25.06.2021—26.06.2021

Proximities

Archaeology, Architecture, Art, Concert, Event, Residencies, Talk, Workshop, Roma

Registration required
Entrance via Ludovisi 48

Dates
25.06.2021
26.06.2021
Location
Roma
Category
Archaeology, Architecture, Art, Concert, Event, Residencies, Talk, Workshop
Information

Registration required
Entrance via Ludovisi 48

Final event of the Roma Calling 2020/2021 Fellows

25.06.2021 H16:00-22:00
26.06.2021 H11:00-24:00

Proximities explores the adjacencies and distances experimented by the Roma Calling 2020/2021 fellows during their time at Istituto Svizzero.

Inspired by the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway and her reflections on how to nurture intimacy without being in proximity, the event considers the ever-shifting tension between these two terms. A similar tidal relationship characterizes the fellows’ relational entanglements, as they transformed from a group of strangers into a closely-knit community, connected to the surrounding city while living in the blissful retreat of Villa Maraini, and delved into the depths of their respective research areas while being at times at a chronological, physical, or epistemic distance from them.

Proximities invites visitors to experience the intimacies of Istituto Svizzero through an ephemeral soundscape communally developed by the fellows, a choral experiment of sonic bits traveling across Villa Maraini and blending, through a fluctuating compositional logic, into new forms of sense-making. The collaborative endeavor extends to audience members, who are invited to compose a tailor-made book from a spectrum of fragments—images, poems, reflections—offered by the fellows. Concurrently, each resident has conceived a time-based, experiential project for presentation during the event to bring visitors closer to their research and creative practices. 

Proximities is curated by Ilaria Conti.

Roma Calling 2020/2021 Fellows

Camille Aleña
Roxane Bovet & Yoan Mudry
Patrick Düblin
Mathias Howald
Aurora Panzica
PRICE (Mathias Ringgenberg)
Alessandra Rolle
Giulia Scotto
Victor Strazzeri
Geraldine Tedder
Hayahisa Tomiyasu
Ginny Wheeler

Read the biographies of Roma Calling 2020/2021 Fellows here.

 


 

PROGRAMME

Register here to visit the permanent installations on Friday 25.06.2021

Register here to visit the permanent installations on Saturday 26.06.2021

To book individual events, click on the corresponding links. Reservations for individual events include the entrance to the permanent installations.

Food and beverages will be available for purchase according to current health regulations.

For security reasons, each participant must provide personal details for the online bookings on Eventbrite. Multiple registrations with the same name are prohibited. 


 

PERMANENT INSTALLATIONS

A collaborative soundscape developed by the Roma Calling 2020/2021 Fellows
Composition by PRICE in collaboration with Renato Grieco
Sound engineering by Renato Grieco

‘Proximities’
A to-be-tailor-made choral book of contributions by the Roma Calling 2020/2021 Fellows

Camille Aleña
Rushes
2021
Single-channel video

Between September 2020 and June 2021, Camille Aleña met eight different Romans. Some from Rome, some from other places. Following them in their daily lives, this work represents all the rushes collected without any editing.

Roxane Bovet & Yoan Mudry
Vogliamo tutto
2021
Installation

With different tools and methods, we have in common the practice of collage, association, and hybridisation—considering the ability to create links between different domains of thought, disciplines and types of knowledges as essential for the individuation, emancipation, and empowerment of anyone living in our complex contemporary societies. “Vogliamo Tutto” is an installation that stems from the writing of a film script interrogating the myths that our contemporary neoliberal societies try to pass off as natural: the idea of competition as the only driving force for evolution; the blind faith in progress and perpetual improvement; but also the idea of social roles, reputation, representation and the network practice linked to it.

Patrick Düblin
Mapping Experience – Performing Archive
In collaboration with Stalker
Installation / Map activations: Friday, June 25 from 5:30 to 7:30pm and Saturday, June 26 from 3pm to 8pm
In English and Italian

Five years after creating the Stalker Archive at Istituto Svizzero, this intervention brings it back to Villa Maraini. A rich collection of maps gets to be unpacked, unfolded, laid out, hung, compared, discussed, photographed, and eventually repacked. A video installation provides an additional view of the group’s practice, while Amacario, an 80-meter-long system of hammocks, invites visitors to transform a space actively with their bodies. By engaging with the archive in a performative way, the intervention revalues the 30-year history of the Roman research and art laboratory Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade, while questioning the possibility of representing ephemeral events. 

PRICE
Mantras for A Club (sequences)
2021
Video performance

The video performance is part of the processual series Mantras for a Club (sequences) (2019-ongoing) and documents the public outcomes of the research developed with various collaborators. Iterating in different spaces, PRICE creates sonic and spatial scenarios in which individuals explore their state of exposure, offering a testing ground for flatness, artificiality, and affect. Using physical repetition as an invocation of forms of theatricality, PRICE manipulates forms of intimacy to offer an imaginary journey and a reflection on collectivity, interiority, and inter-subjectivity.

Giulia Scotto
From Metanopoli to Africa
Installation / Drop-in gaming sessions led by Giulia: Saturday, June 26 from 5pm to 7pm
In English and Italian

“A truly interesting game should satisfy two essential requirements: you should have fun playing it, while learning”. These are the opening remarks of the Metanopoli rulebook, a board game developed in the 1950s by ENI, Italy’s National Hydrocarbons Authority. The installation moves on from this principle to show, using archival and contemporary photographs, how the ENI project materialised and expanded itself across the Padane Plain and the African continent. Moreover, a reproduction of the game will allow audience members to “learn by playing” how to develop the best strategies to build an oil empire.

Geraldine Tedder
Daisies Cloud Passing
Screening

A screening of films by various filmmakers portrays fleeting everyday moments of intensity, familiarity, and estrangement. In poetic, abstract images, the films tell both a general story about how, when our perception of time and space is altered, so does our sense of self, and a personal one about the experience of being in a residency during a pandemic. Connected to the screening is the text Comfort, which is part of the collaborative book project Proximities and its second iteration Comfort too, which can be heard in the soundscape presented across Villa Maraini.

Hayahisa Tomiyasu
10” Zurich / 10” Rome
2020-2021
Two-channel video

As Covid-19 slowly expanded outside of China, across Asia, and  into Europe last year, we constantly received the news about it  from news sources. The tense atmosphere at the time brought me into the feeling that we could not know what would happen in the next few seconds. From that moment on, when my eyes caught some numbers in a public space, I started automatically to count the number down. It happened to me once, and I couldn’t stop after that. So, I started collecting as many numbers as possible in the public space.

12:00, 2021Poster
Palo, 2020-2021, Poster

Ginny Wheeler
Two Millennia of Water and Otium around Villa Maraini
Map

Ginny’s research on late antique fountains and water displays and her curiosity about the urban fabric into which Villa Maraini was inserted at the beginning of the 20th century led her to create a didactic map to be distributed during the final event. Using the SITAR archaeological map of Rome and drawings by Istituto Svizzero’s fellow Yoan Mudry, the self-guided tour (3 km, c. 45 minutes walking time) ties together the great Roman horti that once dominated the Pincio with four sites where glimpses of the Aqua Virgo aqueduct remain visible today. 

EVENTS

FRIDAY 25.06.2021

Alessandra Rolle
Speak with your eyes, your hands, your mouth. A workshop on rhetoric
5pm – 6pm
Workshop
In English and Italian
Register here (SOLD OUT)

In a light and interactive manner, the workshop wishes to explore the two main exercises of rhetoric (controversy and suasoria) through which Greek and Roman citizens used to learn how to speak in public and plead their causes in court. Part of the workshop will be specifically devoted to the performative side of such exercises through an explanation of the actio, i.e. the gestures accompanying the speeches. Participants will split in groups and will be given a theme on which to build a brief (5 minutes ca.) argumentation to be later enunciated (and substantiated with ancient actio!) in front of an audience and of a jury that will select the most persuasive speech.

Mathias Howald
Garden Stories
Drop-in sessions from 5:30pm to 7:30pm
In English, French, and Italian
With the participation of Chiara Bertini and Arianna Ninchi
Register here

Come and meet us under the trees
Where we are gathering garden stories.
Anecdotes of childhood,
Drama in the vegetable plot,
Tales of imaginary gardens:
We accept them all.

Tell us your story and we will transform it into a text.
In exchange, you will receive someone else’s story. 

Victor Strazzeri
Operaism, feminism and the smartphone: a conversation with Leopoldina Fortunati
7:30pm – 8:30pm
Talk
In Italian
Register here

Leopoldina Fortunati’s political trajectory started with Potere Operaio and the student movement in Padua in the context of 1968 before converging with the feminist wave that engulfed the Italian 1970s. In 1981, she published the classic L’Arcano della Riproduzione: Casalinghe, Prostitute, Operai e Capitale. Fortunati subsequently became a renowned critical researcher of mobile communication and professor at the Università di Udine. The talk will explore the connections between the themes and stages of Fortunati’s trajectory. It will be hosted by two researchers of the relationship between communism and feminism in Italy, 2020-21 Istituto Svizzero resident Victor Strazzeri and scholar and activist Eleonora Forenza.

CORA, Female Voices of Tradition
And United We Shall Be
9pm – 9:30pm
Concert
Register here

The songs and tales of one hundred years of labor and women rights struggles.
Directed by Francesca Ferri and starring Francesca Ferri, Mariacristina Picchio, Roberta Santacesaria, Susanna Ruffini, Vittoria Gallo and with Antonella Devescovi, Antonella Prisco,  Enza Di Matteo, Francesca Miano, Laura Squarcia.

 


 

SATURDAY 26.06.2021

PRICE and Geraldine Tedder
Visit to Lateral Roma
Drop-in visits from 10am to 11am
In English
Via Ferdinando Ughelli 28, 00179 Rome
Register here

Lateral Roma is an art space founded by Geraldine Tedder and PRICE (Mathias Ringgenberg), born out of the desire for a space that would allow them to connect to the city. Currently, the group exhibition THE ZANY—with artists Bully Fae Collins, Miriam Laura Leonardi, Bryan Morello, Sue Tompkins, Alice Visentin, a text by Marta Federici, a photo print by John S. Barrington from the collection of Raimundo Biffi and events with Héctor Babenco, Ivan Cheng, Hope Dickson Leach and Jahān Khājavi—is on view, a show on the overzealous, ever-performing, exhausting figure of the joker.

Aurora Panzica
The Empire of the Book: An Incursion in the Medieval Written Culture(s)
12pm – 1.30pm
Talk and visit
In English
Register here

We invite you to a journey into manuscript culture. We will follow the developments of the book as a cultural object from the Roman Age to the introduction of printed books in the West. The presentation, during which we will look at images of beautiful manuscripts, will be followed by a visit to Saint Isidore’s College, adjacent to the Istituto Svizzero. There we will have the opportunity to examine some medieval manuscripts.

Mathias Howald
Garden Stories
Drop-in sessions from 6:00pm to 8:00pm
In English, French, and Italian
With the participation of Chiara Bertini and Arianna Ninchi
Register here

Come and meet us under the trees
Where we are gathering garden stories.
Anecdotes of childhood,
Drama in the vegetable plot,
Tales of imaginary gardens:
We accept them all.

Tell us your story and we will transform it into a text.
In exchange, you will receive someone else’s story.

Ginny Wheeler
Walking tour: Two Millennia of Water and Otium around Villa Maraini
7pm – 8pm
Walk
In English and Italian
Register here (SOLD OUT)

Ginny’s research on late antique fountains and water displays and her curiosity about the urban fabric into which Villa Maraini was inserted at the beginning of the 20th century led her to create a didactic map to be distributed during the final event. Using the SITAR archaeological map of Rome and drawings by Istituto Svizzero’s fellow Yoan Mudry, the walking tour (3 km, c. 45 minutes walking time) ties together the great Roman horti that once dominated the Pincio with four sites where glimpses of the Aqua Virgo aqueduct remain visible today. 

Tzaziki & Crack [TOMBOYS DON’T CRY]
10pm – 12am
DJ set
Register here

Born at the slopes of Mout Sappho, in the Skala Eressos bay,  Tzaziki & Crack takes its ideal shape in the sonorisation of a Martian ballroom, through mutating combinations between past present  and future perfect. T&C, with Dj S/HE, cofounded the TBD’C queer artistic collective made of girls of any gender and non-binary creatures. Based in Milan, since 2011 TBC’D promotes post-identitarian adventures by way of actions and reactions, within and out of the Club’s perimeter.