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 its master narratives – although hundreds of international scholars in town are working on this. Florence is an incredibly rich place of archives (documents, objects, photography, drawings, sound recordings etc.) – some are well known, others neglected in public support and promotion. For artists as well as for critical art historians these immobile archives are treasures to work with – unmapping the violence of the Western Canon in other parts of the world, researching the never listened voices and relations in history. On the other hand: art which is not yet „dead“, i.e. less than 100 years old is not protected at all in Florence / Italy. All main important archives of the past 50 years, as for example the video archives of art tapes 22 (first video art studio in Florence in the 70ies) or few months ago the Superstudio archive left Florence, the first to Venice Biennal, the latter to MAXXI Museum in Rome. For local artists it is always repeated that the rich artistic heritage means a burden. I think the real burden is more how (local) politics commercializes the city, refuses all international and professional dialogue and doesn’t appreciate nor support or collect contemporary artists. Could we talk about this bias?
A place of longing that disappears
I was at Villa Romana on the artist residency as a guest artist in September and October 2020. In April 2021 I had the exhibition of the project developed there.
Even though this history has passed, it does not fade. It is hard for me to describe how I feel about this place, to talk about Villa Romana. The time I spent there and the relationship with Angelika Stepken – your support, understanding, critical dialogues and discursive collaboration was a very emotional thing for me. It feels like I am telling and publishing a very private story. The matter is a bit complicated because I wanted to hide in the villa after a period of mourning by my deceased foster father, and I experienced a period that shaped me personally, but also professionally, for a long time to come. I had high expectations of Florence, the art city with so much past and contemporary art. Today I consider Florence as the „sleeping beauty“. In this case, I consider the term contemporary in a very reduced way. It may be that the pandemic has greatly influenced this situation. Personally, I hardly had the opportunity to see contemporary art exhibitions, as there were hardly any in those times.
Future alliance?
Together with Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, I was the first Roma member to receive this artist residency in cooperation with ERIAC Berlin. I felt like an exception. However, right after my arrival, to my surprise, Daniel Baker opened his exhibition „Futuroma“ with female artists, all of whom I knew. I knew the theme, old content, it was a place suddenly politically familiar to me. A perfect basis for my work.
I find this implementation of wanting to include us Roma artists in this place very important, valuable and long overdue from the restitution aspect. Roma discourses in the European context are not taken seriously until today. We have remained invisible. Apart from a few more or less successful attempts to build an institution for us, we still have few alliances that we can rely on, that we can cooperate with. Since 2020, the Villa has become a necessary alliance for us. Every year, two artists participate in the guest residency. The program includes several talks, presentations and exhibitions with local and international guests. I always felt our talks were very intense and critical, we shared experiences, strategies and visions. I felt heard. Intense working conversations with Angelika, Agnes and Davood led to new ideas and visions. I was free to create dialogues and to speak, which is not a matter of course everywhere. Villa Romana gave me the opportunity to create a solo show in the garden pavilion 2021. Together with Elena Agudio, Angelika Stepken and Jonas Tinius we opened a discussion in the garden next to the exhibition. We addressed the notion of „safe space“, and conceptually created new spaces that need to be redefined so that we, oppressed, marginalized people, like the Roma, have a place of refuge. A healing place, a place of negotiation and safety.
If these efforts are to remain sustainable, it will take a lot of intense and ongoing collaboration and security.
A house without a foundation
The fact that Angelika will no longer run the villa is such a strange feeling to me, as if my place of longing no longer had a firm foundation. As if someone would try to plant something foreign in our minds, erase and obliterate something so deeply experienced. To change something violently without asking us, negotiating with us and having us approve. As if this place were a package without content. Who dares to replace something like that? A place of experience disappears and becomes a foreign place. Because, no house can carry its own statics without a firm foundation. If you replace it so disrespectfully and arbitrarily, it may soon collapse. I feel sorrow.
And where do we belong then?
GAGAPALIZZI Museum
LOCATION – Florence, Italy
CLIENT – The City of Florence
YEAR – 2021
STATUS – Competition
PROGRAM – Museum / Gallery
PARTNER – Esper Postma
COLLABORATORS – Villa Romana
Visitors to Florence can be overwhelmed by the tremendous number of museums and archives in the city. The fragmentation of its collections makes it difficult to an audience to understand the connections between them, as well as the historical context in which all this wealth was created. The new Florence History Museum was initiated by the city to create the oversight that is lacking. During our numerous site visits in preparation for a design of the Museum, we became convinced that making the museum should not be a matter of creating an entirely new building on the assigned location. Instead, we propose to employ architecture to make the relations between existing museum collections more explicit. The GAGAPALIZZI is a new institution that integrates three existing museums that are at close proximity: the Galilei Galileo Museum, Palazzo Vecchio, and the Uffizi. It does this through an elongated glass building that zigzags between – and cuts straight through – the existing museum buildings.
In recent decades, Florentine institutions are under mounting pressure to tell stories outside of the historical canon. An often-heard critique is that the institutions are lacking critical reflection on the history of the city. As Angelika Stepken, director of Villa Romana, recently put it: „Florence sells itself as the Cradle of the Renaissance and as a „Sehnsuchtsort“ (place of belonging) – and insists in an incredibly provincial way of not changing its master narratives (…)“ The GAGAPALIZZI responds to this critique by telling a more comprehensive biography of the city.
At the center of the museum is the Uffizi, housing one of the most important collections of Renaissance painting in the world. The major achievement of Renaissance painting is that it became more natural. It imitated nature to such an extent that a painting functioned as „a window into the world“. The premise of the GAGAPALIZZI is to show how this achievement stood in relation to all other cultural and political developments of the time. It does this by creating direct pathways between specific rooms in the Uffizi and rooms in the Galileo museum and Palazzo Vecchio. For instance, the institution makes explicit the relationship between developments in Renaissance painting and the mapping and conquering of space. A direct pathway between the Uffizi’s Botticelli room and the Hall of Maps in Palazzo Vecchio shows that with painting’s ability to represent space, it also became possible to represent it in the form of accurate geographical maps, which aided Florence in its wars at sea. Another connection is drawn between painting and astronomy. To this end, a direct path leads between the Caravaggio room in the Uffizi and the room with the first telescopes by Galileo. At a young age, Galileo’s ambition was to become a painter. As the art historian Horst Bredekamp has tentatively shown, Galileo’s studies into the rendering of shadows and shades, aided him in devising the first telescope.
The architecture of the GAGAPALIZZI is not only a means of drawing critical connections between collections. It is also a way of putting the museums themselves on display. The glass architecture will cut straight through the existing museum buildings. The buildings will thus be exposed as a vivisection behind glass. The audience is presented with a view of different floors at the same time, including the museum offices and the museum storage. This provides a new transparency to the museum: to its architecture, as well as to its current policy of conservation and display.
The GAGAPALIZZI provides ample new exhibition space between the three museum buildings. This space is used for exhibitions on Florence‘ post Renaissance history. We propose to shed light on historical episodes that are underrepresented in Italian museums, such as its colonial age. Archives from institutes such as the Istituto Geografico Militare and the Istituto Agrario, both based in Florence, can shed light on the way that the city was implicated in the colonisation of African territories.
The GAGAPALIZZI provides an unconventional solution to the demand for a Florence History Museum. It provides insight into the history of the city by reframing existing museum collections, rather than creating a new collection. The benefits of this solution are threefold. Firstly, the GAGAPALAZZI facilitates an expanded interpretation of the achievements of the Renaissance. The institution does justice to the cross disciplinary nature of the Renaissance, by showing how all developments were influencing each other. Secondly, the museum will expand the scope of the museums in Florence beyond the Renaissance. It will show the history of the city in a critical light, while also reflecting on the policy of its institutions. The GAGAPALAZZI will ultimately be an innovative institution that brings Florence into the 21st century. Lastly, by making GAGAPALAZZI, there is no need for an entirely new institution, with all the costs for personnel that comes with it. Instead, the city may choose to merge the staff of the Uffizzi, the Museo Galileo and the Palazzo Vecchio into one team, thus bringing a welcome relief to the city’s finances.
Florence has prepared me well.
After 2011, I spent several years working as an art historian in Florence. Starting from my own interest in arts of the Islamicate world and its relation to modern institutions, museums and collections, I was leading a research group about „Objects in the Contact Zone – The Cross-Cultural Lives of Things“ at the German Kunsthistorisches Institut. „The Kunst“, as it is often referred to, is one of those institutions which were literally created because of the historical, Eurocentric canon, and now they have to live, exist and thrive in a world which defies the historical and geographical confidence that has always come along with canonical thinking. While working at the Kunst, I encountered some of the most open-minded art historians, there was in many important ways a very productive awareness of this contradiction – in fact, my research group would never have existed without this awareness. But there were also still those moments when I needed to explain, maybe even more in the larger world of art history than in the institute itself, why the fellows in my group did not work on ‚canonical‘ topics. Explain that our questions were rarely attached to big names or central places of a common history of art. When we realized, for instance, to what extent the impressive library that surrounded us had been collected with canonical criteria in mind, and when our new acquisitions, systematically including cross-cultural perspectives, were questioned. Never by the librarians by the way, but sometimes by colleagues. There were those conversations which were always hardwired with the silent agreement that I of course have to have my basic Brunellesci right and I have to know my way through the Uffizi, but it remains optional for the core business of canonical art historians to know who the Umayyads or the Qajars were. When my group members were not considered real representatives of the great art historical discipline. When we were not invited to certain things, or over-invited to others. Somehow, our existence was always a precarious one, contingent upon a certain relation to the canon: And how does that relate to Florence? was a question we often heard, implicitly or verbatim, and sometimes it felt more like: Why are you allowed to be here? Weren’t we taking up space that should have been there for someone working on the ‚real‘ questions, the ones that are self-suggesting in a place like Florence? At Villa Romana, this was not a relevant question. I first went up there after Walter Grasskamp had visited me in Florence, and strongly suggested I should get in touch with Angelika. Mariechen Danz‘ exhibition was on show at the Villa at the time, and we very quickly came up with common questions. We came from rather different angles, the three of us, but we shared some observations, standing obliquely to the canon as it were. Based on this, we organized a symposium which brought together artists and scholars in order to, as we called it, „unmap the Renaissance“. The book which resulted from this event begins with the observation that „The city of Florence is regarded as the birthplace of the Renaissance. The fact that the economic and commercial power structures that developed during this time also brought about the colonization of non-European worlds through linguistic and semiotic hegemony, among other things, is to this day rarely incorporated into the traditional Forentine narrative.“ There you have it: If the canon is a hegemonic sign system, then it makes perfect sense to first understand and then question it in its most central places. It is an experience which strangely resonates in other places too. While working on this contribution for Angelika’s „Common Conversation“, I went to visit the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, finally opened after many years of discussion – a discussion which indeed had been integral part of the projects I conducted in cooperation with Angelika at Villa Romana. As I walked through this Widergänger of history, really a travesty of the idea of rebirth, I realized what happens if the canonical order becomes literally reduced to a shell: the reconstructed Stadtschloss claims to embrace a diverse range of „ethnological collections“. If history itself would not clearly give us reasons to challenge this claim, the juxtaposition of these objects and the shere scale and measure of the canonical building alone would reveal the inherent dilemma. This experience in the end confirms the relevance of a place like Florence. A city like that can, indeed, teach you how to look: There is, after all, nothing wrong with being drawn to the the canon, to its beauty, its persistence and to understand the way it has shaped worlds. And at the same time to recognize its stubborness and epistemic violence, and to look for those things that have been outside or submerged by the canon, but which shape worlds just as well. It takes courage to see both things, and it makes our reactions to art more complicated. Being aware of this complication, I would claim, constitutes a genuinely modern and contemporary experience, if we understand modernity as a multiple, globally diverse phenomenon. Ultimately, both the ‚Kunst‘ and the Villa Romana have opened up these perspectives while I was working with them. And that’s how I had become a modernist by the time I left Florence. If my job as an art historian is to recognize and to work with these complications, Florence has prepared me well.