In-ruins residency | 2022 EDITION
Polo Museale di Soriano Calabro +
Villa Romana di Casignana
CALABRIA, ITALY
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OPEN CALL
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In-ruins is thrilled to launch the open call for the 2022 edition of the residency. This year and for the first time, the programme will unroll between two different archaeological sites: Polo Museale di Soriano Calabro and Villa Romana Palazzi di Casignana. The locations are an hour’s drive away from each other, yet revealing very different characters of Calabria.
Located upon the Tyrrhenian side of the Serre, Soriano is a small town in the Province of Vibo Valentia where the artisanal traditions of ceramics and wood working are still strong and alive. The town was an important centre of studies from the 15th to the 18th century thanks to the presence of a grandiose Dominican convent erected in 1510. Among the most important of its time in Europe, the convent is famous for having hosted Charles V on his return from Tunis and Tommaso Campanella in 1535. Interestingly, the religious complex increased in fame and wealth thanks to an icon considered acheropite and miraculous: an effigy of San Domenico di Guzmàn that tradition recounts delivered to a monk by the Virgin, S. Catherine of Alexandria and Mary Magdalene. History tells that the power of the centre could only be diminished, and then wiped out, with the earthquakes of 1659 and 1783. In the 1830s, however, a new church was built around the very ruins of the former convent, making of the Polo Museale a rare example of the death, rebirth and following cultural stratification of a ritual place.
The archaeological area of Villa Romana Palazzi di Casignana is one of the most important archaeological sites in South Italy, located a stone away from the very small town of Casignana. With the old city entirely abandoned, the town counts not more than 1000 inhabitants and lays on a hill, with incredible views on the Riviera dei Gelsomini. On the seashore there is the Villa which extends for about 15 hectares and is characterised not only by the beauty of the ruins it preserves but also by the more than incongruous presence of a highway crossing it in the very middle. Built in the first century A.D. in an area with former traces of Greek presence, Villa Romana includes residential and thermal constructions and preserves 25 mosaic-paved rooms for a total surface area of 500 square meters. This is the largest nucleus of mosaics so far known in Calabria. Visiting the site, it is not hard to imagine the wealth and power marking the ancient lifestyle of an area - the Locride - now remote from both arts and the market.
Among the mosaics there is a tondo depicting the Indian Triumph of Dionysus. The god rides a chariot pulled by two resting tigers and stands, victorious, against the smoky rush of busy drivers and speeding cars.Moving between the micro-histories of these two very different locations, In-ruins residency 2022 invites artists, curators and reseachers to look at archeological sites as epicentres. A vector and vantage point from which to explore topographic, historical and cultural contexts, from neighbouring districts to far more distant and unexpected horizons.
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Applications must be submitted by July 5th and will be reviewed by an international jury composed by:
Mathilde Ayoub
Curator and PhD candidate, University of Cergy and the National Heritage Institute, Paris
Roberta Garieri
Researcher, writer and curator, PhD candidate, University of Rennes 2
Aloisia Leopardi
Director at Paterson Zevi, London, and Castello San Basilio residency, Basilicata
Vittorio Parisi
Director of Studies and Research, Villa Arson, Nice
Please note that the jury's decision is final.
LOCATIONS AND DATES
Soriano Calabro / Polo Museale di Soriano Calabro
12 – 24 September 2022
Casignana / Villa Romana Palazzi di Casignana
24 September - 6 October 2022
APPLICATION MATERIAL
- Portfolio
- Cv
- Brief motivation / tentative project overview (1000 words max)
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CONDITIONS
- transfer from/to airport/station upon departure and arrival
- residency-car available for local trips and tours
- Soriano Calabro / Polo Museale di Soriano Calabro :
accomodation + living expenses + free access to site + shared studio
- Casignana / Villa Romana Palazzi di Casignana :
panoramic accomodation + free access to site + shared studio
Please note that In-ruins can cover very limited production expenses and invites applicants to present projects fit to full-bloom on site.
Applications to be submitted to: inruinsapplication@gmail.com
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Supported by
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SELECTED ARTISTS
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The New Liquidity is an interdisciplinary research platform and collective for artistic and curatorial practices, launched by curator and researcher Selma Boskailo and sound artist and composer Anders Ehlin. It aims to introduce and interpret tropes of liquidity, whether through liquid sonority, materiality or visuality. Being a conscious nod to the capitalist moniker and namesake describing speculative economies and future cryptocurrencies, The New Liquidity uses the term liquidity as a referential trampoline to facilitate speculation and porosity of borders as a means of artistic expression and the creation of alternative and/or potential scenarios capable of reorganizing spatio-temporal coordinates. As a part of their research on liquid sonority, the collective is currently developing the project De-territorialized Listenings - an ongoing series of binaural immersive soundwalks that offer strategies for dismantling prevailing hegemonic sensorial and imaginative structures.
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Alice Pedroletti is an artist and researcher who lives and works in Berlin and Milan and deals with the multiple aspects of being and vision through an imaginative approach and an investigation concerning archiving as an artistic practice and methodology. Her projects range from architecture to urban planning, from geography to geopolitics, with a specific focus on the identity and memory of the individual connected to the community. Imaginative projects, utopian or sometimes future-oriented archives that explore the cognitive autonomy of thought in machine learning systems or that address the fragility of the human being.As an artist-curator, she founded ATRII Open Archive: a collective project hosted at Cittadella degli Archivi in Milan, which uses contemporary art to investigate architecture, focusing on the atrium (concept) space. Alice is part of the Rabbit Island Foundation and TSOEG Temporal School of Experimental Geography: artists' networks focusing on ethical and experimental art practices concerning the environment. She's a fellow artist at ZK/U - Center for Art and Urbanistics in Berlin. Her work has been presented in several Italian and international galleries and institutions, along with talks and residencies. Among these: BOZAR - Center for Fine Art (Bruxelles - B, 2021), ZK/U - Center for Art and Urbanistic (Berlin - D, 2021), Aaran Gallery (Teheran - IR, 2021), Unidee - Fondazione Pistoletto (Biella - IT, 2020), Royal Geographic Society (London - the UK, 2019), PALP (Pontedera - IT, 2019), HeRo Gallery (Amsterdam, NL, 2018), IIC (Bruxelles - B, 2018), National Gallery of Kosovo (Pristina – RKS, 2017), Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa (Venice – IT, 2017), Museo del '900 (Milan - IT, 2017), Museo Michetti (Francavilla al Mare – IT, 2017), Time Art Museum (Beijing - CN, 2016), Mostyn (Llandudno – the UK, 2015). Pedroletti won the Italian Council (9 th Edition, 2020).
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Armando Perna (1981) is a documentary photographer. For more than ten years, he has been conducting research on the landscape of Calabria. Between 2011 and 2016, when the new “Autostrada del Mediterraneo” was opened, he documented the final stages of the construction of the Salerno – Reggio Calabria motorway, the modernisation of which took more than 50 years. In 2018, he began a research project (Presente Infinito) on the specific, influential relationships between people and the environment in a context – such as that of communities in Calabria – that is characterised by a forced period of isolation spanning several centuries. "Presente Infinito" is scheduled to be published in 2022.
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GianMarco Porru (1989, Italy), is an artist based in Milan. He works with different media including performance, video and photography. His artistic research is tied to cultural narratives - especially oral tales in specific communities - and to stories recounted through images which emerge in popular material culture, folklore, communitarian and religious rituals as well in vernacular museography and its displays. The research he conducts on these visual archives often originates from an interest in anthropological and ethnographical analyses and methodologies and later develops in the creation of performative actions, immersive spaces and moving images. His works have been exhibited in several foundations, museums and festivals such as Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Guarene; MilanoOltre, Milan; il museo MAGA*, Gallarate; Museo Nivola, Orani; Pav, Turin; Museo del 900, Milan; Museo Man, Nuoro; Teatro San Martin, Buenos Aires.
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Randall SV is an interdisciplinary artist from Buffalo, NY. He received his MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from VCU and his BFA from Alfred University. His work has been exhibited at David & Schweitzer Contemporary, Brooklyn, NY; El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX; Ditch Projects, Eugene, OR; and the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. SV is the recipient of the Toby Devin Lewis Fellowship Award and has most recently participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, ME), Sculpture Space (Utica, NY), the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA), the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program (Roswell, NM). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Texas at Dallas.
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