Upcoming
20.12.2022
Villa Romana wishes you a festive season!
We are moving into a new phase, and look forward to welcoming you back in 2023 with news and in good spirits!
We are now taking time to reshuffle…The house will witness infrastructural changes, and close over New Year's; but not to hibernate, rather to gather energies, mend some of its cracks, repair, and trouble so that we can respond together to this shared and stirred-up world.
One among many transitions is the change of directorship. Elena Agudio has already taken up her role and is humbled to embrace and find new practices of co-habitation, sustainable togetherness, and critical reflection – together with long-standing team members Ala and Victor Cebotaru, Claudia Fromm, and many others that will be coming to inhabit the Villa and live around and in association with it. Over the last ten years, in her role as artistic co-director of SAVVY Contemporary, she has been concerned with co-crafting an institution with a multitude of voices, minds, and bodies, and of keeping it in a state of critical becoming. Together with colleagues, her work focused on convivial, hospital care-work and communing, on making a home for migrant and diasporic realities, conjuring alternative imaginaries and practices of habitation and co-existence with the more-than-human worlds. From Florence and moving outwards, she now proposes to enact Villa Romana as A HOUSE FOR MENDING, TROUBLING, AND REPAIRING – reckoning with the tremendous work of Angelika Stepken.
Villa Romana will become a home for crafting tools, tactics, and practices, which help us to face a time that asks for a radical and planetary repairing of an asymmetric world. In her role as director, Elena Agudio is committed to creating possibilities of coming together in a world that isolates us, of repair as re-pairing disrupted worlds and fragmented political positions. The house itself will be the starting point from which, concretely and locally, to think hospitability and belonging, domesticity and care, but also the connections between ruination and repair, ecology and its cosmologies beyond the limits of Western epistemology.
We are very much looking forward to welcoming you at Villa Romana again in the new year and to embrace the togetherness needed for making a home together in times that continue to be uneasy for many. We wish you all the best for these days of transition!
With this new year’s beginnings, we would like to express the deepest gratitude not only to all of you following us and our work, to the team, and the artists that since 1905 are driving force of the Villa, but also and especially to the Board of Villa Romana, which is investing so many energies to support the institution, honor its important history, and grow it further.
Thank you all!