Upcoming
21.06.2024
ECLITTICA
EXERCISES OF COSMIC ATTUNEMENT AND TRANSITIONS
21 June 2024, Villa Romana, Firenze
5:33 am/midnight
On 21 June, Villa Romana celebrates the summer solstice with a series of exercises and resonances: performances, vocal interventions, garden workshops, installations, listening sessions, and live music by the artists of the house on via Senese 68, together with invited guests. On the longest day of the year, we pause, observe, and try to re-attune to cosmic orders that are bigger than we are: The ecological devastation and the general crisis that we are experiencing right now in the world urge 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.
The Villa Romana Fellows, the garden residents, as well as guests such as Antonina Nowacka and nikoLFO with Laura Fong Prosper will then tune us all into a full programme open to the public on 21 June starting from 3:30pm onwards in our garden.
The project is realised in collaboration with OOH-sounds e Nub Project Space.
Programme
*5:33am – midnight: The whole day will be broadcasted live on Archipel Radio Community Stations by our Fellow Monaí de Paula Antunes. The livestream will start at 5:33am, when the sun rises and the many more-than-human beings of our garden start their daily concert of voices. The broadcast follows with the participation of the inhabitants of the house and later of people willing to participate in the programme and join the communty radio and the ones of the garden and the house.
* when the wind flows: Looking into the Sun, Saverio Cantoni‘s flags INVISIBLE COMMITTEE and CLIMATE RESISTANCE imagine political communities of a post-human future in Villa Romana’s garden.
*when the garden community gathers, between 3:30pm and 4:45pm: Seed swap at the Semenzaio / Orto Continuo by Leone Contini
*when the sun glows, between 4:45pm and 5:30pm: sunlight performance Ray by Gabriella Hirst and Yuni Chung (please bring your sunglasses to watch it and protect your eyes!). Before the official programme begins, on 20 June, Gabriella and Yuni together with other inhabitants of the house, walk to San Miniato in a kind of domestic preparation to assist in the light phenomenon of the solstice materialising on the floor of the Basilica since a millenium, to carry some of these reflections to Villa Romana for their performance.
*when younger voices resonate, between 5:30pm and 6pm: inauguration of the Body Garden by Gabriella Hirst and an exhibition with drawings by Lila, Joia, Edoardo, Jacopo.
*when the moon waxes, between 6-9pm: Villa Romana Fellow Rubén D’Hers activates a sound installation from the jasmine Gazebo entering in dialogue with a selection of music and field recordings from his archive. Villa Romana Fellow Sergio Zevallos will follow and respond with his own collection of sounds.
*when the sun sets, at 9pm: vocal performance by Antonina Nowacka, from her new album Sylphine Soporifera
*when the dark reigns, between 9:45-10pm: screening of Fermenting Chōri ~A Garden in Italy, a short film by Yuni (Hoa Yun) Chung
*when the stars shine, between 10-11pm: live quadraphonic performance by nikoLFO with live visuals by Laura Fong Prosper
*when celestial spheres and bodies synchronise, at 11pm: dj set
*when the attunement and the transitions become a continuum with the oneiric, at 12am: end of the event
Bios:
Villa Romana Fellows:
Monai de Paula Antunes an artistic researcher, transmission artist, and radio-maker based in Berlin; interested in Communication and Complexity together with their material, spatial and political entanglements. Her work engages with the rich materialities and multiple cultural traditions of radio, drawing attention through them to peripheral manifestations of cybernetics and ecology. Presenting itself as infrastructural, her practice decentralises and connects by producing participatory artworks but also through the reforming and interweaving of things as an art form. Part of Radio Otherwise, she is also the director and founder of Archipel Stations Community Radio, and founder and board member of Archipel e.V and FR-BB e.V., among other NGOs engaged with art, education, communication, philosophy, and ecology. She is Villa Romana Fellow 2024.
Rubén D’Hèrs is a Venezuelan artist based in Berlin. Moving across music, sound installation, and painting he examines stationary sounds from the domestic environment, both trying to unveil their potential as found musical material and investigating how they can appeal to our involuntary auditory imagery. He holds an MFA in Sound Studies from the Berlin University of Arts, a BFA in Media Art & Design from the Bauhaus University Weimar, and in Painting from the Cristóbal Rojas Technical School of Visual Arts in Venezuela.
Sergio Zevallos is a multidisciplinary artist who researches on issues of transcultural identity, gender and the relationship between the individual and power. A basic concept for his work is the hybrid, both in the organic and sexual sense, as well as in the theoretical and conceptual. She configures his performative works, installations, photographs, drawings and sound compositions by collecting images and texts of public circulation, press, popular magazines, television programs, educational manuals and religious images, which she then recontextualizes and reinterprets. Zevallos was co-founder of Grupo Chaclacayo, a collective of the 1980s that dealt with the intersection of religion, gender and armed conflicts. she lives and works between South America and Europe and has participated in the 31st Sao Paulo Biennial in 2014 and documenta14 in 2017.
Garden residents:
Gabriella Hirst is an artist and writer. She was born and grew up on Cammeraygal land and is currently living in Berlin. She works primarily with moving image, sculpture, performance, and with the garden as a site of critique and care. Gabriella’s practice explores the politics of capture. She is interested in how art and archival structures attempt to keep dynamic places, objects, people and stories in a state of stasis. She is inspired by eco-feminism, plant stories, cinema history, and science fiction.
Saverio Cantoni (pronouns they/them) is a white-passing cyborg, disabled – oral Deaf – artist based in Berlin. Situating their practice in the sonic space, Saverio is working through the lenses of crip theory, queer theory, and disobedient archives, with the aim to destabilize existing power structures and to rethink the normative understanding of sensorial experiences. Saverio is actively participating in the Sickness Affinity Group (SAG), a group of art workers and activists who work on the topic of sickness/disability and/or are affected by sickness/disability.
Yuni (Hoa Yun) Chung is a Berlin-based artist working with text, performance, object, drawing, video, and sound. In her practice, she uses metaphors to create spaces where multiple media and different social contexts interweave, revealing structural violence without replicating it. Her spaces evolve and connect, understanding the creative process as mapping, walking, and performing. She studied visual art at the Korean National University of Arts and received an M.A. in Raumstrategien from Kunsthochschule Weißensee. Since 2022, she has co- founded Chōri (調理/조리) Collective, exploring how our bodies harmonize as part of food with our own flavors and open the possibility of fermenting colonial structures.
Garden friend:
Leone Contini studied Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Siena. His research unrolls at the intersection of botany, aesthetics and politics and his mediums include lecture-performances, collective interventions in public spaces, textual and visual narratives, drawings. He has held exhibitions and displayed works at: Thorvaldsen Museum, Copenhagen; Madre, Naples; Pearl Art Museum, Shanghai; Kunstverein Solothurn; SAVVY, Berlin; HKW, Berlin; PAV, Turin; IAC, Lyon; Manifesta 12, Palermo; Fondazione Sandretto, Turin; Quadriennale, Rome; Pistioletto Foundation, Biella; Mart, Rovereto; Delfina Foundation, London; Kunstraum, Munich; Khoj, New Delhi; Galleria Civica, Trento; Kunstverein Amsterdam; Museo Pecci, Prato; Villa Romana, Florence. In 2018-2019 he was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. In 2017 and in 2023 is among the winners of Italian Council award. In 2017 he collaborated with "TRACES - Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts".
Guests:
Antonina Nowacka is a renowned vocalist, sound artist and composer. Through years of study and experimentation, she has developed a unique, deeply soothing and hypnotic theremin-like voice. Her compositions create minimalist soundscapes inspired by nature, space and dreams. She graduated from the Faculty of Media Art at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and studied at Mirosław Bałka's studio of Spatial Activities. A fellow of the Indonesian Ministry of Culture, she studied musicology at ISI Yogyakarta and the Hindustani classical vocal tradition under Shashwati Mandal. Antonina has given concerts all over the world, in such prestigious venues as the Lincoln Centre in New York, the Barbican Centre and Cafe OTO in London, the Silent Green in Berlin, the Centro National de las Artes in Mexico City, and the National Museum in Warsaw. She has collaborated with artists such as Agnieszka Polska, Nicolas Jaar and Sofie Birch.
Her latest album, Sylphine Soporifera, is inspired by the landscapes of Paracas and the Outer Hebrides, and is based on Rudolf Steiner's writings on Sylphs, spirits of the air, and the Latin term sopor, meaning deep sleep. Nowacka's otherworldly voice emerges as if from beyond a veil, creating a fascinating and alien atmosphere. Her music evokes open environments and infinite landscapes, using instruments such as Budrio ocarinas, Mexican whistles, Nepalese bamboo flutes, and Hawaiian synthetic sounds. Sylphine Soporifera brings these influences together in an album imbued with a sense of hope and contentment, offering a unique and immersive sonic experience.
nikoLFO: based in Berlin for over a decade, Niko de Paula Lefort works as a musician and sound artist. His vibrational practice covers the fields of art installation, experimental music, instrument building, field recording, radio transmission, concert curation and knowledge sharing. Also known as NikoLFO, he is a resident host on Archipel Stations Community Radio and a co-founder of Portals Editions and Archipel Editions. De Paula Lefortʼs work has appeared in commissions for major museums and festivals as much as in DIY settings, most noticeably at Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim Bilbao, Kunsthaus Göttingen, CTM, Bozar, Berghain and HeK Basel, in various constellations, solo or in collaborations with internationally renowned artists. Aurality is a vibratory research that promotes diversity and inclusion of knowledge making and musical models, perceiving sound in its vibrational structures formed by the interaction with the environment and with others in relation. It relies on the critical concepts of Sounding Situated Knowledges and Acoustemology. As a vibrational practice, it reflects this ecological stance through the inclusion of biophony, geophony and anthrophony in relation to, within the listening experience and its psychoacoustics phenomena, a composition-performance process that draws on oral traditions as models for complex interdependent systems of memory-deep spacetime relationality, and their modern mutations. Since the beginning of the project, Lefort has been regularly joined by video artist and long-time collaborator Laura Fong Prosper, particularly in joint live performances, during which their two singular universes inform each other on a deeper level, in vibratory matter and astral dances.For Eclittica, they will present an extended version of aurality, in quadraphony, with live visuals and with vocal and instrumental interventions from Lefort's latest effort in the path of aurality: Chaosmos / Saumes Pagans.
Laura Fong Prosper is a visual artist from Panama based in Berlin. Her work addresses themes such as the collective memory, retro-futurisms, ancestral imaginaries and eco- feminisms while interweaving video, analog film, new media and most recently textiles. In her process-oriented practice, she creates a dialogue between the body, the territory, history and decolonial narratives while conducting a personal research as a recycler of materials, archives and electronic gear. Her work has been shown in Centre Pompidou, Paris, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Museum of Modern Art Rio de Janeiro, Museum of the Americas Washington DC, San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX, Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin amongst many others.
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