What does it mean to shape an art institution ? Who is giving the rules? What do artists expect from a residency place? What does it mean to have a protected space for artistic exchange? Why do we need protection? Why is hospitality such an important attitude for (temporary) communities? How to relate to the …
An artists residency is a place where you live under one roof with colleagues whom maybe you would never have met under other circumstances. Learning from the other is a part of everydays’ life in such a place. Focussing on the own artistic work, the other main focus. I understood this as a first and …
Based since it’s beginnings in 1905 in Florence Villa Romana has always been confronted with the burden of a canonic, hierarchic and exclusive western art history and its capitalization. Florence sells itself as the Cradle of Renaissance and as a „Sehnsuchtsort“ (place of belonging) – and insists in an incredible provincial way of not changing …
In the fall of 2020, as the first exhibition after the lockdown, we took over the FUTUROMA exhibition curated by Daniel Baker, which was part of the supporting program of the Venice Biennale the year before. In an interview we made, you used a notion almost identical as the Grotowski Theater in Pontedera does: art …
When I arrived in Florence one of my very first purposes was to avoid Italian-German stereotypes and not walk on these exhausted paths. Freeing Italy from being the German lemon garden, I wanted to consider the other Italian neighborhoods – which is above all the water of the Mediterranean. At least since colonial politics the …
An artists’ residency could work as a closed working area, just giving time, space and (financial and ideal) support to the artists far away from their normal every day life. In Villa Romana we always tried to keep all doors open, to create a public space parallel to the individual studio appartments. The exhibition spaces, …
2015 was the year of the so-called European Migration crisis. Hundred of thousands people were fleeing the war in Syria and threatening life conditions in other parts of the world. We asked ourselves: shall we still invite guest artists from the Southern Mediterranean or are these artists already on their way? We were calling several …