Kaleidoscopic No. 25: Elena Agudio
To activate practices of radical conviviality, of sharing, of repairing.
Leonardo Bravo:
Hello, this is Leonardo and I'm here doing an interview with Elena Agudio. You are in Florence, Italy right now, and I'm here in Brooklyn. It's great to connect with you again: We met about a year ago in Berlin and it was so nice to get to know you and your family and also get a little bit of an understanding about your work as a curator, as a cultural worker, and as a scholar. So, thank you for this opportunity to have a conversation, and I'm so glad we're able to reconnect this way.
Elena Agudio:
I am the one who is grateful to keep talking because obviously sometimes these conversations between colleagues do not have a real long-lasting effect. It was clear since the beginning , instead, that you had an openness towards what I was doing, but also towards the ecosystem in which I lived and worked in Berlin. Some of my beloved colleagues at SAVVY Contemporary, my partner Jonas, and some very meaningful friends, they were all somehow triggering and multiplying the complexity of the conversations between the two of us. So, I think in rhizomatic ways we kept talking and we continue to keep talking. Thank you for calling me! <Laugh>
Leonardo Bravo:
Thank you so much. I mean, I've always been drawn to this rhizomatic approach to life, to work, to the way we are in the world. So, I thought to start off with that, basically to frame your practice, because from my end it appears rhizomatic but also it seems you have a holistic view and there's such an ethos to the way you approach your work as a scholar and a curator.
Elena Agudio:
That’s an interesting entry point to start with. I am first of all educated as an art historian. I studied in Italy, where I received a classical and, I would say, canonical Western education. In a context that never really grappled with the possibility of questioning certain epistemic violence of a white European perspective. Yeah, Italy never even really questioned too much its own history, its own involvement in fascism and colonialism, this is a reality. At school, and even in the university, it was never really something that you could do, to engage these themes with criticality. So, I was saying, I studied art history in Venice, and then slowly I started curating and the main drive and the main agency that was inspiring me was one of deconstructing and actually realizing I had an urgent need of questioning this epistemic violence.
Elena Agudio:
In Italy the narrative is always the same: art was born here, and some of the most outstanding treasures and creations of artists are spread throughout the country. I did my MA in Renaissance studies, so what I was perceiving obviously this self-referential continuum.
When finally I could develop my own practice out of the university, my main approach was to shift this perspective, questioning, and decolonizing and so deconstructing my position. Once I moved to Berlin it became clearer, because I started meeting colleagues with situated practices and educational formations marked by reference system and ways of thinking outside of these canons that I was socialized into. I also became much more aware of the engaged perspective of embracing possibilities of repair, of restitution, and also feminist disturbances of the normativity of our societies. And so that's how it came about that I felt urge of talking to artists, of curating, and expanding my cosmological perspective.
Leonardo Bravo:
I love what you said about a more expansive model and thinking about these multiple perspectives outside of the western European canon or gaze. You've been the director at the Villa Romana in Florence for the last year or so and I was really struck by the range of artist and fellows that came in just around the time you did. Artists such Diana Ejaita, Jessica Ekomane, Samuel Kortey Baah, and Pınar Öğrenci. It feels that there's a real sense of purpose and intention in terms of the artists that you're working with and what you're looking to do there, maybe as you said to disrupt the canon or the narratives a bit. Can you talk about that and how it's been for you at the Villa Romana and your vision there?
Elena Agudio:
Absolutely. I moved here to Villa Romana in January 2023. So now it's about a year that I'm here and that I am developing a program for this institution – even if my program builds on over a decade of thinking and grappling with questions of decanonisation. When I applied for this post, I elaborated a stance that sought to tackle my positionality as an Italian, who was out of her country of birth for more than 15 years but who still had strong and situated relation to Italy. My strongest urge upon returning was manifesting through the possibility of deconstructing and breaking with certain ossified narratives.
Elena Agudio:
Because unfortunately in places like Florence, that are seen as the cradle of the Renaissance and for that reason attract millions of tourists every year, really this canon weighs heavily on your shoulders. It's a cultural, political, and intellectual burden, especially for those who wish to work in the present time in order to construct a viable future.. And not only that of course, also there is a lack of infrastructure for contemporary art. So, it's not easy to get out of this self-referential loop that I mentioned earlier. I therefore thought and proposed to continue the work I've been doing for years in Berlin, and I came to this house understanding this as an opportunity to experiment and to live together with a group of artists whose narrative has been, since the early stages of their career, really focused on disturbing normative perspectives.
Elena Agudio:
The Villa Romana Fellows 2023 were selected by two jurors: artist Emeka Ogboh and cultural worker Chiara Figone. I was very happy to have such a bold constellation of people for my first year. It was really great to start sculpting a program and forging a practice of co-habitation together.
Collaboration is in fact really at the base of what we are doing in this artists’ house: fundamental collaboration within the team, but also active co-operation with the fellows themselves. With them, we started sketching and creating artistic propositions to unfold together the new agency of Villa Romana as A House for Mending, Troubling and Repairing. I already talked and wrote expansively about this idea of the house, and you can find materials about the public program of workshops, laboratories, presentations and artistic interventions we elaborated over the last months: events all characterized by doing together, ecological thinking, and anti-racist and anti-discriminatory acting, to elaborate practices of radical conviviality, of sharing, of repairing.
Elena Agudio:
This is at the core of what we've been trying to do with this program, and we will continue this work for the next few years. Because we all live together in the house (the fellows, our curator Mistura Allison, our team members Ala and Victor, me and my family, and the many more inhabitants who animate the life of the Villa - the cats, the bees, the other people working here like Claudia and the Radio Papesse), domesticity is a strong reflection that we are also embracing: we are asking ourselves how to re-weaponize the domestics as a space of wild imagination, and not of domestication. A space of co-habitation and public politics, where we are negotiating ways in which we want to live together as a community.
Leonardo Bravo:
It's almost like you're proposing the site of the domestic and the home as a site of the commons as well.
Elena Agudio:
Absolutely. This experimentation with domesticity, conviviality, cohabitation, and all these possibilities and opportunities that a place like Villa Romana gives, are actually at the basis of the mission of this place. When in 1905 the German artist Max Klinger bought the Villa with the help of some patrons, he really wanted this place to be an artist's house. He was doing it as a counter-gesture, in a historical moment in which in Rome many national academies of the arts were being established - the Academy of France (Villa Medici) was born much earlier, but most of the other academies like the Academy of Spain, the American Academy, and – later – the German Academy / Villa Massimo, among others, were being created to represent the aesthetics of nation states. Max Klinger saw the urgency for artists to have a space to think in togetherness and independently, and he created the association Villa Romana, a non-profit organization which is now still independent. It is an artists’ house, a place where togetherness, experimentation, critical thinking and artistic practices are constantly unfolding.
Leonardo Bravo:
Can you share what this looked like for Diana Ejaita or Jessica Ekomane? Or for Samuel Baah Kortey? Just to share some examples of how this might look like for artists.
Elena Agudio:
Sure. Jessica’s residency is a meaningful example: from what I could observe, she took this opportunity has a possibility to focus and breathe, to somehow decelerate from the rhythms of Berlin and at the same time to ground work. During her 10 months stay she had, as all others, a wonderful studio with a view into the garden, from which she could observe (and hear!) a lot of what is happening in nature, and from where she could participate the particular context of this house - where the garden became a space for community engagement and practices of co-cultivation. She has also been collaborating intensely with different local initiatives working with experimental sound and performance, in particular with ooh-sound and Nub Project Space. With them we organized, for example, a wonderful listening session under the stars of the summer solstice, where we gave central stage to her work and to a collaboration with Afrorack that she expanded during the time of her residency. Beyond Afrorack, we had the opportunity to invite other sound artists to dialogue with her work, among them Lamin Fofana and SADI. It was memorable, and the city of Florence – as all of us – will remember that night as a very special moment and event. She performed also in different museums locally and in more informal concert contexts: the most impressive one was her recent performance at the Pecci Museum. She just left the Villa, and we are going to miss Jessica a lot!
Elena Agudio:
Diana Ejaita came here with her one-year-old (now two-year old)daughter. For Diana, as for Mistura and for myself, coming to Italy was meaning coming back to her country of birth. To the place where she was brought up and from which she holds a passport. Returning meant finding many things changed, but at the same time realizing too little transformed. Her residency represented an opportunity to reconnect to a context, but also to re-question many things.
She used the residency as a space and time to delve more deeply into her artistic investigation. In the past years she gained a lot of success with her incredibly strong and visionary work as illustrator. The possibility of having a large studio and to access artisans’ laboratories allowed her to experiment with different materials and techniques. She for example started working with a printmaking laboratory, a very old and quite special laboratory here in Florence called Il Bisonte. They were offering all fellows the possibility of taking printmaking classes to experiment with the very special machines, tools and materials they have at disposal; Diana didn’t need any training because she is really into printmaking, and she could produce a large body of work. She also produced some major works during her stay, as for example the big wall piece she presented last June in the exhibition O Quilombismo, for the reopening of HWK in Berlin.
Elena Agudio:
Samuel Bah Kortey started working hard since the first day he arrived, and is keeping working also with the end of his residency. He connected deeply to the community of artists, cultural workers and activists from the “family” of Black History Month Florence (BHMF) / The Recovery Plan, and he started a long-term research through and on the social fabric that this community represent locally and for the wider afrodiasporic and panafricanist context.
Leonardo Bravo:
I love how you've committed to these epistemologies of cultural histories and perspectives that are non-European. Can you talk a little bit about your experience at SAVVY and how that sort of began to define your research and your work?
Elena Agudio:
Yes. For me my time at SAVVY has been incredibly transformational. It has been really a springboard for my thinking. When I arrived in Berlin it was 2008 and, as I said, I immediately started curating and getting in conversation with different cultural actors active in town. And at some point, I met with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung - ironically in a workshop at the House of World Cultures (HKW), where he is now the new appointed director since January 2023. It was interesting to see how bold his positioning was. We immediately started to work together on a couple of projects, and soon I joined him as co-director of SAVVY Contemporary. It is through this dialogue with him that I began to embrace a serious path of unlearning, challenging the canonical perspective that I was given. It was really very fruitful because we were not just looking at the violence of the Western epistemic system, but also and especially, we were really interested in the richness of the diversity of cultural propositions and epistemologies outside of the European narrative. Initially many people were thinking that SAVVY Contemporary was a space dedicated to contemporary African art. But it was never just that. It was and it is a place where epistemological diversity, intersectional practices, and extra-disciplinary thinking could shed different light on our past, presents, and futures. This for me was extremely liberating.
What I also learned at SAVVY has been this collaborative horizontality that is the way I always like to go, when I'm working. This was extremely inspiring. It's something that Berlin gifted me, and that really changed my belief in what it means to do cultural work.
Leonardo Bravo:
The times I went to SAVVY I recognized how important that space was for cultural discourse in Berlin, but also, you're right, this feeling of things being very horizontal, very collaborative, and it's what you're describing about Villa Romana, that becomes a work in progress with everyone having a stake in it.
Elena Agudio:
Absolutely. I am interested in bringing together different agencies, as they always enrich each other in kaleidoscopic ways. These last 10 years at SAVVY also brought me to understand how interested I am to ground my research on infrastructural work and on the importance of institutional self-reflection, something that I'm also doing here at Villa Romana. What I'm doing here of course is different, because this is an old institution with a certain history, surely a very inspiring history, but at the same time also crystallized in some ways.
Elena Agudio:
I am interested in analyzing the way we work together, how artists and team can always collaborate and how we can implement horizontal practices and policies of reciprocity. This relationality that seems an easy and obvious thing actually needs infrastructural and institutional reflection. This year we have been in fact drafting policies of cohabitation, policies of respect, and of anti-discrimination for the house. All things that actually were not existing, because even if one can think it's common sense, it is easy to realize that in our society it is not common sense.
Leonardo Bravo:
I'm always interested in people's individual journeys so this is more about what inspired you to work in the arts along the way?
Elena Agudio:
I arrived to contemporary art through a non-linear path. It is because it was too normative the way in which artistic discourse was presented to me, that I felt urged to get involved in its forging. My father was a psychiatrist; I think this probably tells a lot about my work and my way of approaching research. He was constantly analyzing things, of course he was a very analytical person ;). I was born in 1979, one year after the legge Basaglia (also known as law 180/1978 the Italian Mental Health Act) was legitimized, starting a large reform of the psychiatric system in Italy, and the closure of mental asylums. In the 80s, when as a child I was spending time with my father in his working environment, I was actually witnessing the transitioning of a whole disciplinary system into a different one. I remember spending much time in psychiatric asylums – it took a while before they definitively closed – and I still recall the feeling of going to these places like entering parallel worlds where everything was turned upside down. It may sound stupid or romanticizing, but the feeling was very disruptive, very artistic in the sense that it was always mind-blowing. It was like entering the space of the otherwise, navigating with my father’s hand the blurred threshold between sanity and insanity, between normativity and imagination.
So when I came to art through art history later, I came with this experience and need of questioning and undoing things. As art historian, I delved into iconology and into a psychoanalytical interrogation of symbols in art. I studied Aby Warburg and I think this also was connected again to psychiatry in many ways, and to semeiotics and semiotic analysis. And I think this connects me to the work I'm doing now, which is so focused on this constant interrogation of what repair and repairing is.
Elena Agudio:
My mother instead is coming from more mathematical studies, she studied economy, and she has a very different mind. In these charismatic relationships, there are oftentimes in families, I needed - I don't know if I had a sort of an Elettra complex or not - to elaborate much. Instead of studying psychiatry, I ended up working in the arts. And I basically ended up doing what I remember wanted.
Leonardo Bravo:
Sounds like a kind of Venn diagram, the thing that meets in the middle for you, <laugh>.
Elena Agudio :
Exactly. And actually, along my curatorial path, I actually did few projects that have to do with mental wellbeing. And one especially was at SAVVY and it was entitled Ultrasanity. On Madness, Sanitation, Anti-Psychiatriy and Resistance. This was a clear way for me also to question the violence of psychiatry and the pharmacologization of care, which is absolutely something I'm still interested in addressing, but at the same time brought me to explore further the possibilities of understanding art as a cathartic refuge or as a pharmakon.
Leonardo Bravo:
I'm intrigued by how your work deals with diasporic belongings, ecologic displacement and migrations, cultural migrations. These very complex and interwoven issues. How do you begin these lines of inquiry or the research into such projects? How does that begin, the conceptualizing of the projects and the research involved?
Elena Agudio:
Usually projects start with animated discussions between friends and colleagues, collective reflections at a table with the exchange of books and with the urgency of keeping certain conversations unfolding further. A good example is exactly this, this project on Ultrasanity, or another one was when we found ourselves urged to interrogate from a very feminist perspective the way in which our institution was working, or again with Agropoetics. You were asking how they come together this research on ecological devastation and on diasporic belonging, right? I think they really all connect with this interest I have in digging traumas: geotrauma and other traumas that are out there in nature, traumas that are coming from a colonial past or from within the family, they are all connected, and there's a collective need for rebalancing and repairing.
Elena Agudio:
Restitution as well is a fundamental act of rebalancing too.
Leonardo Bravo:
Elena, I wanted to find out what's coming up for you? What are you planning at the villa? How do you continue working with artists and are you still connected to networks in Berlin and other places?
Elena Agudio:
I'm definitely connected to Berlin, first of all because my best friends are there, but also because I really see certain discourses there that are not everywhere. Maybe it is just because I was there for so long, but I really see that in Berlin there are certain communities and groups of people engaged in longer-term reflections I care for, and that I don't want to disentangle from.
Elena Agudio:
What is now inspiring me, as you are asking, is surely this opportunity of exploring the possibilities of living in different ways, of co-habitation in this place, where we have a great and special garden, and where we do really a lot of work of community engagement. We are bringing in different diasporic communities that are very present in Florence/Tuscany/Italy, while at the same time we are also trying to understand what it means to live beyond a nuclear family context. I am urged to interrogate how commonality can become a space of opportunities.
I'm interested in radical pedagogies but also I'm interested in togetherness, and in the sustainability of this togetherness. Too often I think these reflections are done in books or by doing a little project here and a little project there, but it's very different when you are really into the thing. Right? So, this possibility that we have here, with Villa Romana as A House For Mending, Troubling, Repairing, it's quite special. And all the work we are trying to do with the ecological transition of the house and the garden is also a transformation that is happening for me also individually and for my family, an opportunity to see togetherness in a sustainable way.
Leonardo Bravo:
Well, that's a beautiful aspiration. And as well, it's a set of ethics and a sort of an action call. It's like bringing theory to life, bringing these ideas to lived experience in the day-to-day. And that's beautiful.
Elena Agudio:
First of all it's not a romanticizing.
Leonardo Bravo:
Right! Because it's a troubling, I mean, it's hard work as well, <laugh>.
Elena Agudio:
Exactly. And this is why we just did now an exhibition with the Villa Romana Fellows and other artists under the title a house is a house is a home - resonating with Gertrude Stein's verse A rose, is a rose, is a rose - to really mean that Villa Romana is not just a house, a building, an institution, but first of all it's a home. It's a place where we try to embrace processes of homemaking in a strict sense, but also in a more metaphorical sense. And where we are interested in renegotiating what home, what the concept of home should be, because of course it's quite clear that not only the ecological devastation is making it difficult to survive together in this world, but also politics and society. So, I think it's very crucial to try out something a bit different.
Leonardo Bravo:
Well, Elena, this has been such a treat to continue the conversation that we started, and I hope we continue to build on these conversations. I'm hoping next year I can come to Florence and visit for a little bit and see what you're doing at the Villa Romana.
Elena Agudio:
Absolutely. You should really come and the good thing is really that this is an open house. It's funny because in Italian open house means the casino, in the sense of a bordello! I mean it in the sense that doors are always open, but of course I like the short circuit that this generates in people’s minds. Because we want to disrupt things. This is the house of four artists that are staying here for ten months, the Villa Romana Fellows, but many people are coming to engage in possible research and collaboration. So please let us know.
Leonardo Bravo:
Wonderful. We will be in touch. Thank you for your time.
For more information:
https://www.villaromana.org/front_content.php
IG: @elenaagudio
I loved reading this. Brilliant. Thank you Elena & Leonardo. ~Rashida Bumbray