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CURATED BY SERGIO MARIO ILLUMINATO
“Alchemical Workshop of Ideas“: ideas, from vision to reality, are developed, shaped, and transformed into creative devices.
Artist Residencies provide artists and creative professionals with time, space, and resources to work, individually or collectively, on those areas of their artistic practice that merit further exploration.
The Residency is a place for the dissemination of knowledge and culture, closely connected to the community and the local cultural heritage.
“Alchemical Workshop of Ideas” is an annual Artist Residency with special features:
Curated by artists;
Research-based. Artists use research processes to create the residency experience; thus, a unique relationship is formed between artists, people, and the location where the residency is conducted;
Thematic. These residencies ask artists to contribute to a common theme, aiming to draw attention to that topic and facilitate a process of regeneration.
Production-based. The focus of these residencies is the creation of an artistic project. The VulnerarTe Movement therefore offers materials, expertise, and a network of infrastructure in a specific artistic field, aiming to foster the creation of an artistic production (the process is part of the final work).
Transdisciplinary and cross-sector. These residencies host artists working in various artistic disciplines, increasingly offering opportunities for collaboration with partners from diverse fields, including those outside the art world.
Held in the Contemporary Cathedrals of Vulnerability. In Italy alone, as highlighted by the latest ISTAT census, there are seven million abandoned buildings.
The first Artist Residency took place in Velletri, from April 30 to September 30, 2023, at the former Pontifical Prison.
A group of artists and professionals in film, dance, music, and photography, along with teachers from Roman high schools and painting and sculpture students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, conceived the idea of exploring the observational experiences and insights of Sergio Mario Illuminato’s book “Corpus-et-Vulnus” in a unique and unrepeatable ARTIST RESIDENCE in the former Pontifical Prison of Velletri, prior to the irreversible transformation of this historical and cultural heritage into a new architectural structure functional to the community.
These spaces, dating back to the mid-19th century, have been included in the latest ISTAT census of over 7 million unused buildings in Italy over the past thirty years. The Lazio Region, the Metropolitan City of Rome, and the City of Velletri have recognized the importance of these Artist Residencies and have granted their patronage and special use of the structure, thus transforming it into a place of reflection and dialogue for future generations.
During the six-month residency, this hibernating space was explored to conceive and create a profound, nuanced, critical, fragile, and necessary “intellectual space.” Through unusual perspectives guided by the concept of transdisciplinarity, an inclusive and open relational life was practiced, allowing for the exploration and unraveling of the nature of the multiple connections between isolated issues, in a space where questions are revisited, alternatives reconsidered, and interrelationships revealed. (UNESCO – Division of Philosophy and Ethics, 1998).
This specific research focused on unusual perspectives guided by the concept of transdisciplinarity, aiming to understand the complexity of the contemporary world. We moved in the unusual space of the interstitial zones between painting and sculpture, influenced by the languages of cinema, dance, music, and photography, in order to continually re-signify the exhibition spaces and experiment with relational creative practices that reveal connections, affinities, and potential developments with the participating elements.
This was the exciting necessity in the unfinished expressive search for an authorial dimension that, through the “COSMIC-WEAVE-FABRIC” of “COMMUNICATING-ARTISTIC-ORGANISMS,” was based on “CO-EXISTENCE” in creating irregular performative loops, conceived as meeting places and communities, spaces for generating and actively learning, not just for enjoyment.
This is a reversal of the trend in art, far from the exhausted exclusive castes and self-referential systems that have become breathless. From here, the primordial themes of “BODY-BEYOND-MATTER,” “VULNERABILITY,” “NOMAD ETHICS,” and “AESTHETICS-OF-CONVERGENCE”—based on the creative mechanisms of the Ruins—were intertwined, expanding and diverting contemporary demand away from what is propagated through the para-verse. This neologism, in this context, refers to the incessant degradation of virtual worlds toward the superficiality of the mirror worlds of our everyday lives.
The end result was the birth of the “VulnerarTe” movement, the TRANSDISCIPLINARY PERFORMANCE PRACTICE “iosonovulnerabile,” and the production of the SHORT FILM “Vulnerare.” These intertwined activities embody the soul of an immersive site-coexistence experience, a continually evolving project presented in these pages.
The building that housed the Residence was state-owned for many years. Various proposals have been put forward for its conversion to various uses. We don’t know many details about its bureaucratic history, but the question of how to redevelop it has plagued the last three municipal administrations, eager to usefully revitalize the building. Thanks to a €1.3 million investment, the former prison has been preserved from any real estate speculation and is now owned by the Municipality of Velletri.
By one of the many accidental coincidences that mark our journey, the project presented in these pages represents the last experience and living testimony of the building in the state in which it reached our eyes, preserving the memory and original traces of its history spanning two centuries. The Book, the Artist Residency, the Transdisciplinary Performance Practice, the Short Film, and the photographs of the entire Residency process, along with the testimonies of the participants, constitute the last useful documentation before the architectural renovation and change of purpose and use of the 19th-century structure, planned for the coming months.