Veranstaltungen
31 July - 5 August 2023
takeover
(for and by children)
Between July and August, Villa Romana was taken over by a program designed, developed, and exhibited with, by, and for children, inhabiting the interface between art and education, while also participating firmly in contemporary art practices and discourses. Much has been happening at several scales in efforts to decentralise in order to decolonise artistic practices, bringing important political issues to discussion and pressuring necessary world changes. Inasmuch breakthroughs have been happening by shaking curatorial hierarchies, renouncing the dominance of object orientation and hearing and honouring non-hegemonic voices -, there is an eminent necessity to reintegrate joy and experience in the alternative worldings we are all engaged in through the arts. Children’s universes across cultures are permeated by primarily sensorial environmental experience. They practiced daily a dialogical non-anthropocentric forming of matter that truly engages with the relationality of objects, as discussed in decolonial aesthetics and new materialisms. Children’s timeless play of creation and destruction and re-creation is an endless folding and unfolding of worlds - a generative purposelessness, a bodily trust, constant movement, sensuality and material-discursivity this project wishes to embrace and potentialise.
Archipel e.V. invited children for a week-long participatory process of taking over Villa Romana, distributing contributions and collaborations in modules that flow into each other. The immersive collaboration with the children will be as much about the process of decision making and organising with the children as it will be about artistic experimentation. Therefore, this project is also a laboratory for dynamic conviviality and public domesticity. We expect chaos to be an element to navigate with, incorporating it into the process and highlighting its potency through the children’s reality, also in contrast to the usual inhabitation of Villa Romana. The main guideline is to work with an elemental and playful world experience and therefore plan on engaging with different qualities of earthly materials, sand, compost, rocks, allowing the momentary and also building micro-worlds in order to do micro-politics.
The Rediscovery Planet supported artists and children with pedagogical anti-discriminatory resources, practicing intersectionality through playfulness in narrative, movement and diverse forms of communication. By developing new models together, we might be able to tackle issues of value, noticeability, inclusion, restitution, memory and acknowledgment in gentle and sensitive ways. Dudù Kouate is a special guest conducting the formation of an environmental percussion ensemble with the children using improvisation and storytelling strategies to play with the landscape, while also building with found materials instruments that echoe the land.
On Thursday 3 August, at 6pm, Villa Romana hosted a matinné concert by Dudù Kouate and Niko de Paula Lefort, and on Saturday 5 August, from 4pm, it opened doors showing the work developed by the children during takeover, including performances and a volcanic party.
Archipel e.V.: Monai de Paula Antunes, Silvia Noronha, Niko de Paula Lefort, Florian Bendsen, with Dudù Kouate
The Rediscovery Planet: Marzia Duarte & Ilaria Cavallini
The project is realised with the contribution of the Fondazione CR Firenze.
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