Monthly Dispatch
from VILLA ROMANA - January 2023
Day after day, this first month of 2023 at Villa Romana unfolded silently, meaningfully. In dormancy phase, like seeds and plants active in the soil albeit still underground, in this transition and winter time, the institution is undergoing major infrastructural reflections - pondering the political importance of maintenance and the possibilities of transformation activated by processes of cultivation, pausing, and regeneration.
After the break before New Year’s Eve and the first days of January, the new director moved from Berlin to Florence. She didn’t arrive alone, but with her two children, who now started school here in Italy and moved to the Villa. The house has been filled with new energies, and new constellations have been created: Yannis and Marie, the two cats of Villa Romana, have found new favourite companions in the kids, Edo and Jaki. Ala, Victor, and Claudia, together with Ilaria and Carola from Radio Papesse, engaged intensely with the new trio and embraced the new spirits animating the house. The garden and the plants experienced new eyes, hands, and molecules moving around and caring for them. Some collaborators are gone (thanks and greetings to Luca and Davood), and we are preparing the ground for someone new to come.
Despite the arrival of very cold days, much warmth has been in the air. Artist Monai de Paula Antunes brought emotions and ideas, when she came to stay at the Villa during the second week of January to start the process of imagining a pilot programme driven by children’s agency and animated by anti-racist and anti-patriarchal values. In dialogue with the garden, with brilliant people active in Florence and with the inhabitants of Villa Romana, communal lunch after communal lunch, she provoked and instilled collective reflections about the urgency of transformational politics to be enacted by and with children, whose political imagination is not yet fully “formed” by normativity and capitalist values… and who might be daring to “experiment, invent, risk and try to work out new forms of organisation, new modus of struggle, new vision and concepts” - to use Walter Rodney’s words. For the future of our children to be liveable, we need rigorous transformations. And they can and should participate in them fully.
After Monai, Villa Romana has been hosting artist and scholar Marleen Boschen for a few days, who has been spending time observing, talking, and interacting with the garden and the people who have been caring and experiencing it for years, Victor and Claudia in particular. After a long-term immersion in “agropoetic” practices through a research, publication, and exhibition project she ran together with Elena Agudio through SAVVY Contemporary from 2019-2020, she came to Florence to attune to the rhythms of more-than-human collaborations, to the ecosystem of Villa Romana, and to engage with its soil, seeds, and organisms. And to plan collaborative planting sessions soon.
The month of February is about to start, and Black History Month Florence (BHMF) is preparing its numerous events and projects: Since the last week of January and throughout the month of February, to continue the close dialogue with BHMF and to make it structural, Villa Romana is hosting artist Jermay Michael Gabriel as guest resident, and plans active collaborations with the programme of this year’s BHMF. The intention is to weave together narratives and infrastructures to support community-engaged agendas, sustainable futures and visions.
We are cooking a lot at the moment, and we look forward to keeping you informed about the organic developments, changes, and movements that Villa Romana will be witnessing and experiencing over the coming months: Beginning with this newsletter, we are going to share monthly dispatches from Florence and together with our social media platforms, we invite you to have closer insight into the life unfolding in and around the house.
Stay tuned and participate in the process of homemaking.
Elena Agudio and the team of Villa Romana
