06/2024

Monthly Dispatch

‍from VILLA ROMANA – 06/2024

by Elena Agudio

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In a whirlwind of summer moods and activities, the drafting of this Dispatch feels like following Rilke’s suggestion: that one should write just after having forgotten what (s)he wanted to write… Much has happened, and the Villa Romana crew has been so active, that we can mainly feel a deep sense of gratitude and warmth for community love and team support without really being able to recall all the moments of joy and labour.

But let’s delve into this exercise of re-membering by using writing as a form of archiving and an occasion of sharing the multiple trajectories that bifurcate from the house of Via Senese 68 in Florence. On June 2^nd we opened Trattoria Guaiana and transformed our house in a space of open and radical conviviality, welcoming goers of different kind, and creating a context to address a certain (forgotten) history of Florence and its contemporary legacy. Understanding all of us as hosts and guests, the team of Villa Romana, the Villa Romana Fellows and the guest artists of the house engaged in the first domestic exercise of our programme: Niccolò Moronato, Prince Asford, and Alice Jasmine Crippa gifted us with the opportunity of a multisensorial experience, a project that allowed us to realise what we hadn’t been realising yet – through the amplification of taste, flavour, sound, and also of archive research and the refined artistic “technology” of making a different use of history! Trattoria Guaiana hosted lunches and dinners, confronting us with the critical fabulation of imagining how it could taste if the colonial project wanted by Ferdinando I de’ Medici at the very beginning of the XVII Century in Latin America was taking full shape. A sensorial experience and a project that reckons with a long-term trajectory of the effects of colonisation on food traditions of both the colonised and the coloniser – as Jacqueline Greaves Monda wrote on her review of the project on Linkiesta. Moronato-Asford-Crippa gave us food for thought and activated institutional public conversations about the lost threads of Tuscan colonial history with Museo dell’Antropologia, Museo della Specola and Opificio delle Pietre Dure (respectively with its curators Francesca Bigoni, Fausto Barbagli, and with the restorer Guia Rossignoli). The current Villa Romana Fellows – three of which are originally from Latin America – engaged with the project from a particular situatedness, contributing a meaningful perspective that afforded us heuristic conversations and confronted us with a necessary politics of emotions.

On 26 June we had the honour to host filmmaker Daphne Di Cinto at the Trattoria, screening her short film Il Moro, recounting the history (and the interior emotional life) of the first Duke of Florence, Alessandro de Medici, the illegitimate son of an enslaved African woman and Pope Clement VII. The Black duke, who was murdered in 1537 by his distant cousin Lorenzaccio, and the narrative fabulated by Daphne di Cinto helped us to delve deeper into the history of the context from which we are acting, and provided us with tools to understand better the colonial expedition of 1608 and its unfolding. The Trattoria is open until 14 July, come and join us for the finissage that the artists are organising on Saturday 13!

While in Florence we were mixing flavours and disclosing forgotten histories, in Berlin we continued to show the work of the Villa Romana Fellows 2022 and 2023. After the opening of the first chapter of Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts on 30 June, last Thursday 4 July we embraced the incredible work of another constellation of artists: Jasmina Metwaly, Alexander Skorobogatov, Diana Ejaita, and Pınar Öğrenci, under the curatorial concept of Mistura Allison: mythological rhizomes and ancestral tech. of blooming and fabulation. We had the occasion of presenting the latest publication of Villa Romana, a series of four booklets by the Fellows 2022 – first edition of a collaboration with Archive Books that will continue throughout the years of programming for A House for Mending, Troubling, and Repairing. We could not be prouder of the bold and sophisticated result of so many months of work and collective imagination!
Our Fellow Tuli Mekondjo in the same days gifted us with an incredible and moving conversation about her work, together with Paz Guevara at the DAAD Gallery. For us, the occasion represented an important moment of discussion and reflection together with different generations of Villa Romana Fellows.

Over the last weeks, Villa Romana surfed the radio waves different times, with our Fellow Monai de Paula Antunes and her project Archipel Stations Community Radio as well as with our Radio Papesse: we were lucky and honoured to have them both holding inspiring sessions in the Trattoria Guaiana. Stay tuned, as we will share material!

Like last year, we decided to mark the passage to the astronomical season of the summer with a line-up of performances and interventions in our garden. In collaboration with the Florence based initiatives ooh-sounds and Nub Project Space, on 21 June we invited our Villa Romana Fellows and our Garden residents plus other guests to celebrate the longest day of the year, by re-attuning to cosmic orders that are bigger than 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.

Between 24 and 25 June, part of the team of Villa Romana travelled to Rome upon an invitation by Villa Medici Fellow Hamedine Kane. Asked to intervene in the gathering Circolo Nero N***8 / Incontri panafricani @villamedici, we contributed a curated gesture with a performative unravelling of Samuel Baah Kortey’s 40 m long canvas produced during his Fellowship last year: Na Who Give Up Messop. A tribute to a vibrant African descendent community active in Italy and too often overlooked. The gesture was accompanied by a sonic call and response intervention by Italian sound artist SADI, ending in a dynamic listening-to-move-session by Le Chef aka Elijah Ndoumbe. Our wonderful friend and multi-talented artist Kaaj Tshikalandand blessed us with brilliant interventions throughout the two days of gathering and with a moving offering to the ancestors in the studio of Hamendine Kane.

Once again this year we had the opportunity to host part of the African Diasporic Cinema Festival (ADCF) at the Villa and to award a prize to the best short film in the competition - or to the one that is clearly resonating most with the Villa Romana programme. Our choice was for Moyo by Henry Jay Kamara, a work that reflects on the agency of children through an incredible story of collective resilience. We gave a special mention to More Dangerous Dead Than Alive, a film about the life of Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigerian writer, poet and activist, fighter against crude oil extraction and promoter of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. In 1995, a few months before he was trialed and hanged, Saro-Wiwa was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in recognition of his work for the environment.

We give thanks, and we will continue to do so, as this is what we understand as the basis our praxis. Just through collaboration, companionship, and polyphony we believe we can contribute something meaningful. For us, for our communities, and for the generations who will come later.

Fresh Off The Press!
by the Villa Romana Office

Read these interviews, reviews and articles just printed and published.

https://www.ad-italia.it/article/cosa-vedere-a-firenze-5-posti-consigliati-dai-local/

https://www.linkiesta.it/site/gastronomika/

https://www.intoscana.it/it/artecucina-trattoria-getta-un-ponte-tra-guyana-francese-e-toscana/

https://www.cibotoday.it/citta/firenze/trattoria-guaiana-villa-romana-firenze.html

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(After)Word

‍by Mistura Allison

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‍The word this month is Fabulation*.

Haraway's notion of "speculative fabulation" suggests a form of storytelling that goes beyond mere imagination to create new realities and possibilities. In this context, the works of Skorobogatov, Metwaly, Ejaita, and Öğrenci can be seen as speculative acts that not only reflect but actively shape cultural memory. Haraway's emphasis on the interconnectedness of all life forms resonates deeply with Skorobogatov's botanical myths, where plants and humans are bound by shared narratives. Similarly, Braidotti's concept of "nomadic subjectivity," which highlights the fluid and ever-changing nature of identity, aligns with Metwaly's exploration of temporal boundaries and the mutable nature of memory and myth. Ejaita's focus on ancestral memory and the land echoes Braidotti's call for a grounded and embodied understanding of our past, while Öğrenci's cyclical symbolism reflects the ongoing struggle against historical amnesia and the need for perpetual vigilance. Through their works, these artists invite us to see myths not as distant relics but as dynamic forces that shape our reality. How do we engage with these narratives? Do we merely recount them, or do we allow them to transform our understanding of ourselves and the world around us?In this reimagining, the artists also remind us of the importance of preparing the soil — of creating the conditions necessary for new narratives to take root and flourish. This preparation involves an openness to polyphony and a willingness to question and deconstruct established narratives. To embrace weirdness and the seemingly absurd. It is a process of continuous cultivation, where the old and the new, the mythical and the real, coexist and coalesce**.

*thank you Donna Haraway

**excerpt from curatorial note for Greater Than The Sum of Our Parts, mythological rhizomes and ancestral tech

PEPITE - Sonic Nuggets
from the Radio Papesse's Archive

It's summer time and this year Radio Papesse turns 18. We're officially adults!!!! To celebrate we invite you to listen to a deep dive into our sonic archive selected and mixed by sound artist Giulia Deval. What does this story need? is a digression through a multitude of voices that focuses on what is most deeply connected to radio: narration in its many forms, memory and memorisation, orality, writing, recording and support, knowledge and technology, power, resistance and archiving itself.

Evergreen Recipes

‍by Claudia Fromm

Our St. John's Wort oil and its properties

The medicinal plants in our garden have been blooming beautifully in recent weeks!

During the period between 20 and 24 June, between the summer solstice and the feast day of St John in Florence, we harvested the flowers and a few leaves of Hypericum perforatum and prepared St John's wort oil. This oil has a strong healing, anti-inflammatory, soothing and antiseptic action and is therefore perfect for sunburns, burns, wounds, skin inflammations and irritations such as erythema. It is also very useful for easing muscle contractures and joint pain. It is an excellent after-sun and anti-wrinkle.

The recipe for St. John's Wort oil requires only two ingredients: fresh St. John's Wort flowers and olive oil (can be replaced with sunflower or sweet almond oil). The flowering tops of the plant are picked by hand, making sure they are well dried. They are then placed in glass jars and completely covered with oil. These jars are left outdoors, in the sun, and shaken once a day to stir the contents. After a few days, the oil magically begins to turn red. After 40 days, the contents must be filtered, using a sieve and gauze, and can be bottled in smaller bottles. The resulting oil is ruby red in colour and has an intense aroma.

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