The Struggle Is Not Over Yet

The publication of the winners of the Villa Romana Prize has taken the shape of four distinct yet interrelated booklets – an editorial series continuing the tradition of the institution to offer a space for the dissemination and reverberation of the research and work of the Villa Romana Fellows after their ten-months residency in Florence.

Each year, four selected artists are invited to live and work in the same house that, since 1905, generations of artists have continuously inhabited. They always come as a group – a constellation of four people – but all as singular artists. The opportunity of yearly publishing their work in a bundle of four separate books and within an open series allows for a larger combination of echoes across the generations of Villa Romana Fellows. A further occasion for “being singular plural.”

Contributions by Elena Agudio

Publishing a selection of her radiophonic essays here for the first time, I Speak Radio reflects Anne Bromley's collaborative radio practice.

Since 2010, Anna Bromley has been inviting artists, activists and cultural researchers into the radio studio to explore language and voice together, in the context of sound, politics and everyday life. What began as an artists' radio research format has developed over the years into a series of exhibition pieces focusing on radio and its visible and invisible transmission bodies.
Publishing a selection of her radiophonic essays here for the first time, I Speak Radio reflects Bromley's collaborative radio practice. The publication also provides insight into the corresponding exhibition formats of these projects, including cooperations with a large number of artists, activists, radio makers and theorists. An index of images and texts on Bromley's other artistic works is inserted into the book.
I Speak Radio opens with Bromley's eponymous multimedia essay on the feminist appropriation of early radio technology in the 1920s. A Voice Exists in Voicing, the series of radio essays and sonic portraits with which Bromley opened the Manifesta Radio in Prishtina in the summer of 2022, comprises the core of the book. The accompanying visual element to this section is a series of drawings by Michael Fesca. Contextualizing texts by Catherine Nichols and Hedwig Fijen provide an introduction to A Voice Exists in Voicing. Finally, Bromley talks to media activist Diana McCarty about the politics of persistent radio voices and considers critical perspectives on radio as a medium within art exhibitions.

The reader series Scriptings: Political Scenarios publishes carefully selected scripts and texts by artists that refer neither to academic forms nor to purely literary forms of writing, but rather embed "text" as a fully integral part of contemporary political and visual art practice.

Contributions by Anna Bromley, Diana McCarty, Hedwig Fijen, Catherine Nichols, Tetsuo Kogawa, Alla Mitrofanova, JD Zazie.

A complete documentation on a multimedia exhibition by Berlin-based artist Ixmucané Aguila, giving voice to voiceless descendants of victims of genocide in Namibia.

Genocide in Namibia is an especially sensitive matter—its history has at times been ignored, underestimated, or even denied outright. In the artistic documentary Fraitaxtsēs sores tsîn ge ra≠gâ – Ondjembo yo Null Vier, Ixmucané Aguilar has worked in close collaboration with Nama and OvaHerero people who vividly evoke memories and rituals of mourning caused by human loss and land dispossession under Imperial Germany's violent occupation.
From these personal encounters emerge portraits, visuals and narratives as documental fragments, consisting of living voices which insist on defending memory as an invocation to witness and never to remain passive in the face of social injustice. Rather than a linear collection of data referring to distant places and its distant past, this work engages with stories as chronicles calling to be recognised as pieces of humanity and time.

Alongside Aguilar's portraits, this publication also contains contributions by human rights attorney Wolfgang Kaleck and the curator of the work Tristan Pranyko, along with poetry by Namibian artists Nesindano Namises, Fritz Isak Dirkse and Prince Kamaazegi, and narratives, testimonies, chants and mourning rituals shared by OvaHerero and Nama people in present-day Namiba.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at National Art Gallery of Namibia, Windhoek, in 2023

Ixmucané Aguilar (born 1983) is a Guatemalan Berlin-based visual artist/designer who, through multi-layered documentary photography, engages in extensive field research to put out installations and art publications to relay her work in an artistic language.

Studies on Squats is an evocative exploration of embodied resistance and political movement that uses the multifaceted posture of the “Asian Squat” as a lens through which broader concepts of migration, illness, and resilience are examined. In Studies on Squats, the body—in its most vulnerable and potent states—becomes a speculative site for reclaiming agency by crafting new forms of protest that draw from ancestral strength, humor and eroticism. This posture, rich with cultural resonance, offers as an entry point to imagine ways in which the body can engage in acts of defiance against systems of oppression. Studies on Squats  invites the audience to consider how dance and choreographic thinking can serve as tools for envisioning alternative futures, where artistry empowers those enduring systemic social injustices to transform their realities. 

Things Bigger Than What Can Be Seen is a collection of Oraib Toukan’s essays, translated to Arabic for the first time. In close dialogue with Palestinian pedagogue Munir Fasheh on the topic of turbeh (local soil in Arabic), Toukan crafts a haptic perspective on images from what she terms their ‘soil grain’.

This publication brings together two original screenplays for yet-realized video works by Robinson along with a collection of research material presented as a retrograde calendar. The screenplays, / Imagine Prompt: Catfish Monogamy and The Jealousy of Sagittarius A*, both deal with contemporary life and creative labor as they intersect with digital culture and current anxieties regarding AI. In addition, the screenplays are followed by A Faggot is a Unit (Homage to Hanne Darboven), a collection of archival photographs, scanned objects and ephemera, as well as stock imagery and graphics from the internet collected by Robinson over the course of seven years (2015–2021). The imagery further splits the disorienting narratives presented in the two screenplays to offer a kaleidoscopic and unpredictable way of reading stories while functioning simultaneously as visual companion and counterpoint to the scripts.

Writing and editing is central to Robinson’s published and film work, inquiring into queer histories and the contemporary economy of the image, not as novelty subjects in themselves, but as forms of knowledge integral to questioning histories of perceived liberation. We are committed to representing diverse voices and perspectives that challenge and build upon our vision of bringing material from the fast-paced digital experience to the book form.

Padraig Robinson is a Berlin-based artist, filmmaker and writer. 

This publication is presented as an object-book-manifesto of a ‘desespiegles’ way of thinking. It “translates” the trains of thought that architect-artists Anne Philippe and Jolien Naeyaert exchanged via videoletters. The videoletters mainly occurred during the covid period. Questioning the scope of the addressed images, these exchanges revealed a play of symmetries. It shows a series of interrogations, linking the intimate with the collective. The move towards a publication was obvious after conversations with Loes, Phyllis, An and Teresa of nadine. The desire to activate reading in a performative way, mirrors the exchange of videoletters. It continues the process-based methodology that inventively gave birth to a publication through the physical manipulation of the work. The riso-technique proved particularly suitable for this project, as the hands, the gaze and the exchange all played a role during the object-making process.

Dannie.n is an art-zine, published by nadine, about the artistic research, themes, and topics of discussion of the artists involved in nadine. nadine invites an artist or collective to create each new edition.

Dannie.p is a limited-edition artist's book by desespiegles (57 copies). nadine is supported by Vlaamse Gemeenschap, VGC, Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest.

For the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine a group of people/ performers memorize a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. After years of learning by heart and reciting for readers, some of the books have now been written down from memory to create new editions, versions resulting from this process. This book is one of those books, chosen by one person, learned by heart and recited many times, and now written down again from memory. This edition is not a re-edition of the original text. It is a re-writing of the text after the process of reading, memorizing and reciting, with all the alterations that might have occured in the course of this process.

An experimental essay on voice, narrative, literature and translation. In this text Daniela tunes into the hums of voices heard within books, to the recollected csitation, to singing with stitched lips.

A text on speaking, listening and being understood made in conversation with iOS speech-to-text software.