This year, for the first time, the residency will take place across two distinct archaeological sites: the Polo Museale di Soriano Calabro and the Villa Romana Palazzi di Casignana. Though just an hour apart, the two locations reveal strikingly different facets of Calabria. Perched on the Tyrrhenian side of the Serre mountains, Soriano Calabro is a small town in the Province of Vibo Valentia, where artisanal traditions in ceramics and woodworking remain vibrant. Once a prominent center of learning from the 15th to 18th centuries — thanks to a grand Dominican convent built in 1510 — its cultural weight was diminished by the earthquakes of 1659 and 1783. In the 1830s, a new church was constructed within the ruins, making the current museum complex a rare example of layered cultural rebirth. In contrast, the Villa Romana site — bisected by a modern highway — is among the region’s most significant archaeological areas. It lies just outside Casignana, a village of fewer than 500 inhabitants. Moving between the micro-histories of these two sites, In-ruins invites artists, curators, and researchers to view archaeology as an epicenter, vector, and vantage point for engaging with broader topographic, historical, and cultural landscapes.
Residents
The residency program 2022 was curated by Nicola Guastamacchia, Maria Luigia Gioffrè and Nicola Nitido.
SV Randall
U.S.A.
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.
Alice Pedroletti
ITALY
Artist and researcher living in Berlin and Milan. 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. Pedroletti won the Italian Council (9th Edition, 2020).
Gianmarco Porru
ITALY
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.
Armando Perna
ITALY
He is a documentary photographer. Since 2011, he has been documenting the final stages of the modernization works on the A3 Salerno-Reggio Calabria motorway, a critical infrastructure for southern Italy and for Calabria in particular, which culminated in the 2015 inauguration of the Autostrada del Mediterraneo. His research on the Calabrian landscape continued in the following years, culminating in the project Presente Infinito, published in 2023 by Rubbettino. In 2023, thanks to a residency at the Misk Art Institute in Riyadh, he began a research project on the city’s urban development.
The New Liquidity
SWEDEN + BOSNIA
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.
Jury
Mathilde Ayoub
Curator / PhD University of Clergy
Roberta Garieri
Writer and researcher / PhD University of Rennes
Aloisia Leopardi
Director, Richard Saltoun Gallery London /
Castello San Basilio residency, Basilicata
Vittorio Parisi
Director of Studies and Research, Villa Arson, Nice
SV Randall
Speculative ruins
Architecture and its possible variations resurface in the work of New York-based artist SV Randall, who shapes objects and narratives through sculptural practice. Randall reimagines the entire archaeological site, recreating it using the ephemeral material of sand. This fragile miniature is complemented by a parallel research process: the artist has photographed and catalogued the museum’s extensive collection of statue fragments in order to later develop an idea of “speculative new ruins,” conceived through a technological lens and grounded in the de-anthropomorphizing perspective of machine learning.
Partners
COMUNE DI SORIANO CALABRO