Villa Romana
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The fourth dispatch of the year is a receptacle of seeds. Since the beginning of the new season and over the past month, we have been holding, cherishing, taking care, and planting seeds of various kinds. We have not all become gardeners, but – here in the House for Mending, Troubling, and Repairing – we are sensing the need for retreating into small gestures of protection towards life. Of mothering, if I may say. We are seeing the rubbles and the many devastations that stand in front of our eyes, we are hearing the echoes of the pain. Of all the wars that are being waged, and the planetary climatic crisis. Reading the words of a philosopher, who is writing from the other side of the highway tunnel – across the Apennines from here, in Bologna –, we realise that what we are doing is maybe also a form of deserting. The cogitations of this deserter has been reaching us since a few weeks, and has been pressuring us to reflect even further on the urgency of what we are compelled to do, as a community of artists. Deserting not because we are cowardly, but because we want to be courageous enough to find escape routes from the loops of violence, of incessant consumerism, and of oppression.
Having a garden, we dig and we grow. We nourish seedlings and we cherish life. Since the Villa Romana Fellows 2024 arrived, many are the seeds and germinating ideas that were brought to us in Florence. Some in a literal sense, as from Monai de Paula Antunes, who, with her husband and daughters, carried here for the entire community of Villa Romana a bunch of seeds, and since April started planting them in small pots and subsequently in our soil. Others, like Tuli Mekondjo, in a literal and allegorical sense, take care of the fertility dolls of the Aawambo people that she recreated for her recent project at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin: dolls, which were formerly passed down from generation to generation to practice motherhood and connect to fertility in her community, and which were looted by the Germans during the colonialisation of Namibia. Other fellows are growing seeds by opening up new research paths, like Sergio Zavallos, who is researching about the Italian naturalist and explorer Antonio Raimondi, and is gathering seeds of information from different Italian researchers and sources; or Ruben D’Hèrs, who is relentlessly experimenting with painting and with sound, growing and weaving together different investigations and practices.
Our Fellows have lately been supported to dig deeper, also thanks to other inspiring presences in the house. Since the very end of March, we welcomed our Testing Grounds residents; artists we were able to invite for a three-month stay at the Villa, thanks to a grant by Culture Moves Europe: Saverio Cantoni, Yuni Chung, and Gabriella Hirst. Together with our collaborator and partner-in-crime Marleen Boschen, we are curating a programme with them, getting them to experiment further with the different projects that we started in the garden since last year, and embracing their engaged research and imagination through “agropoetic” gestures and projects.
The house is full, and the artistic thickness that one can breathe in the air is dense. The rhythms are multiple and multiform, but the different agencies of the artists and of the people living in the house are pulsing in unison.
We currently do not have an exhibition on show, but you can always come and visit us.
Upon an invitation of our fellow Monai de Paula Antunes, in mid-April we organised a Seed Bunch + Garden Day, inviting people to learn about the seeds we brought together in this year-and-a-half of research and sharing knowledge and materials towards the creation and grounding of a Villa Romana seed library.
While in Venice with some of the Fellows and residents during the opening days of the Biennale, we were blessed to be given – very serendipitously – some seeds from the cooperative of Somankidi Coura: a gift by Raphael Grisey, honouring the work and labour of our common friend and colleague, late artist Bouba Touré. We could not avoid feeling immediately reconnected to such a great practitioner and agitator, and to the unique project of the Malian cooperative. We will grow Okra in his memory.
Over the last weeks, of sun and rain, of warmth and cold humid weather, what we mainly did – beside office work - was surely planting, but also gathering, talking, cooking, and eating together. We conducted closed workshops, and we initiated radio: we were live on FM in Berlin with Archipel Community Radio Stations, featuring an intimate and thoughtful as much as thought-provoking conversation between Monai de Paula Antunes and Tuli Mekondjo, with the participation of Sergio Zevallos. Some of us travelled, as Tuli, who last week performed at the Ford Foundation in New York - curated by our beloved and brilliant colleague Beya Othmani - amidst so much admiration and praise for her important and moving work. In the Villa, we had the pleasure to welcome great colleagues like Lisa Marei Schmidt and curator Kari Conte for studio visits – among others –, and to host inspiring and generous artist such as Marysia Lewandowska, who stayed with us for nearly two weeks to deepen her research on the figure of Gertrude Bing – knowing of our long-term relationship with the work of Aby Warburg and research institutes such as the Kunsthistorisches Institute (KHI) of Florence.
We are cooking up some beautiful upcoming exhibitions and events.
Please mark in your calendar:
(After)Wordby Mistura Allison
The word this month is Fellowship.
This month, I have made the time to revisit two works by Wole Soyinka; particularly reflecting on the multitudes in which fellowship can manifest. In his multiverse, fellowship emerges not merely as a theme, but as a foundational ethos, embodying the complexities of collective responsibility within a fractured world. Fellowship, in the context of Soyinka's work, often transcends the simple camaraderie among peers to address a deeper, moral and ethical alliance against tyranny and injustice. This is particularly evident in his plays and political activism. In The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka, he delves into the harrowing experiences of imprisonment without trial under Nigeria's civil regime. Here, fellowship is not a given; it is a tested and hard-earned achievement among those who share the harsh realities of oppression and the struggle for dignity and freedom. In Death and the King's Horseman, Soyinka explores how fellowship can bridge the divides of life and death, the earthly and the spiritual, and the individual and the communal. This play, based on a real event during British colonial rule, underscores the collective responsibility of the community to uphold its cultural integrity against external disruptions. The protagonist's tragic fate illuminates the potential for communal fellowship to act as both a support and a burden, raising profound questions about the boundaries of individual and collective destinies. I am reminded by the Yoruba concept of Omoluwabi, a term that encompasses virtues of honesty, respect, and integrity. This philosophy informs understanding of fellowship as a moral and ethical fabric that holds communities together, a counterforce to chaos. It is a call for a return to a collective moral foundation, a reminder of the interdependence of individuals within any society.
The Garden as Studio
by Saverio Cantoni
PEPITE - Sonic Nuggets
from the Radio Papesse's Archive
This month's sonic nugget comes singing and swinging. It is a family story that questions our relationship with disability and the idea of normal, it is the story of Gilles, Mathilde and Camille: two sisters and an unexpected guest... Gilles De la Tourette. Gilles, ma soeur et moi is a documentary by Camille Descroix; it was part of the Lucia 2022 program and now we will bring it with us for a listening session series at the Internazionale Kids Festival in Reggio Emilia (May 10th-12th).
Evergreen Recipes
by Claudia Fromm
Here is the recipe against the last cold days in April, with lots of wild herbs from our garden.
Chickpea soup with wild herbs
Ingredients for 4 persons:
500 g boiled chickpeas with cooking water
4-5 chopped celery, onion, garlic and carrot
about 500 g of mixed wild herbs, in April they are: beta vulgaris (chard), hypochaeris radicata (saucer), sonchus asper (sow thistle, spiny sowthistle), salvia pratensis (meadow sage), crepis vesicaria (beaked hawk´s-beard), plantago lanceolata (lamb´s tongue), silene vulgaris (strigoli), lamium purpureum (false nettle)
1 glass of tomato sauce
1 handful of dried porcini mushrooms
rosemary
salt, chilli
olive oil
Preparation:
Soak the mushrooms for 10 minutes, then chop them. Chop the celery/carrot/onion/garlic and wash the herbs, then cut them into strips. Blend one glass of chickpeas with one glass of cooking water. Put a few tablespoons of oil, the chopped vegetables, rosemary, a little chilli pepper and the mushrooms in a saucepan and wilt. Add the tomato first, stir, then the herbs and cook for 4-5 minutes, finally the mashed chickpeas, the whole chickpeas and the cooking water you have set aside. Continue cooking for about 20 minutes. Serve the soup with slices of toasted bread and season with a drizzle of oil directly on the plate.
Enjoy!
PERIOD!
von Maike Wild
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:
