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 local context / people ? What remains when you leave the place?
I remember that I was talking of the Villa Romana as a „battery“ when I’ve sent my application letter to the former board 15 years ago. A battery should be loaded up with each person / artist coming in and it should spread energy (and content) permanently inside and outside its walls. When we designed the first graphic „identity“ for the Villa with atelier september in 2007 it was conceived as a kind of light frame, that should embrace all contents temporarily brought in by artists and researchers. Until we could not resign anymore from Instagram presence in 2018 we never published any image of the inner spaces of the Villa or the social life inside the institution (apart from Open Studio photos). I am more than happy that the Villa never became a kind of hostel, where masses of people come in anonymously and leave again without traces. Instead we created a huge open community including many artists and guests whether they stayed here as fellows for ten months, as guests artists for two or three months, as artists participating in exhibitions, lectures and symposia or just as a visitor for a few hours or days. Villa for me was and is a place of respect, friendship and sharing – a basic fundament on which we all moved. What are your thoughts and experiences about artists space and institution in present and future?
Zukunft, that is future in German, appears written in many leaflets and walls of Berlin, as a
recurring dimension of the cultural discourse.. A dimension that is key to imagine art institutions
beyond western canons and politics of consumption. I see an art institution as a breathing porous
ecosystem whose margins are permeable and allow a constant flux of exchange from the inside
towards the outside and vice versa. In a constant transformative process, always oriented
towards the future in order not to have a final shape but a shape of becoming, an art institution
offers support, an ear to listen and through empathetic practices and engagement creates the
premises of a space that feels protected and safe. In his essay “University without conditions”
Derrida envisions a university to come, exempt from dictations and servitudes, immune from the
extections of authority and contamination, self-standing, self-defined, self-governing,
self-responsible. Ideally I wish an art institution to be such a space, as many before me have
wondered. As many public sector art institutions are more and more often being privatised, and
the interest of the private sector to finance major art events is increasing, and this is something
that as art practitioners we need to hold clear in our self positioning and understanding of the
current state of the arts. When we run a space or we would want to find and fund one we are
more and more asked for a certain level of equipment in understanding the economic
circumstances and stakeholders we deal with, in order to keep our work and practice unbiased
from certain market logics that bind together money and artistic production. The concrete aspects
of artistic production are key in creating a safe and protected space of free expression for artistic
exchange and mutual support. In my opinion the notion of protection and safety for a temporary
community are very linked to the ways in which the institution works within the local context by
opening channels of communication that promotes not alienating and self referential patterned
behaviours within the temporary community it hosts. An art-institution merged and interconnected
within its surrounding built environment and social fabric is a safe space for imagining alternative
relational patterns in between the permanent and the temporary, a space that is hospitable
towards the outside yet protected inwards, in a dialectic tension that is a good reason to
constantly reshape its goals and forms. In a constant dialogue with the local and the global, as
Villa Romana has been for the last 14 years, it builds affiliation and alliances within the context
and outside of it, through means of consistency and cultivation, which not by chance require
genuine and motivated curation, through pauses, speeding ups, rests and distensions. As i could
experience over the last two months in Berlin, where i have been hosted in the space of ZKU –
Zentrum fur Kunst und Urbanistik, running a contemporary art institution while accepting and
facing the challenges of our time, (such as climate change, alienation, decolonization…) requires
a lot of dedication, knowledge, awareness and understanding and it hardly can be done without
following an agenda or a vision. ZKU has a very specific character determined by its location and
a very hybrid and multifunctional use of the space ensured by permanent infrastructures,
continuous programming, local and global cultural affiliations. Having signed a lease of 40 years
contract with the public sector ZKU is currently renewing and extending the community area of
the building that in its overall standing stands in the middle of a public garden. Aside from the
community area to be completed in one year, is a residency with overall 13 studios for artists,
activists and curators participating in the various programmes ZKU develops with the support of
national, regional and local institutions. In overall the whole conceptions of the space is carefully
designed and developed along various spaces of negotiation: a communal kitchen for all the
residents, a small hut self-built in the outside terrace area for the youngsters of the
neighborhood, an accordion folding open building for other local crews and even a community
garden. In general all threshold in between the inside and the outside of the building are an
occasion to responsibilize both the permanent and temporary community of the place. It is not a
case that ZKU is involved and mapped as a Campus for education within the independent
cultural scene of Berlin, as it promotes informal pedagogies and support projects in which
community and space become spaces of constant learning and new ecologies to come.In a
project of one of the colleague and collaborators of ZKU, entitled “BYE BYE UTOPIA” the
architectural collective, todays’ network, set and call for a different pace towards the future, not
merely Utopian but grounded in the now and in place. Even though there are so many examples
to follow and ideas, I wonder: can all this be possible outside of the privileged positions of the
mentioned institutions in the world map? What is the challenge we hold together?
Over the last ten years, with Radio Papesse, we have experienced Villa Romana, the house, the artists, the guests, the projects and the many lives that have passed through, fertilized and contaminated it. Practicing the community of Villa Romana, being exposed to its movements day after day, welcoming it and being welcomed into it, has been an emancipatory experience. It has given us the opportunity to take risks and to imagine, it oriented our gaze, welded our roots and showed us what a cultural institution can be and what forms the idea of hospitality can take. If I think of Villa Romana, I remember names and see faces: sharing, friendship and respect are to be found and grow where reciprocity is accepted, performed and participated, despite our differences, our multiple subjectivities, diverse geographies and temporalities.
What does it mean to shape an art institution? Who is giving the rules?
Among Angelika’s many questions, these are the ones on which, in my opinion, the imagination of possible future art institutions is played out. What if we talk of an ever changing community, inclined to rewrite its rules, boundaries and visions, as an institution? Can a community of people call itself an institution?
Community and institution. They might sound like contradictory terms: the social geometries of communities develop horizontally, the institutional one, vertically. It’s common sense… But an institution without a community is an empty bureaucratic gear, and a community without rules risks being blown up. Institutions transcend individual intentions, but it is equally true that it is people, and people together, who change institutions: while we see museums changing names and returning artifacts, while we get inspired by other living beings and forms of ecologies, the systemic gaps and glitches the pandemic has come with, highlight the erosion of the public, the weakness of labor rights, the solitude of the individual… and we forget that rules are not immutable but part of a cultural evolutionary process.
What does an institution learn from the people who pass through it?
The cultural institution I would like to see in our future is not one, but a multiple idea, the result of clashes, changes and contradictions: my wish is an institution that is open to learn from its community; rethinks itself from heterodox perspectives; embraces the common and supports new subjectivities; takes the shape of becoming – as Enrico is writing – by finding a balance between guidance and imagination.
LB
I cannot tell precisely when I went for the first time to Villa Romana, but it was certainly about 15 years ago, I suppose when Angelika started the direction of the Villa. I had never crossed its gate before, and I suppose that I did not know much about its existence before. Since then, Villa Romana has become one of the most significant places for me, where I grew as a person, as an artist, as an individual, always coming up with the same constant idea of an incredible, open, creative community gathering artists, citizens, researchers from everywhere and where I decide to return as often as possible.
BB+LB
The “battery” loaded up by Angelika and her team over these years turned Villa Romana into an uncanny, singular place within the art system, where the role, the functioning, the actual motivations of the institution itself are primarily and permanently questioned to adapt, to evolve, to take on responsibility, to learn anew from the people and the contexts and to respond to the actual social, political, ecological urgencies, with the aim to share new visions, new attitudes, new possibilities for the future.
Villa Romana hosts, Villa Romana takes care, Villa Romana creates a living, nurturing, mutual place in which artists, curators, researchers, among others, mostly concerned by art as a political means of expression, gather and interact to poetically challenge the paradigmatic, conventional, dominant way inherent to the neoliberal, consumeristic society. In these terms, Villa Romana represents an art institution, as perfectly said by Enrico Tomassini : “as a breathing porous ecosystem whose margins are permeable and allow a constant flux of exchange from the inside towards the outside and vice versa”.
Villa Romana is a community, in the exact sense expressed by Pietro Gaglianò in his book “La sintassi della libertà. Arte, pedagogia, anarchia” as a political, sentient form, distancing from the image of masses as anonymous collectivities, a definition that perfectly corresponds to Angelika’s aim for the Villa: to never become a site “where masses of people come in anonymously and leave again without traces”.
Villa Romana is a place dense of traces, of sounds, of notes, of words, of bodies, of tastes, of smells, of colours, of art, of organic life, of long-lasting relationships.
In our mind, today an (art) institution should clearly aim at the depowering of what makes the institution “institutional” in terms of a privileged system of knowledge, that, even indirectly, preserves a kind of semiotic hegemony, and thus, in order to break down the dominant narratives which are mostly constitutive of institutions. The term institutio in Latin, deriving from the verb instituere and formed by in- statuere, carries in its meaning the values of: to stay, to establish, to put in order, to order, to give rules, to educate, principles which easily reflect those “parameters of legibility” of modernity’s epistemic territory (Vázquez, Mignolo).
In such a disrupted, deeply pandemic, society, art institutions might attempt to concretely engage as living platforms for discussion, exchange, gathering the neighborhoods in a way to horizontally build new spaces for social, political and environmental communities, and resonate at large with other art institutions or rather art communities for plain art experiences. The whole art system – not art, nor artists – is more often an expression of the state of the art of capitalism itself. We do not need good conscience (marketing) operations, but gestures producing a radical change for the future. We can find great inspiration for new ways of living in many artistic experiences. As Daniel Baker writes, the Roma experience uniting life and artistic practice is a very interesting “example for rethinking strategies of existence” and “inter-connectedness”.
The social and political commitment of Villa Romana is a great opportunity to rethink our society. Scuola popolare, The Broken archive, the Mediterranean dialogues, music@Villa Romana, open studios are just some of the numerous projects of Villa Romana. No matter where they take place: in the premises of Villa Romana, outdoor in the garden, in Arci Galluzzo, or in Florence, on an online platform, through talks, conferences, workshops, emails’ exchanges or radio broadcasting, they create the substratum for a living, content and/or context-based community.
We have been in art residencies in Europe, Canada, China, Japan and every time, though very friendly moments were part of the program and some encounters are still long-lasting, we had the impression that at a certain stage a kind of power mechanisms emerged. Villa Romana is a place where the publics are not called to be entertained, or just to be proposed educational formats, or be visitors at all costs. The relationship with this institution is never anonymous and the sense of an open community is present and tangible. It is a welcoming and convivial place, not demanding, where good time is an essential part of life, where a spontaneous engagement towards a shared, common horizon is proposed and to which every artist, activist, researcher, art critic contributes individually or collectively.
Art can freely spread everywhere. An ideal institution would be a diffused place to support relevant projects for the community.
BB
I got to know Villa Romana because it was Leonora’s environment when in Italy. At Villa Romana freedom and well-being intensely combine with practice and sense. A garden is a great chance. A square, a cultural, recreational association, a library, a platform as well, when the purpose to be part of a community and to act for it is there.