A Place Is Loved When It Becomes a Chorus.
What does it mean for a place to be loved?
At Villa Romana, we have learned that a place is not loved because it endures unchanged, nor because it holds the weight of history intact. A place is loved when it becomes a chorus. When it gathers the polyphony of those who arrive, those who depart, and those who pass through carrying other landscapes in their bodies. When its walls stop acting as borders and become resonant chambers – echoing, absorbing, and transforming the voices that shape them.
It is in this spirit that Villa Romana joins ifa Gallery Berlin to respond to the exhibition’s question. “What does it mean for a place to be loved?” A Place Is Loved When It Becomes a Chorus is not a metaphor but a method: a proposition for listening to the trajectories of the Villa Romana Fellows and the ways their practices re-tune Florence and Berlin as interdependent sites of making, remembering, and imagining.
This evening celebrates the fellows of 2023 and 2024: Samuel Baah Kortey, Diana Ejaita, Jessica Ekomane, Pınar Öğrenci (2023); Rubén D’Hers, Tuli Mekondjo, Monai de Paula Antunes, and Sergio Zevallos (2024) – through the presentation of their newly published booklets in collaboration with Archive Books. These publications are not catalogues of what has already happened; they are resonating chambers of ongoing processes.
This event also opens a new chapter: the beginning of a three-year collaboration between ifa and Villa Romana. Its first vibration was Corale, the collective sound piece by Radio Papesse co-produced with ifa and Deutschlandfunk. Presented at the Georg Kolbe Museum during Berlin Art Week and now resonating through the Museo Novecento in Florence, Corale embodies the very proposition of this gathering: a polyphony of many voices, entangled but not collapsed, co-existing in tension and resonance.
We gather, too, with the presence of the 2025 Fellows: Sajan Mani, Elia Nurvista, Chaveli Sifre, and Raul Walch.
In a time of fractured geographies and contested histories, perhaps love for a place is not a longing for origins, nor a romantic attachment to land, but a commitment to listening – to allowing many voices to inhabit the same space without forcing them into unison.
