Radio Robida

0:00

<< About

Izba

spazio collettivo / skupni prostor / collective space

Robida + Topolò/Topoluove + Rečan

dove? / kje? / where?

sotto la chiesa a Topolò / pod cerkvijo v Topoluovem / under the church in Topolò

quando? / kdaj? / when?

sabato e domenica / sobota in nedelja / Saturday and Sunday

〰️

Izba is a coworking space, small cafe, radio station, kitchen, party place, reading room.

The izba is in Topolove the room of conviviality. It is the clean room of the house, heated by the peč, the old stove made of majolica tiles, upon which children and elders used to nap, the room where tales were told and where guests felt welcome. Its opposite is the črna kuhinja, the black kitchen with the fireplace and no chimney. Inspired by the convivial inner meaning of this word, we named the new collective space of hospitality of Topolove Izba.

Curated by: Dora Ciccone and Caterina Roiatti

Graphic design by: Laura Savina

Photos by: Tanja Marmai

Izba is supported by Regione Friuli Venezia Giulia.

ABC

Affinity

Affinities are inclinations, affections, kinships, and connections between different bodies, human and non-human. The Irish essayist Brian Dillon defined affinity as "something a little bit stupid", "a realm of the unthought, unthinkable, something that unkillable by attitudes or arguments". The realm of pre-thought inclination towards something, the realm of love, perhaps you could also call it.
Perhaps we want to use the word affinity to first recall what the German philosopher Walter Benjamin called correspondence. With this concept, Benjamin hinted at the relationship between different elements of the world or its phenomena, which meaningfully connect with each other or create a certain resonance or organic analogy between them. His notion of correspondences contains the idea that certain objects, images, or experiences can be understood in relation to other objects, images, or experiences, whereby we can begin to reveal hidden connections and meanings that would be missed if we focused solely on individual entities before them being placed in one of these relationships.

written in 2023

Aljaž Škrlep

Be-longing

Written in 2022

Studio Wild

Izba

Written in 2021

Robida

Joyful Administration

How can we bridge the separation of one kind of work(er) – administrative, bureaucratic – from another – the creative or the academic? It is fundamental to understand these as two interconnected parts of every cultural endeavour. Joyful administration is a term I coined when confronted with the huge amount of administrative work behind my projects. It was an attempt to practice with joy the invisible side of cultural work and to propose that what defines the practice are these daily acts! To challenge and disrupt bureaucratic traps with radical imagination.

Written in 2023

Rosario Talevi

Kozolec

The word is translated into english as hayrack but we like to use the original Slovene word since the english translation is quite generic, indicating a structure where to hang to dry hay. The kozolec in Topolove, in its most complex shape, is an architecture standing on four or six pillars made of stone, covered by a roof, defined as a “monument to farmers culture”. The pillars are connected by wooden racks where hay, buckwheat or wheat was dried: these racks were filled up in summer and slowly emptied until winter. The kozolec is therefore an architecture showing in its filled or empty structure the passage of season, the cyclicity of time. A calendar in the shape of a house or a temple.

Written in 2022

Vida Rucli

written in 2023

Barbara Stimoli Titta C. Raccagni

Margins

Margins (geographical, topographical, as well as social), in opposition to centres, are spaces which are usually perceived as conservative, slow, un-creative and nostalgic. On the contrary, we like to intend them as places of radical openness (bell hooks), spaces particularly fertile with possibilities for change (Catriona Mortimer Sandilands), zones of unpredictability, at the edges of discursive stability (Anna Tsing). Margins, as well as peripheries, borders, edges, interstitial spaces and liminal zones are places of meetings, impacts and crossings, where ideas, life worlds, experiences and cultures collide and intermingle.

WRITTEN IN 2023

Vida Rucli

Mud

“Being mud is really different from being granite and should be treated differently. Mud lies around being wet and heavy and oozy and generative. Mud is underfoot. People make footprints in mud. As mud I accept feet. I accept weight. I try to be supportive, I like to be obliging.”
→ from Being Taken for Granite by Ursula K. Le Guin

written in 2023

Vida Rucli

No gods in this room!

Expression found in the notebook of last Summer School 2023, written big and circled in pink marker. Probably, but obviously without certainty, flourished during Olya's presentation.

Formula to be proclaimed (possibly aloud) before beginning any kind of collective conversation involving concrete or abstract, decisive or frivolous issues. It declares that we do not possess or look for certainty. Every thought, nebulous or rocky, finds its place in the irregular circle of our crossed legs. We do not desire dogmas, fixed points, we do not seek rigid structures. We want to learn by climbing green and flexible branches, with our feet in the niches of mutual knowledge, always careful not to step on luminescent mushrooms or newly laid eggs. "No gods in this room!”, no cathedra or pulpit, just wet, wild soils where to scatter our most bold ideas.

P.S. It is crucial to use the plural "gods" to give the atmosphere a fascinating aura of polytheistic antiquity.
P.P.S. There is no need to actually be in a room, you can also use it outdoors.
– Laura Savina

written in 2023

Laura Savina

Observing

In Topolò, one does not come to see things, or even just to look at them. One listens and observes. A landscape, a leaf, a gesture, a stone, a breath, a detail, a noise, a lichen, a relationship, a memory. From the micro to the macro, and vice versa, from the physical object to its abstraction. "Observing", from the Latin "ob-servare" or "to preserve, guard, consider", brings one back to the personal sphere of the in-depth understanding of things. In observing something, all of the action that this something exerts upon us is reflected.
I believe that knowing how to observe a place is the first step in taking care of it.

Written in 2022

Elena Rucli

Parasitic Reading Room

The Parasitic Reading Room is an open format formed by a multitude of voices in a spontaneous set of reading spaces. Texts gathered in a reader are spoken out loud by participants who should have a willingness to be affected by other voices and ideas. A Parasitic Reading Room intends to provoke a contagion of knowledge by acting as a parasite of its chosen site, as well as its reading participants. There is no straight line for the Parasitic Reading Room, but a zigzag of joyful moments which bring a multitude of voices to contemplate future imaginaries for spatial practices.
→ from Climate Care Reader 2021 by Rosario Talevi

Written in 2021

Rosario Talevi

Peer pressure / Beer pressure

Peer pressure is a well known phenomenon of being influenced by others in the group to engage in a behavior or activity that you may not otherwise engage in. It gives an opportunity to experience something new, stretch the bones, push yourself a bit further, take risks, feel alive. The subjects change as we grow: youths would do drugs, ride motorbikes or watch porn, people in their 30s would rather go for bouldering, jewelry making or pottery classes. It is a great force, but also can be tiring as hell.
The other famous phenomenon (very popular in the region of Brandenburg) is a beer pressure — the social urge to go out for a beer, or go out in general. It is flattering to get invitations, and yes, it is a pleasurable activity.
Yet, in both cases it is important to allow yourself to say I could not care less, and consequently do nothing, perhaps lie on the floor if that is what you crave for.

written in 2023

Ola Korbańska

Pisdaria

“I found a pisdaria.” – “What is that pisdaria?” – “Look how many pisdarie.” – “Here we will put some pisdarie.” – “I woke up feeling a pisdaria on my left leg.” – “Look, this is such a pisdaria!”

During autumn I lived for some time in Topolò and every now and then I have been hearing Ali saying pisdaria. One afternoon the sound of this word suddenly caught my attention. I started to repeat it, not knowing exactly what it meant. It became a synonym for thing, element, moment, word, feeling – one that is a bit familiar, little, light and simple. Something that, all the time it was repeated, would make us smile. Since then, all the time I talk with Vida or Elena all the little traces, marks, cute things, crumbles are just and simply pisdarie.

I find very fascinating and beautiful how language evolves in groups of people spending time together and how the meaning of a word like pisdaria can be familiar and understood by the specific group that has been together in a certain moment in time-space.

Franca Lucchitta

Politics of relation

“A politics of relation is not striving toward absolute alterity to the self, but rather to tip the concept of “subjectivity” away from “individuality” and in the direction of the inclination toward the other so that “being” is constituted not first through the “Self”, but through its own longings to be with. Belonging precedes being.”
→ from Be-Longing: Towards a Feminist Politics of Relation by Aimee Carillo Rowe

See also Positionality and Be-Longing

written in 2023

Vida Rucli

Polyrhythm

Brandon LaBelle defines Rhythm as—“the making of a particular order; it rivets together time and space according to certain energy expenditures, defining a relation amongst bodies and things; it is a field in which different orders meet, regimenting bodies while also affording acts of modulation and breakage; the beat is a territorial dispute, an argument; it is a violence bringing pain and pleasure together, teaching us how to find place and also how to redefine, reorganize or disrupt existing patterns”.
From Rhythm to Polyrhythm.
Polyrhythm is the simultaneous experience of two or more personal rhythms that are not readily perceived as deriving from one another but create an unexpected experience for both parties.

Written in 2021

Jack Bardwell

Porous body

A Porous Body is a highly permeable matter that unfolds by letting others in. Sensitive to the complex ecologies of the landscape, Porous Body engages with both its problematic and empathic participants to stimulate their ancestral, ‘tentacular’ memory. Porous Body repeatedly performs humble gestures {1}, revealing their significance in the continuity of the matter transfer.

{1} gestures and patterns that might be conventionally considered as unimportant, inferior, routine, domestic, or insignificant like those gestures of useless care we were exercising in Topolove or those of the “invisible fish” - simple wave-like movement patterns that are encoded in our spine.

written in 2022

Olga Kozmanidze

Positionality

“I am advocating a shift from a notion of identity that begins with “I” – as does the inscription “I-dentity”, which announces “I am…” – to a sense of “self” that is radically inclined towards others, toward the communities to which we belong, with whom we long to be, and to whom we feel accountable. Perhaps “positionality”, with its multiply placed “i’s” is a more appropriate signifier.”
→ from Be-Longing: Towards a Feminist Politics of Relation by Aimee Carillo Rowe

see also Politics of Relation and Be-Longing

written in 2023

Vida Rucli

Radical affection

"Radical Affection is a call for tender acts of individual and collective imagination through which new axes of caring, connection, and resilience might be forged. Calling those acts “radical” speaks to their power not only to transform how we live together, but also to a promise of emancipating people from structure and ideologies that have limited their thinking and thwarted agency."
→ from Slow Spatial Reader – Chronicles of Radical Affection by Carolyn F. Strauss (ed.)

Written in 2021

Vida Rucli

Re-cultivation

RE-CULTIVATION → to cause to grow or flourish anew

the action of cultivating land, or the state of being cultivated.
the process of trying to acquire or develop a quality or skill.

Written in 2022

Studio Wild

Re-placing

To bring words back to place, to ground them, to locate them. We discussed a lot about some terms, such as the word residency, so loaded with content which we would not necessarily find fitting our practices. But instead of replacing these words with others, instead of substituting them or ever re-inventing them, we start here with re-placing them, making them fitting our place, our context, our community.

Written in 2021

Vida Rucli

Relaxed and disciplined

One of the most prominent Slovene partisan poets Matej Bor once wrote: “The rhythm of Slovene revolutionary poetry must merge into one with our liberation struggle. And what is the rhythm of the awakened Slovenian masses? Relaxed and disciplined at the same time. Why would we search for form in various currents and -isms? Form is dictated to us by our flowing life itself.” Living in an abandoned village throughout the whole year requires intentionality in both discipline and relaxation. While life in the city is guided by the city-flow, in Topolò, the lack of the gaze of another during winter and our consequential habit of this lack turned our gaze to the flow of surrounding nature, our loyal companion: be persistent and disciplined in growing, generous and relaxed in giving.

Written in 2022

Aljaž Škrlep

How to make the site enter the publication, how to let it speak and through which channels? Can we be not carriers of the voice of the site, but doors through which it can speak its own language?

written in 2024

Vida Rucli

Written in 2023

Janja Šušnjar

Tingling

When the sunlight touches the surface of the water little sparkles appear – I call them tingles. It somehow makes me smile and feel light. When tingles affect my body, I usually can't calm down, a special enthusiasm takes over everything and makes me feel bubbling.

I love the Italian word to define this phenomena: 'formicolio', from 'formica' (ant); as when I was young and without noticing I sat over an ant hill – multitude in motion – and suddenly my body was covered of these fast little insects.
I experience different types of this little slight prickling sensation. Tingling describes both the quick, very quick movement of elements in space, the strong feeling of an emotion, and the feeling as if a lot of sharp points are being put quickly and lightly into the body.

Tingles for the unknown. Tingles for surprises. Tingles for excitement. Tingles of fear. Pins and needles.

Sometimes I take a moment to observe the splendid sparkles flowing on the surface of the water creating an over-shifting brilliant pattern. Somehow standing in a point and observing this spectacle gives me a sense of, at the same time, calm and excitement. Their magic and ephemeral presence is hard to grasp and even when I see them, if I slowly move I notice how the sparkle slowly disappears, but I carry some tingles with me.

_Tingling moments: little situations–traces–memories that I like to remember and carry-with-me. Lived moments, that if I think about, I immediately feel some joy and a sensation of lightness spreads all over me.
“How else do most of us experience history if not in the presence or absence of small things?”
Thea Lenarduzzi, Dandelions, Fitzcarraldo, 2020

Vida Rucli

Zappa

The hoe is an ancient and versatile agricultural and horticultural hand tool used to shape soil, remove weeds, clear soil, and harvest root crops. Shaping the soil includes piling soil around the base of plants (hilling), digging narrow furrows (drills) and shallow trenches for planting seeds or bulbs.

Written in 2022

Studio Wild