborating with participatory, radical, and vulnerable archives, connecting them to a wider network of initiatives in different geographies and spaces, Villa Romana foregrounds Diasporic imaginaries and their politics of affect, with their multiple temporalities, forms, and corporealities. 

As A House for Mending, Troubling, and Repairing, Villa Romana is embraced not as villa, not as a museum, but a house. A house of artists for artists, not an arcadia but a real place with its challenges and its cracks. A physical and mental space where one can feel safe and at times unsettled, as in life. A space for cultivating criticality and dialogue, art and ecosystems. 

Nourishing a hospitable and critical laboratory for artists, activists, cultural workers, Diasporic communities, children, while also for animals and plants, the programme and vision address the very core of the institution of Villa Romana—its infrastructure, domesticity, community, locality, and garden. The aim is to see the Villa as a home for crafting the tools and practices to face times that call for a radical and planetary repair of these asymmetric worlds.