Continuing the institution's tradition over the past decades, this year's programme kicks off on 21 March 2025 with an exhibition introducing the latest winners of the Villa Romana Prize. In celebration of Villa Romana's 120th anniversary, the artists intertwine their voices with Plurifonica. A choral for the 120 years of Villa Romana, our 2025 programme, featuring performative and installation interventions. Visitors will be invited to delve into the research of this year's fellow, to start conversations with them and to return to our House for Mending, Troubling, and Repairing throughout the whole year. This will represent a first moment to further explore the intersection of the work and research developed at Villa Romana and the Florentine art scene.
Sajan Vazhakaparambil Kolavan Kalyanikutty Mani is an artist whose practice interrogates the intersections of performance, archives, and Dalit consciousness. A central theme in his work is the reverberation of ancestral voices, critically engaging with the weight of colonial history and its contemporary manifestations. He configures installations, videos, drawings, and performances as sites of imaginary dialogue, activating counter-narratives to dominant historiographies. Mani's long-term project Wake Up Calls for My Ancestors functions as a critical artist-archivist intervention, addressing the appropriation and exhibition of subaltern subjects in colonial archives. By focusing on South Indian photographs housed in the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, he initiates an interdisciplinary discourse that challenges Eurocentric archiving practices, proposing a deliberative counter-movement against the presumed exactitude of colonial photography.
Museums in Germany, like the Ethnological Museum in Berlin and the State Library in Dresden, house collections with colonial ties, including photographs of marginalized Dalit and indigenous communities in Kerala, anthropological images with colonial biases, and documents in Malayalam. The language’s connection to Germany traces back to Hermann Gundert, who standardised Malayalam and published books in the late 19th century. His work, though colonial in nature, helped Dalits escape caste-based oppression.
Sajan Mani engages with these materials to restore the dignity of the subjects and reframe colonial narratives. He transposes these images onto raw rubber sheets, linking his work to his family’s history in rubber tapping. Rubber, a material tied to colonial exploitation, was once sacred to indigenous cultures in South America. For Mani, rubber evokes ancestral memory and reflects the complex history of extractive colonialism.
Unlearning Lessons from my Father (2018), made with the support of the Asia Art Archive, excavates the artist’s biography in relation to colonial history, botany, and material relations.
Elia Nurvista is an artist whose practice critically engages with food politics to examine power structures, social hierarchies, and economic inequalities. Through a diverse range of mediums—including workshops, study groups, publications, site-specific works, performances, video, and installations—she explores the social and political implications of food systems, addressing broader issues such as ecology, gender, class, and geopolitics.
In 2015, she co-founded Bakudapan, a food study group that operates on the principles of complementarity and solidarity. With Bakudapan she has conducted cross-referential research at the intersection of food, art, pedagogy, and activism. She is also part of Struggles for Sovereignty, a solidarity platform focused on land, water, farming, and food, working to build lasting alliances between grassroots movements in Indonesia and transnational networks advocating for the right to self-determination over essential resources.
Using the batik technique in The Route, the works explore the complex history of migration and displacement tied to palm oil and Dutch wax. Palm oil, native to West Africa, was 'discovered' by Europeans in the 15th century and transported via the transatlantic slave trade. It became a valuable resource, but Africans refused to cultivate it over cocoa, prompting European investors to establish plantations in Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula under Dutch colonial rule. Meanwhile, Dutch textile companies mass-produced Javanese batik in the mid-19th century, finding their largest markets along Africa's Atlantic coast.
Chaveli Sifre is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores healing traditions, the hierarchy of the senses, botany, and the belief systems that shape them. Through installations, sculptures, paintings, and participatory performances, she investigates the intersections of science, spirituality, ritual, and healing modalities, seeking to recover their long-lost connections. Her immersive and sensorial installations invite audiences to reconsider the hierarchy of the senses as a means of generating transformative tools for reimagining the world.
Mano de Dio features a glass hand filled with camphor, a wax-like resin used
in purification rituals across the world. Central to Latin American care traditions, found even in humble Vicks VapoRub, camphor sublimates when exposed to air, transforming from solid to gas. Through this material, Mano de Dio enacts both a cleansing ritual and a meditation on transformation. Mano de Dio was originally conceived for an exhibition in Naples, where devotion takes on exuberant, hybrid forms. To present it now in Florence is to displace and recontextualise it. In its new setting, the title Mano de Dio becomes a wink to the cult of Maradona, a figure both secular and sacred, canonised by the people. His infamous "Hand of God" goal in the 1986 World Cup transcended sport and entered the realm of myth. In Naples, Maradona is not merely remembered; he is venerated, his image found in shrines alongside Catholic saints. Saints are not born; they are made, sculpted by collective memory, desire, and projection. In this sense, Mano de Dio is not only a reference to divine intervention but to the social mechanisms that sanctify the mundane. It is a reliquary for belief itself, a suspended offering, forever in the act of sublimating.
Acqua Madre is an offering: a fountain that emits not only water but a delicate marine mist, released through an atomizer to create a breathable cloud. Visitors are invited to inhale. The scent becomes a shared memory made atmospheric. Sifre’s work investigates how understanding the hierarchy of the senses as an inherited system can become a world-transforming tool. As a migrant artist, she has been researching the olfactory composition of the ocean as a way of connecting and mending longing. Acqua Madre suggests that belief systems, like oceans, are fluid, porous, and charged with invisible currents. Here, scent acts as both trace and invocation: a material that disperses, lingers, and invites us to question the systems that birth our reality.
A constellation of oysters is affixed to the wall, silent mouths holding the scent of the sea. Boca Marina continues the artist’s exploration of olfaction as a site of memory, intimacy,
and transformation. The oysters, once filters of ocean water, now become vessels of atmosphere, holding not pearls, but the invisible trace of marine life. As the scent drifts, it evokes submerged geographies, coastal rituals, and the porous boundary between inside and outside.
Raul Walch is a visual artist whose practice is driven by political and ecological engagement. After studying Sculpture at Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee, he completed his studies in the class of Olafur Eliasson at UdK, Berlin, and was later a fellow at the Institut für Raumexperimente. His work often takes the form of sails, mobiles, kites, and flags, created through collaborative and performative processes.
Prato, in Tuscany, is one of Europe's leading textile centres, with a rich tradition of textile production dating back to the Middle Ages. The city hosts numerous textile companies that combine high-quality craftsmanship with innovative technologies. Its strong ties to international markets make it a key player in the global textile trade. Prato is also known for its multicultural population, particularly the significant Chinese community, which plays a vital role in the local textile sector. Many Chinese migrants have founded textile businesses, contributing significantly to the city's economy.
Local shops sell both homegrown textiles and international goods, catering to smaller brands and designers. The textiles selected by Raul Walch in Prato feature distinctive colors and patterns that transcend regional styles, reflecting the global nature of the textile industry. The reproduced motifs and fabrics sewn into large flags are attached to bamboo poles in the garden of the villa, arranged in groups and moving in the wind. The colours and motifs overlap, radiate in the daylight and merge into something new.
The share of renewable energies in electricity generation has risen to over 50% in 2024. The transformation of the energy sector in Germany is called Energiewende and is making progress, but is now facing major challenges. The political power shifts in Germany show a turnaround in climate protection and it is questionable whether the new government will continue to promote renewable energies and technologies. In addition, the largest opposition party denies climate change and spreads far-right conspiracy narratives.
Video work and soundscape provide insights into energy production and the industrial landscape in Germany, bringing together impressions from the largest sites of wind energy production and coal-fired power generation. The alienation of humans from their
environment and the dystopian prospects for the future are contrasted with a protest that would only have to be louder.
