Veranstaltungen

15.06.2023

Ibrahim Mahama

Lecture

We are delighted to invite you to join us at Villa Romana this Thursday, at 7pm, for the open keynote lecture The Quagrey Effect and The Precarious Gift by artist Ibrahim Mahama!! You are welcome to come to the lecture and later to dine with us, also thanks to the support of Black History Month Florence and their convivial participation.

The event is organized in the context of a 1-week workshop Beyond Wishful Thinking. Communitarian Living, Intentional communities, and Sustainable Togetherness: a laboratory of radical pedagogy, dedicated to learning while practicing models of commoning and ‘communing’ that aim to be ecologically sustainable and socially just. Based on theoretical/practical exercises during 1-week of cohabitation at Villa Romana, the workshop brings together students from the Master Programme in Spatial Strategies from Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin and students from the Kumasi College of Art, K.N.U.S.T. in Ghana, connecting the practices of two art schools.

On the one hand, the Kumasi College of Art K.N.U.S.T. has developed as an ‘Emancipatory Art Teaching Project’, which led to a series of multigenerational collectives and exhibitions that prioritised a dynamic, democratic approach, creating a web of affiliated projects and collectives throughout Ghana with the focus on developing a sustainable, critical and tenacious post-Western local art scene. On the other hand, the Master Programme in Spatial Strategies from Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin tackles the necessity to reconsider the concepts of “space” and “publicness” in a world that is drastically transforming under the effects of globalisation, and to expand the scope of artistic practices in the social context.

Brought together by Elena Agudio and Paz Guevara, and by the Villa Romana Fellow Samuel Baah Kortey, at Villa Romana both student communities and their respective experimental practices that rethink and reimagine collective agency and space are welcome to meet for a workshop that is conceived as a common space. By drawing upon scholarly and practice-based research, the workshop scrutinizes spatial strategies to conceive, design, and implement alternatives to the current systems and structures of overconsumption, to unlearn exploitation and exercise greater responsibility towards the ecological crisis and the urgent climate justice agenda of our time. It does so while addressing possibilities of unfolding autonomous learning communities, enabling those radical pedagogies that could get us better equipped to navigate and get out of the capitalistic ruins of our time: exercises based on “practices of dreaming together, enacting political therapies, storytelling (...), practicing intersectional solidarity, sharing our food and our stories, self-building social spaces, and analyzing the erased role of women and other marginalized subjects in social movement”, as Manish Jain and Alessandra Pomarico state in Pedagogy, Otherwise.

The central room of Villa Romana is for the occasion activated by Villa Romana Fellow Samuel Baah Kortey, who is not only participating in the workshop very actively but is also lecturing and helping the two communities to bridge their practices and reflect on pedagogy and emancipation.

Reach out to us if you are interested in knowing more about it. And come for the open lecture by Ibrahim Mahama!

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