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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

“Belonging is where you long to belong, whom you want to nestle beside at the end of the day, who you call when you are in pain, or who accompanies you in ritual–in signifying practices that give life meaning. (...) The command is to “be” “longing”, not to be still, or be quiet, but to be longing. This being is, of course, a command to which we are already responding. (...) If the assumption of the individual is foundational to colonial modernity, my hope is that the assumption of belonging is constitutive of the decolonial imaginary.” → from Be-Longing: Towards a Feminist Politics of Relation by Aimee Carillo Rowe

see also Politics of Relation and Positionality

Thanks to Sophie Mak-Schram for having introduced this text to us!

written in 2023

Vida Rucli

Blue carpet

It is only allowed to walk on it without shoes and this rule is carefully respected by all. This stunning cobalt carpet, with amazingly long, soft bristles (almost like french fries) is a sanctity for understandable reasons. It is a real blessing to come back home from Topolo, and find little blue pieces felted into white, knitted socks — tiny memories of soft, blue walks.

Written in 2022

Ola Korbańska

Bordering

“For some a wall is a defence, for others an insult, and for others a means to spray graffiti on. And a line in the sand is not always a limit, as well as a border is not always a line in the sand. A line is geometry, a border is a power interpretation. What is important to the study of the ontology of borders on our world is not the item of the border per se, but the dynamic objectification process of the border; the power practices attached to a border that construct a spatial effect and which give a demarcation in space its meaning and influence. The border makes and is made. Hence, also in this respect indeed, a border is a verb. So, rather than a border we should speak of bordering.” (Hank van Houtum, The Janus-Face)
The border, like the face of Janus, simultaneously looks in two opposite directions: The border is necessarily a lie that limits, colonizes ontologically free and undivided territory. At the same time, it is a lie that is the truth. In the most basic sense, the border represents the sacred desire for eternal truth, which wants to cancel out the constant changeability of things. On the other hand, it is also the other way around: The border makes it possible to understand that precise ontological freedom and makes it an object of desire. How could you possibly desire something that is not the Other? The border is made and it makes.

written in 2023

Aljaž Škrlep

Boundaries (to honour them)

"A hooded seal gets everything they need to travel the world from only four days of nursing. No one knows how the Baikal seal ended up in a freshwater lake. And Amazon dolphins in captivity may be dying from sleep deprivation. What are boundaries that we choose and do not choose? What are distances that we choose and do not choose? What are the distances we need and what are the walls that will isolate and destroy us? How can we discern the differences between generative boundaries and destructive borders? Are we ready to move towards nourishing forms of adaptation?"
→ from Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Undrowned”. In: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. AK Press, 2020.

written in 2023

Rosario Talevi

Building-with

Whenever we build, we must work with specific materials in a particular site. How could we ever build without building-with? Yet, as reality is abstracted into a paper sheet or a computer screen, the tools architecture affords can often have an alienating effect, detaching oneself from the concrete reality of a material context. As a conscious effort to resist this perverse tendency, to build-with means to reclaim the autonomy of building by establishing a relationship to knowledge based on embodied experience. This involves entering into an attentive dialogue with matter and site, rather than imposing a preconceived idea over it.

Written in 2025

Antônio Frederico Lasalvia

Buzzing Spirit

These lines that always captivated me were written by the Austrian author Gerhard Roth. In his essay On Bees (1989), he speaks about the unity of the hive: the individual perceptions and thoughts as part of a larger whole, where the individual bees come together to form a kind of "buzzing spirit", the so-called "Bien" (German). "The "Bien" is the organism composed of all bees of a colony. It has no definite appearance ... It is an unusual animal, dancing and pulsating within itself, made up of freely moving body cells, and belonging to the liquid or gaseous state of aggregation rather than the solid." His way of describing the superorganism has been with me ever since, as the so-called buzzing spirit. To me it illuminates my relationship with bees, something that carries me throughout the year. Without touching them, I am touched by them. It is not the physical proximity that binds me, but the knowledge that the hives are in my care. Paradoxically, any intervention might be one too many as every intervention leads to more effort on the part of the hive because the Bien 'knows' how to survive and it is then that the hive is the most beautiful to observe, because it shows itself in its true form. Indeed it is not about physical care and interventions, but it is about consciousness and care that lies way beyond.

Written in 2023

Erika Mayr

Ca(r)r(y)ing

caring-carrying-maintaining
Juxtaposition of words thought during a thirteen day walk where what you carry is really what you care and need. Along the path everything becomes simple and the attention is directed to very elementary needs. Every time we move, for short or big periods, packing becomes a moment of visualising possible future needs in relation to what we care about having with us and what we are planning to live.
In the moment of sharing knowledge or else, we always consider what we care about, therefore what we always carry with us. In doing so we contribute to the maintenance (physical or theoretical) of something.

written in 2023

Francesca Lucchitta

Calendar

Now, then, before—time is a dimension we live in and a system of reference where to act, remember action and imagine others. We keep track of time. The measurement indicates the duration and the when, the from-when-to-when. A clock tells the time. The same temporal succession of states is constantly repeated. The repetition is cyclical. Each period has the same time duration.
We live in an environment characterised by natural changes (natural clock of the alternation of day and night, etc.) that we observed, understood and classified. In relation to these changes we organised our activities and it is necessary to find a structure where to keep track of these natural shifts and our actions, and to combine them.
A calendar could be defined as “a system by which time is divided into fixed periods, showing the beginning and end of a year” or as "table showing divisions of the year". A calendar also has the qualities of connecting different events and moments of a specific time frame, to inform one another, to see, plan and prepare ‘beforehand’. The calendar could be a tool to ‘bring the cycle together’, to assemble the events and seasons of a year as a whole, to give insight, access and overview.

Etymologically speaking the term comes from the latin verb calare "to announce solemnly, to call out," as the priests did in proclaiming the new moon that marked the calends. Meanwhile the root of calare comes from Proto-Indo-European *kele- (2) "to shout." The format of a calendar could therefore be seen as a call to action, an invitation to participate. Calendar address seasons which, with the influence of the climate crisis, are not stable according to months and days. Wolf-Dieter Storl suggests using a phenological calendar, which is not bound to dates and months such as astronomical calendars are, but where the beginning of a season is introduced by specific stages of development of plants (such as the flowering of dandelion), which can shift from year to year. The phenological seasons are defined in pre-, first- and late spring, early-, high- and late summer, early-, full- and late autumn and winterly rest.

Written in 2021

Francesca Lucchitta Kim Lang

Care

“Care work becomes better when it is done again, creating the specificity of a relation through intensified involvement and knowledge. It requires attention and fine-tuning to the temporal rhythms of an “other” and to the specific relations that are being woven together.”
→ from Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds by María Puig de la Bellacasa

Written in 2021

Vida Rucli

Caregiving

An action that comes from a feeling of humbleness and awe, especially used in terms of relations to nature and living matters (woods, leaf, animal, humans, …). Precondition of caregiving is a feeling of love, respect, mutual understanding and connectedness with “the other”. Caregiving centres on wanting to improve/keep the state of the matter and can be applied mostly on living beings. There are different practices of caregiving, some more useful than others, but both equally powerful and with the potential to change human position in their surroundings. A term that is in contrast to caregiving is ownership. What defines ownership are material things, not living beings and domination or a position of power. While on the other hand, caregiving is an act that focuses on the other, tries to blur the border between “me” and “the other”, ownership is a process of putting “me” in a dominant position, an owner. As Marjetica Potrč nicely said,” I am not the owner of my son, I can only provide him care”. The process of caregiving sums up the relation to non-human as well as to other human beings and provides a window to a more humble environment.

written in 2022

Jelena Radić

Cats

Topolò is mostly inhabited by female cats. Olá calls it a matriarchal village. Add to this the fact that each of us has a cat. A female one, of course. Between fights and games, they swap houses, glossing over the concept of private property. And we like this.
In the village, every inhabitant or visitor has met one of our cats, who, moved by this freedom, have crossed the threshold of domestic walls to meet people and explore other people's places and homes.
Everyone in the village, in one way or another, takes care of them, as if they were a little bit their own, too.
Dora has Marfa, the oldest of them all.
Elena has Tit with a severed tail and who had an identity crisis (from Tito it turned out to be Tita, but when in doubt, we leave her as Tit)
Vida has the young Pičič/Picig/Peachaech (multilingual).
And then there is Selena's latest arrival, Mačka, long-haired and three-coloured.

Written in 2022

Elena Rucli

Clearing

Opening, cleaning, allowing light to touch the ground, maintaining.

A space in the forest free from trees where light can reach the ground.
A clearing can be human-made and reflect a stubborn desire to keep a part of the forest empty from trees, perhaps as a reminder that what is today forest was once meadow. Or it can also appear naturally, by the fall of some trees that open a space for the light to enter the forest and touch the soil. It’s the shift we experience while walking through the forest, from a homogeneous dark space to one flooded with light, that makes every clearing a place.
When is maintained by humans, through the cyclical cutting of grass to avoid bushes and trees to grow, the clearing is the sign of a silent commitment, care, and presence.
What is the parallel of a clearing in a built environment, as the village?

Written in 2025

Vida Rucli

Collective

“It is important to think about the collective as an activity. To approach the notion of collectives not as a pre-existing social structure but as actively becoming in context. So that becoming a collective is an acting toward it, a coming together and dissolving and recomposing.” → from Preparing for the Not-Yet by Jeanne van Heeswijk

written in 2024

Vida Rucli

Colour rule

The first time is a gamble, a plunge. You might get lucky, who knows. From the second onwards, you will be careful (without really realising it), to choose accurately the colour of what you take with you to Topolò. You will act so influenced by a chromatic resonance that you will inevitably have perceived as you move through the village, from one house to another, one room to another. You will begin to understand that colours have a different value from the one you are used to giving them, they are not random attributes, they speak and tell of what would be impossible to put into words. If you pay attention you will learn to recognise the clues that colours suggest, you will know who passed by, who left that shirt on the chair, who set the table, who picked the flowers. The most experienced can recognise at first glance who is a local and who is passing by, just by deciphering their chromatic essence. It’s the silent rule of colours.

Written in 2022

Laura Savina

Comp(h)osting

Comp(h)osting. Interlacing hosting and composting – it’s about temporality, let encounters, conversations, events sediment, stay, be in contact with other remains, become a meshwork of elements which decompose to create humus to host again. Does this relation about composting and hosting speak only about finding a time for letting meetings, conversations, events (all things hosted) deposit – does it only speak of a slower temporality, of a time dedicated to waiting for the transformation of the material? To compost also means to accumulate in a place… so it’s at the same time about a slower time and about a shared place.
Comp(h)osting. Relating the host to the transformative essence of the compost. Who has the right to host? What is left after we have hosted (events, people, collective moments)? What is the aftercare these remains need?

written in 2023

Vida Rucli

Conspiring

Up at the top of the bell tower removed from the official proceedings, free to drink and talk, the situation conjured up other rebellious scenes of conversation in taverns, or at fireplaces, washrooms, and cafes where people would meet to ponder their yesterdays and tomorrows or conspire against the status quo. The word conspire, I have since found out, derives from the latin con (together with) and spirare (to breathe) to conspire then is to breathe together. What I find interesting about this shared air in the context of bell ringing and broadcasting is that you are also sharing an acoustic air. What is created in that intimate space is then expanded to include all that are in earshot of the bells or the radio signal. A recreation of that shared air, an expanded belonging through sound.
→ from A Space to Conspire by Jack Bardwell, published in Robida 9

written in 2023

Jack Bardwell

Continuity

Historical places that carry memories within them are living entities that can grow and adapt to changes without completely losing their character. The most important criterion that remains is the suitability of integrating new interventions into the existing space, rather than conforming to our expectations of how newly constructed buildings should look at a given time. Continuity implies uninterrupted connection and suggests the present and the future in which the identity of the space continues, evolves, and is continually reexamined.
Indeed, any response to a place is specific and requires a thorough understanding of the context and sensitivity when intervening in it. Respecting heritage and operating harmoniously within a space with a recognizable language is a responsibility that demands the ability to listen and question.

written in 2023

Janja Šušnjar

Conviviality

In the text The Convivial Table, Kelly Donati takes into consideration the difference between the notions of generosity and conviviality. While the first refers to an “individual altruistic virtue” and create an unequal relation of privilege and disadvantage, or gesture of an active giver and passive receiver, the second is “a hospitable stance of openness to difference, responsibility and receptiveness to the needs of others rather than one based on relations of benefactors and recipients”.
Conviviality (con- meaning “with” or “together” and vivere meaning “to live”)—as Donati says—”attends fundamentally to the question of how we live together”. The ‘we’ needs to look beyond the human and consider our interaction with other species—multispecies relations as Donna Haraway conceptualized in her work When Species Meet. How can we reshape the material and conceptual ways in which we share the world with others?

Written in 2021

Francesca Lucchitta

Dai

ma dai Vidaaa (low voice, with prolonged last syllable of the name), dai Ali (accompanied with a gesture of hands connected similarly to amen style, going back and forth), dai, dai (short and friendly, and encouragement while mixing dense polenta), daaaaai, incredibile! (said in certain cheerful disbelief, as a reaction to gossip).

Written in 2022

Ola Korbańska

Dwelling exercise

Exercise is a form of play and play is one of the essential forms of dwelling.
Try and Imagine, Describe, Work out the itinerary, Start at the end, Observe, Observe with a concern, Apply yourself, Note down what you can see, Walk backwards, Pick something from the floor, Turn it around, Note the absence, Count, Detect a rhythm, Read what’s written, Read backwards, Decipher, Wait, Carry on … “Until the scene becomes improbable, until you have the impression, for the briefest of moments, that you are in a strange town or, better still, until you can no longer understand what is happening or is not happening, until the whole place becomes strange, and you no longer even know that this is what is called a town, a street, buildings, pavements.” (Georges Perec, Species of Spaces)

Written in 2022

Janja Šušnjar

Education

How do we learn from each other and what is required? I say zero effort and no theory is required. Sweet naps and cigarettes are a condition. Pizzas and river walks are a must. Gossip could be helpful. Laundry making would do the job. The curriculum is written on a napkin smudged with gnocchi leftovers. The text book for such an education is a transcript of The Nonna sharing her memories about the practical use of moonlight. Or a documentation of multiple giggles and whispers cracking the silence of a night, when no one sees where they go and are about to trip almost every step. The classroom would be – sitting on the stone steps, like the Latin academy, but no togas this time – maybe swimming suits or cotton overalls? No desks, but a long table – I cannot hear you too well, but does it matter? The portrait of Baby Jesus with a blue ball hanging on a wall. Be careful in the toilets, the scorpios hang out there at night. What else? Dancing is required – the one that starts with 20 people or so and ends with the three sweaty ones that refuse to stop dancing till 5 in the morning and thus learn that they are a kin. Exam is cooking for 100 people. The holidays are always and it’s ok. The teacher is everyone and failure is a virtue.

written in 2024

Olya Korsun

Elusive

from Elusive Earths, the book by Jennifer Teets and Lorenzo Cirrincione which speaks of medicinal clays: are these maybe elusive because of the scarcity of research on them, because they speak with reticence? Elusive can be a synonym of vague and indefinite but it also speaks of mystery somehow. Someone who is elusive – I feel – tends to hide, not wanting to be named, to be recognised maybe. Jennifer spoke about memory as care. I think about our elusive landscape, which hides traces of past histories (or her-stories – how much of the story of a landscape is actually connected to women’s actions on that landscape?) that are maybe recognisable only to attentive eyes. Elusiveness therefore also speaks of attention. And of humbleness too, somehow. Of something that is not loud, partly hidden, that needs attention to be noticed and named and memory to be taken care of with.

written in 2022

Vida Rucli

Eyes of the Body

Things we forgot that exist within or around us. They come in various forms – senses being just one of them. A lot of bodily eyes can be collected, grown or found as wild berries in the deep forest. In order to (re)open them one must go deep in the unknown fields of green, taking the risk of being hurt by the thorns growing all around. Collecting the eyes of the body means listening, sharing and encountering with our environment (people, plants, places, animals, bacteria, stones, weather, history,...).

written in 2022

Pia Gerbec

Face/Surface

“In experiential terms, the abstract philosophical distinction between subjects and objects is readily understandable when it is translated into the difference between faces and surfaces. A face individuates whoever has it, rendering this being, precisely, a who. Whether smooth or rugged, a surface is the anonymous outer layer of material existence, delimited in its finitude by edges, beyond which this particular surface ends.
Just as the subject-object distinction is not set in stone and has, in fact, recently undergone a thorough questioning and critique, so its palpably experiential corollary is far from secure. Faces are actually made of living surfaces—of skin, above all, but also the protrusions or invaginations of sense organs, without which a face does not open itself to the world and the world remains closed to a face. And, in their uniqueness, in the unrepeatable interplay of their edges, clashing and overlapping, surfaces are not entirely anonymous; instead, they are facialized, beyond the symbolic machinery of metaphor or allegorical connotations. Do houses have faces, with their windows and doors playing the role of their sense organs? Does a mountain have a face, its slopes uniquely bedecked with lush forests and, on a more limited scale, peppered with the white of house walls? Do flowers and trees have faces, too?”
→ from Michael Marder, The Faces and Surfaces of Robida

written in 2023

Michael Marder

Fear of periphery

The fear of being peripheral, of remaining out, is a feeling and concept that I feel quite strongly while living and working here in Topolove. Working with contemporary culture on the margins, in a small village, puts you always in relation to the city, to the center, to which you always look for validation. Fear of periphery speaks about the need of being in contact with the urbanity and of the power relation that still exists between culture at the center and at the margins. Fear of periphery is about claiming power and also about emancipation. It portrays a need of being connected to transformation (which is usually urban). It also reflects on what is expected from the peripheries (a certain type of works, connected to crafts, ancient knowledge, traditions) and on how to go beyond these expectations.

Written in 2022

Vida Rucli

Ferality

To find oneself lost in ancient positions, to forget what comfort is. Discovery of the possibility of being no longer part of a domesticated society and need to (re)discover the places we live in through our senses. This might exclude the sight, try to walk with your eyes closed. I feel like we are scared of getting lost in our feral side. How does it affect the way we behave? Does it include a kind of loss?
I stopped for a minute, sitting on a bench, and saw my body and eyes twisted, looking for unwanted parasites. That made me perceive – and remember– that I am an animal, before a human-being.
September resolution, be as feral as you can! Let your knowledge include what hearing, smell, taste and touch can offer you.

written in 2022

Martina Negroni

Gentleness

“Gentleness is primarily an intelligence, one that carries life, that saves and enhances it. Because it demonstrates a relationship to the world that sublimates astonishment, possible violence, capture and pure compliance out of fear, it may alter everything and every being. It is an understanding of the relationship with the other, and tenderness is the epitome of this relationship.”
→ from Power of Gentleness. Meditations on the Risk of Living by Anne Dufourmantelle

written in 2023

Sasha van Aalst

Gossip

When traveling and visiting friends, it is always nice to bring a gift. Whether it's a bottle of wine or a cake, a book or a postcard, “knocking with your feet” (as we say in Rome when someone shows up at an invitation with something small to share, a.k.a. a “pensierino”) is always greatly appreciated. Now, if you happen to be passing through Topolò whether it is for a short walk or a longer stay, perhaps to study or work, know that no gift is more welcome to the Robide than gossip. “Gossip is God” is a phrase you have heard for sure or will certainly hear if you begin to become familiar with this place and especially its female inhabitants (and their friends and friends of friends and so on..). Gossip beats everything else, gossip comes before and above everything else: it is like a sacred object that needs no introductions or justifications, it annihilates the formalisms of social relations, it overrides good manners and the “unwritten rules” of friendship, it goes beyond any shared and recognized code of behavior. That’s it: Gossip is God.
Fascinated by this concept and now inexorably enveloped by its coils, one day I wanted to look up what the origin of this curious word was. For me, being Italian, it is a bizarre yet common term that does not refer to anything intuitively relatable to its meaning. So I typed the magic word into Google and was amazed. The word “gossip” is actually connected with the word “God”:
Old English godsibb “sponsor, godparents”, from God + sibb “a relative” (siblings). The sense was extended in Middle English to “a familiar acquaintance, a close friend, a neighbour”, thus a person with whom one gossips (c. 1300), especially to women friends invited to attend a birth. Later to “anyone who engages in familiar or idle gossip” (1560s).
But not only that, and here's the kicker:
The term godsibb is often found used with the feminine meaning, godmother, “madrina”. The reason may lie in female solidarity, born at a time when women were completely excluded from public life. Gossip, then, only among themselves, was a clear sign of reaction to male domination, a way to carve out a space in which women's opinion had value. Gossip is described by some as having connotations of warmth, intimacy and bonding. Suddenly this word acquires a new seductive meaning, a political one. It sounds like the name of the first spontaneous, extremely intimate and personal form of feminist struggle. I don't know about you, but for me now, more than ever, Gossip is God.

written in 2023

Laura Savina

Grounded

“How to be grounded without getting stuck in the mud of personal experience? I guess I am trying to re-articulate ‘grounded’ as a ‘thinking-and-making-with’. (...) To be grounded means to be porous to remote impressions, to trust the touching done by (other-than-human) others.”
→ Femke Snelting in Making Matters by Janneke Wesseling & Florian Cramer (eds.)

Written in 2022

Vida Rucli

Growing as a plant

Accept the unfolding of events without probing into the reasons behind them; let them flow and recede. Keep your gaze fixed on the sun, seeking light and warmth, while anchoring your roots deep into the ground, tracing the paths of tiny streams. Approach other beings with gentleness, lightly rub against each other, and discovering your own place within the spaces occupied by others. Inhale deeply with every part of your body, perceive with all your senses. Release dry leaves and embrace change if it enhances your well-being.

written in 2022

Laura Savina

Guest

Following Jacques Derrida’s text Of Hospitality (1997), hospitality (if not unconditional) implies a power to host and hence involves claims to property, ownership and a form of self-identity. The opposition between who is a host and who a guest, therefore, speaks of a relation of power.
For this reason when possible we try to avoid this duality of hosts vs. guests, speaking rather of temporary and permanent dwellers or referring to guests as co-dweller. Making the relation between temporary and permanent inhabitants reciprocal and sharing with guests responsibilities the place demands is a way of overcoming this binarity – of making hosts less hosts and guests less guests. (Furthermore, the fact that in Italian the host and the guest are called with the same word – ospite – helps to go beyond this dualism).

Written in 2021

Vida Rucli

Hexagonal Dialogues

A musical composition of equilateral hexagonal entanglement of six elements: violin, analogue synthesiser, bees, nature environment, room acoustics and audience.

written in 2023

Tiziana Bertoncini Thomas Lehn

Horror

When the fog rises from the valley after a rainy autumn night, a brief and barely noticeable shudder runs across the village of Topolò. Some of the older inhabitants still remember the Incident when, during a season of heavy rains, a party of volunteers in search of the ethologist Marco Contrada vanished under mysterious circumstances. Some attributed their disappearance to the škrakjaci, historically known to lead travellers astray in the forests of Topolò, while others spoke of two sisters who, having been banned from the village as bringers of misfortune, were said to inhabit the ruins of an abandoned cabin. Following the Incident, the villagers called upon a sorceress, who sealed the powers of horror away in the corner of an old house but could not eradicate them entirely. Each new unwitting visitor is a reminder of the looming threat that the spell could once again be lifted, be it by accident of by design, tipping over the precarious balance and once again unleashing the ancient horrors of the valley.

Written in 2025

Moritz Gansen

Hospitality

Building a relationship between two people, in a space and a time: a door always open, a warm cake in the morning or a glass of wine to share in a summer evening. Opening your private dimension to someone else, bringing a fragment of your home in a stranger one, becoming part of its story and collecting something to carry with you. A reciprocal exchange of care, gossip and good food.

Written in 2022

Dora Ciccone

Hyperlocal

As defined in the Oxford Dictionary, "hyperlocal" is an adjective that relates to or focuses on matters concerning a small community or a specific geographical area.
Hyperlocal activity is not merely about fitting in; it's an active response to the unique attributes of a place, enabling its improvement, regeneration, and long-term resilience.
Hyperlocal activity involves a deep sense of belonging to a particular place and community. This connection is not limited to those who permanently reside in the area; it extends to individuals who have a strong affection for it.

written in 2023

Janja Šušnjar

Intense proximity

Intense proximity is a term coined by Okwui Enwezor which we use to refer to the relation we strive to stimulate between the temporary dwellers and the site where they are immersed into, intending it not only as a physical environment but also as a situation, an event, a set of relations among people and other inhabitants of the place.

Written in 2021

Vida Rucli

Interspecies Space

“What if the social, economic, and political contradictions spawned in the modern city were to be flipped? What if plants and non-human animals were understood as city dwellers and spatial producers, giving us the opportunity to understand and design living spaces for a wide range of users beyond pure exploitation, speculation, and utilitarianism? Could the complex structure of the city as an inter-species space open up new modes of subjectivation, kinship, and solidarity? Could it produce and promote a concept of politics and subjectivity beyond neoliberal individualism?”
→ Marion von Osten, “Swooping in and out of the tiniest niches on the façade” in Making Futures, 2022

written in 2023

Rosario Talevi

Intimate necessity

Intimate necessity is a word that I frequently use to refer to the modality of thinking/doing of Robida. I use this term to explain that whatever we do is not driven by a concrete, real, detached-from-us necessity of the place/situation we are immersed in (in our case, the village of Topolò), it is not necessarily an answer to those urgent questions that the place opens. The adjective “intimate” refers to the personal dimension that we recognize in these needs of the place. It is a way to underline that, with our practice, we cannot bear on our shoulders all the urges that surround us but we chose those which have an intimate resonance for us. This gives us the possibility of finding our personal meaning for what we do, avoiding the risk of operating just to solve things, without building a personal attachment to these urgencies.

Written in 2021

Vida Rucli

Irrigation

"Quando c'è acqua c’è vita" (Graziano 2022)
Irrigation is the agricultural process of applying controlled amounts of water to land to assist in the production of crops, as well as to grow landscape plants and lawns, where it may be known as watering.

Written in 2022

Studio Wild

Izba

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.

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

Kuota (sl)

KUOTA (sl)/ CARBONAIA (it): "Era quasi mattina quando i due sono arrivati allo spiazzo d'una carbonaia e l'omone ha detto: Qui possiamo far tappa. Pin s'è sdraiato sul terreno fuligginoso e come in un sogno ha visto l'omone coprirlo con la sua mantellina, poi andare e venire con dei legni, spaccarli, e accendere il fuoco." → Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno by Italo Calvino, 1947

Written in 2022

Studio Wild

Landguage

“I write about Slovene as a sharp terrain, a landguage, perhaps. Sharp sounds, sounds I had to climb on, to cling onto, many other fragments where soil reverberates like a spell, a spillage, a geography of foreign noise”, writes Giorgia Maurovich in her article Soil Searching, written for Robida 9. Landguage reminds me of the dearest sentence by bell hooks who said “I have been working to change the way I speak and write, to incorporate in the manner of telling a sense of place, of not just who I am in the present but where I am coming from, the multiple voices within me” (from Choosing the Margins as A Space of Radical Openness, bell hooks, 1989).

Written in 2023

Vida Rucli

Learning-With

The with in learning-with has multiple interpretations. Firstly, it is the antonym of the proposition without, which is so characteristic of the standard pedagogical process. The sterile classroom is only one of its withouts: it puts the one who learns out of the context of everyday life, in which — so it seems — learning does not and cannot take place. As if learning is one of the multiple modes of being in which a human subject can put itself into, modes which are strictly separated from one another. But learning-with “is not a predominantly mental function, but a ‘movement’ of life, involving the human subject as a whole and in relation to the various environments that constitute the ecological world,” wrote authors Carvalho, Steil and Gonzaga in their article Learning from a more-than-human perspective. Plants as Teachers (2020).
But the with also opposes the proposition from, as in learning-from, the method which clearly assumes that there is an essential opposition between the student and the teacher, the opposition which perpetuates the power relations imposed on subjects by the standard pedagogical process. Learning-with, on the other hand, means — as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney wrote in their The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) — to be “committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. […] The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.” There is no call to order in learning-with, no interpellation into teachers and students, activity and passivity, spaces of study and spaces of mere being. But learning-with is not only a simple gesture of dismantling this binary opposition, but a context, that provides a way of forming a new possible subjectivity, which is open to contaminations from outside — the environment, the landscape and its human and non-human inhabitants; learning-with provides a context, as famously wrote Moten and Harney, “where people sort of take turns doing things for each other or for the others, and where you allow yourself to be possessed by others as they do something.” Being possessed by others, their otherness and particular personalities, everyday practices, eating habits, choice of words, tics, even — this is what we call learning-with.

Aljaž Škrlep

Lecture par arpentage

Literally translated into English as reading through land surveying. Arpenter means to measure, to determine the surface of a piece of land, its extent, to know or, at best, to recognise and grasp its limits. Or arpenter as to walk with a wide, determined stride.
La lecture par arpentage is a shared and collective form of reading, developed and practised in working-class circles at the end of the 19th century in France.
A simple, non-dogmatic process that can be adapted to the context and desires of readers. A text, a book, a poem, a sentence. Literally torn into as many pieces as the number of participants. First, an individual moment in front of the words, the signifiers, the content, the layout, of a length chosen at the beginning of the workshop. And then a pooling of impressions, thoughts, sensations, questions and misunderstandings. For a collective understanding, an open discussion, questioning of the learning practices. An intimate moment for oneself with part of the text; a moment shared with the other participants to discover the other pieces of the puzzle, to eventually grasp the importance of the collective, shared, and hopefully nourishing experience.

written in 2023

Irene Lunghi

Lei

She/her in Italian – a three-lettered word crucial for the village, where the population is more female than men. The gossip goes, that the young generation created a Slavic Matriarchy here, which is an incredibly heartwarming concept. They even have a flag of “lei” which they hang on the balcony, alternating with the one with a peace symbol on it.

Written in 2022

Ola Korbańska

Line-ing

How do you trace the boundaries of a garden? Which is the limit that defines what is inside and what is outside? Without realising it, our life is a set of lines, imaginary or real. You follow the directions of the road that lead you to your destination, you follow a path, you move from one room to another in a museum according to the logic of a curator, you take a plane, you cross a border.
While I diligently walk the paths of Topolò, the mule tracks that lead to the various terraces surrounding the landscape, which were once diligently travelled by mules, I notice other traces. A passage of wild pigs that have wildly ignored the linearity of the path and cut across it, moving earth and stones in search of roots or other food. A little further on, just off the path, I see traces of “secondary paths” made by deers. They too have ignored the path favoured by us, human beings.
This made me think about how often we rely on the linearity of others (lines in space but also mental lines or trajectories) and how often we go along with them, override them or simply ignore them.

Written in 2025

Elena Rucli

Listening

From the Old English "hlysnan", "pay attention to". If all places are characterized by their soundscapes, these are often richer than ever in the proximity of the margin, and being there demands for listening, for paying attention. To take care of something also means to be able to listen to it, and arriving in a place is always also a matter of letting it talk to you. Topolò always welcomes me with its soundscape of sounds, languages and voices, familiar and foreign ones: and it is surely no coincidence that right here a radio was born, and that I can listen to the sounds and voices of Topolò through it, even when I am not there.

Written in 2022

Maria Moschioni

Listening (new)

“It is not one and the other who are listening to each other; it is actually listening that is unfolding between them. This gentleness arises because it connects two strangers who have become intimate; once or twice a week, same time, same place. These strangers were once children whose thoughts, imagination, fears, longing, amazement, feelings of love are lodged in fragments of light in the body, in words, in what lights up their eyes. The power of listening is an activator, in the folds---as understood by Deleuze---of the psyche that are microrecorders of the real. Listening watches over the unexpected.”
→ from Power of Gentleness. Meditations on the Risk of Living by Anne Dufourmantelle

Sasha van Aalst

Maintenance

In the spirit of giving care and attention, maintenance does not necessarily mean a return to any particular condition, or even transformation into a new state. Nothing performative, we just come to the land together, or alone. Maintenance entails ongoingness, indeterminacy, a certain sense of precarity that demands attention. Presence. Celebration. Being in the place. A noticing of what is there now, and what could become.
Maintaining a landscape is about maintaining relationships.

written in 2023

Antonio Sotgiu Jean Ni

Mapping

Inspired by the (Re) discovering our places intimate mapping workshop
curated by Mathilde M. Cahill during the Summer School 2023

Mapping can be a personal, intimate or a collective exploration.
An intimate way of taking note of organic traces - sounds, smells, touches - paths of memories, places of rituals, houses, places of human conviviality, fountains, trees…
You can map the known places but also the unknown ones; those where you are not yet ready to go, those where you do not wish to go, and the most well-known ones that can become extraordinary each time. You can map the paths in the landscape that lead to water, those that lead to favourite places, those where you used to practise small rituals, listening, a meditation, a small dance, an act of care towards a place.
Mapping as a recording of embodiments of meeting with humans and more than humans, through senses.
Mapping as a way of looking, sensing and moving differently.
Mapping as opening possibilities, re-mapping, re-reading boundaries, creating alternative worlds.
Mapping with other humans or more than human - plants, fungi, other animals, minerals: a relational mapping.
Mapping as a collective way of sharing personal and common geographies.
Mapping the sky, the earth, a rock, a village, a mountain, a sea, an ocean.
Mapping is also changing perspectives, high and low, East and West, macro and micro, subverting spatial rules to invent new ways of looking at the land.
Mapping is also micromapping, a way of becoming with.

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.

Francesca 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

Residency

The term residency, and especially artist residency, is many times the carrier of a concept that we do not find appropriate for the type of involvement we wish to generate in our place. We do not see the residency as a place where the artist/researcher/architect/etc. would withdraw, a creative retreat where the person is isolated and self-focused.
Anyway we don’t want to find another word but to re-claim the word residency which we found interesting as it is a chronotope (using Michail Bakhtin word, coined in 1973) – it contains a spatial dimension (meaning the concrete place where the person is hosted) and at the same time a temporal dimension (recalling a defined period of time in which the person is hosted). Other words do not have this quality, some (as guesthouse) refer much more to a specific space, others (as sojourn) refer to a period of time. Residency is here intended as a permeable space – that reacts, reflects and cares for what it has around it – and as an expandable time – guests can prolong their stay, return and start to build, through time, a relation with the place.

See also Temporary Dweller, Return, Village as House

Written in 2021

Vida Rucli

Responsibility

Joan C. Tronto and Berenice Fisher in the text Care as a Basis for Radical Political Judgements (1995) suggest four phases of care, each of which has a concomitant virtue. The first of these four phases is “caring about'' and its related virtue is attentiveness; the second phase is “taking care of” and the pertinent virtue is responsibility. (The other two phases and virtues are “care-giving” – competence and “care-receiving” – responsiveness).

Written in 2021

Vida Rucli

Return

What does it mean to return to a place, each time rooting deeper. To connect to place, its people, plants is to take part, be with it, through it, over and under it. By taking distance we can observe growth, transformation and take direction. Returning is about taking time to look back and look forward. It’s about remembering and dreaming. It’s about taking apart and (re) building. Returning is about movement with care, with trust and with doubt in order to know a little more and a little less.

Written in 2022

Suzanne Bernhardt

Rituals

“Rituals are symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. (...) They are to time what home is to space. They render time habitable.”
→ from The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han

Written in 2023

Vida Rucli

Routines

And with the passage of time; and again; another time; routines live in repetition, in the execution of an act over and over, again and again.
Routine comes from route, path, road. A personal or collective practice that comes with experience, patience and time. When thinking about them the image of a wheel (from french roue) comes to mind—this round object moves forward just by rotating on itself. It needs the energy to do so but once it’s in movement it goes.
These repeated gestures allow us to orientate in time and space, as daylight and dark, giving a rhythm to our days, months, years. Routines can be site specific: an act performed with the land, a facility or specific person; "nomadic": they belong to the body, you carry them around for all your life; and alienating or monotonous, when related to work.

Written in 2021

Francesca Lucchitta Kim Lang

Ruin

Gilles Deleuze reading Charles Dickens: “A disreputable man, a rogue, held in contempt by everyone, is found as he lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care of him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love, for his slightest sign of life. Everybody bustles about to save him, to the point where, in his deepest coma, this wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating him. But to the degree that he comes back to life, his saviors turn colder, and he becomes once again mean and crude. Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death." That very moment is the moment of the ruin: we admire it, because while dying, a life shines through it. This realization that life and death play in everything that is, is cultivated while admiring the ruin.

Written in 2022

Aljaž Škrlep

Situated Knowledges

Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals. The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular. The science question in feminism is about objectivity as positioned rationality. Its images are not the products of escape and transcendence of limits (the view from above) but the joining of partial views and hating voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living without limits and contradictions – of views from somewhere.
→ from Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective by Donna Haraway

Written in 2021

Vida Rucli

Situated Publishing

Situated publishing practices are those publishing practices that hold, host, are informed by and reflect places. How can publishing formats and methods mirror places? Is there a difference between publishing from a city or a rural environment? How do places enter publications - beyond the usual formality of being mentioned in colophons? Can publishing – whose main goal is to be dispersed, distributed widely and circulating – be also situated, localised, grounded and site-informed?

Our situated magazine is held, hosted, supported and informed by this specific place and the view we have to the world from here, which doesn't necessarily mean that the content of our publication speaks about this locality. It is maybe situated because its reason to be is deeply grounded in our specific context. It is maybe situated because the cyclical change of seasons, which we are immersed in, impacts how we work, how we stay together, what we think about.
We live here porously and are constantly transformed by others, by friends who visit us, by the weather, by the forest. The village and its landscape host our walks during the pauses while designing the magazine and from the walks we bring back traces that graphically enter the magazine and our memories. Its changing seasons give rhythm to our work – summer: the fullness we generate, winter: the emptiness we desire – the heavy rains and storms affect electricity lines and we are left without light for half a day or sometimes even for entire days.

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

Spirit

The word Spirit has its roots in the Latin “spiritus” meaning breath, which might explain why spiritous means humorous in Italian. A laugh is after all an exercise in uncontrollable breathing, an escaping spirit perhaps. While in Topolò I became fascinated with the pirate process of creating grappa in the region. The illegality of this ancient process and all the social, spatial implications of this. Distillation can be traced back to 1200 BCE describing processes of perfumery. But it is the 14th Century alchemists using these processes to try and transform everyday materials into gold who saw this process as extracting the spirit of fruit or plant matter hence the term Spirits to describe this strong alcoholic beverage. To alchemists, drinking grappa would be consuming the spirit, the life force, of the grape. These processes still have a kind of magic about them. I find these alchemists an inspiring analogy for the creative process. The alchemists took their own imagination so seriously, like a kid making a mud pie in the garden that eventually, serendipitously they were creating alcohol, modern science and medicine.

Alchemy → Science
Spirits → Alcohol
Agriculture → Culture

Written in 2022

Jack Bardwell

Steepness

Topolò is born on steep ground. From this there is no escape. When you walk, you are constantly with your body in tension: gravity pulls us downhill. So if we stop and stand, we have to calibrate the weights well. You can not run too fast down to the river. That leads us to be slower -why not?- and more careful, more observant. Very often the steepness is related to something uncomfortable. But in the end it’s a matter of habit. Adapting to the steepness of the ground, or rather conforming to it, makes us more similar to the landscape.

written in 2022

Elena Rucli

Stones

If one can patiently stand still within the slippery landscape, if one lets the freezing water fall on them with no particular reaction, if one knows how to win and lose the paper, rock, scissors game, if one is cool, and quiet, and pretty, means they learned well from the allies of this place – stones.

Written in 2022

Ola Korbańska

Strategic antropomorphism

Knowledge is a form of persuasion. It distributes visibility and power. We know that we cannot know precisely. So why not know creatively? One of the most potent and primordial strategies of creative human thinking is anthropomorphizing. It was always perceived as an anti-philosophical all-too-human colonization of the non-human. However, when a poet personifies non-human entities, he does not merely compare, but also creates: a new possible form of sensation which sees non-human entities as agents with their own autonomous power. Get out of your chair too quickly and the stars themselves will rush before your eyes; the crickets are trying to tell you something; the stone rolling along the ridge is its way of self-expression.

Written in 2022

Aljaž Škrlep

Stream

Either an act (to stream) or a small, narrow river it is always transmitting. Bringing and keeping together small ponds in the forest, a continuous flow of water or information, observation. Providing, feeding, connecting, maintaining. A crucial element of a closed circle. A carrier of information jet being an information itself – of something happening somewhere, might it be underground.

written in 2022

Pia Gerbec

Support

“We define 'support' as the ways your needs for well being are met in order to dream, practice, and work on any project. Support extends beyond the life of the project, often shaping the ways in which people navigate the contradictions of living and working. We are focused not on the support practices that we utilize for short-term projects, but on the ongoing support that is necessary for livelihood and for social reproduction.”
→ from Reproducing the Struggle: A New Feminist Perspective on the Concept of Social Reproduction by Fulvia Serra (2015)

Written in 2021

Lenn Cox

Symbiosis imperative

A common need and demand to live in symbiosis with each other, with ‘the other’, in order to survive (global but also personal) challenges. Only together can we get there.

Written in 2022

Janja Šušnjar

Symposium

We were initially hesitant to use this term to describe our two-days gathering because it recalls serious academic meetings. In its roots, however, it indicates the act of being together, often accompanied by music and chants (and traditionally food and wine). We liked this second interpretation!

Written in 2021

Vida Rucli

Tacit knowledge

Tacit knowledge is the knowledge you have gained through living experience, both in your personal life and professional development. It is often subjective, informal, and difficult to share or express because it is affected by our personal beliefs and values.

Written in 2022

Studio Wild

Temporary dweller

Dwelling is primarily the establishment of a relationship between a human being and the environment. This relationship is established through identification or a sense of belonging to a certain place. Hence, the dwelling community is not necessarily only people permanently living in the place, but also those who have an affection to the place and dedicate care to it. Those who keep returning, those who spend every holiday in a specific place, those who create for the place, those who are inspired by the place, those who experience it as a safe shelter, waiting for them like family. The set of relations between people dwelling in place and people visiting/returning are bound in time, not in a hurry, but in a low spiral time. Community is built on values such as reciprocity, collaboration, support, and care.

See also Residency, Responsibility, Return, Visiting

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

Written in 2023

Francesca Lucchitta

Toolbox house

Hybrid space of "super-living"; Active and generative resource (in botany: generative nucleus, the one present in the pollen grain). A place without a perimeter, conceptually infinite. Capable of functional metamorphosis, the toolbox house responds to the needs that question it, flourishes with transitory, totally usable tools and spatial solutions. Space that lends itself to change, puts itself into play.

Written in 2021

Laura Savina

Topophilia

Topophilia - a term coined by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan - is the affective bond between people and place or setting. Diffuse as concept, vivid and concrete as personal experience, the term topophilia couples sentiment with place. Topolò/Topolove is for us the receiver of that affection Tuan is speaking about which is rooted, for many of us, in actually inhabiting the place, be it short term, long term, permanently or cyclically.

Written in 2023

Vida Rucli

Tramontana (wind)

A message from the sea. To remind the mountains of the oceans. The word came from Latin trānsmontānus (trāns- + montānus), beyond/across the mountains, Alps in the North of Italy. The word has other non-wind-related senses: it can refer to anything that comes from, or anyone who lives on, the other side of mountains, or even more generally, anything seen as foreign, strange, or even barbarous.

Written in 2022

Suzanne Bernhardt

Undisciplined

“Undisciplined practice is too busy with proliferating sensibilities, issues, demands, requests, complains, entanglements, methods, and questions to bother with the inherent etiquette of disciplinarity. It insists on a mode of thinking and making that is situated and ad-hoc. It is anti-solutionist and motivated by the need for rigorous uncalibration and disobedient action research.”
→ Femke Snelting in Making Matters by Janneke Wesseling & Florian Cramer (eds.)

Written in 2022

Vida Rucli

Useless care

Within a landscape which is abandoned since fifty years, a once productive land which today hosts a young forest, a post or ex rural landscape – what does care mean? What type of minimal gestures could represent transformation or even only maintenance? Useless care is represented by those types of gestures and practices which do probably not make any difference, do not change the course of landscape’s transformation: they describe an attitude toward a territory, they are memento of your presence right there, a caress to the environment that surrounds you every day. They speak of collaboration and co-habitation, rather than of control and use of the land. Small gestures of useless care could represent a possible feminist approach to abandoned landscapes to which we feel a certain affection.

Written in 2022

Vida Rucli

Vernacular

Vernacular are, I think, all those products, objects, buildings, works that organically develop out of practices of dwelling. They are therefore situated, embodied, vulnerable (“because location is about vulnerability” says Donna Haraway in her Situated Knowledges). This definition of vernacularity as practice of dwelling came out during the Morning Reading Room sessions on Radio Robida, talking with Jack Bardwell.

Written in 2022

Vida Rucli

Village as House

A concept elaborated by Janja Šušnjar in 2019 in her master thesis that reflects on a specific way of inhabiting the village of Topolò/Topolove by Robida collective, namely as if the village itself is a house.
Such a way of conceiving the village invites its dwellers to fluidly move from one building to another – from their private bedroom, to the common kitchen or workshop – inhabiting the village as a set of interconnected spaces.
This spatial concept, built upon the decentralisation of the house, stimulates an extension of the relation of care, which is directed not only to private spaces but also to common buildings and the spaces between them: the idea and practice stimulates inhabitants to actively engage in the care and well-being of the entire village.
Topolò/Topolove – the Village as House is therefore an experiential exercise of collective care-taking of a place, where inhabitants of Topolò are re-imagined as stewards and custodians of the village.

Written in 2023

Vida Rucli

Vine

Holding on, reaching out. Following the vines around the village and around the terraces surrounding the village. Along their reaching, holding on whatever support structure they can find. The vines show us how to reach out. Guide us to unexpected support structures and invite to this dance over the seasons.

Written in 2022

Suzanne Bernhardt

Visiting

Visiting is not an easy practice; it demands the ability to find others actively interesting… to cultivate the wild virtue of curiosity, to retune one/s ability to sense and respond – and to do all this politely! → from Staying with the Trouble – Making Kin in the Chtulucene by Donna Haraway

Written in 2021

Vida Rucli

Whispering Intervention

“Whispering”: uttering words with a soft, almost unheard, devocalized breath.
“Intervention” (from inter “between” + venire “to come”): the in-between yet to come.

It is often assumed that placemaking requires large-scale interventions, monumentalish architecture, or heavy material and financial investment. In the context of curating as placemaking, this assumption overlooks the power of what we call Whispering Intervention. Even the smallest gestures — a sign, a modest structure, or a provisional marking — can activate a site, transforming it into a place of encounter, collective reflection and imagination. Yet this insight alone does not go far enough: whispering interventions do more than merely activate a place; they can even amplify its impact. They are a tactic for maximal placemaking, privileging relationality, affect, and imagination over objecthood.

Written in 2025

Aljaž Škrlep

Who is cooking

Present continuous tense of the verb to cook, to be distinguished from "who cooks?" whose verbal form presupposes asking the question at such a time that one still has to decide, through a more or less established organisational scheme, who is actually going to prepare food. "Who's cooking?", on the other hand, is a kind of magic formula, encompassing layered and emblematic meanings. First, it presupposes that someone, even someone you don't know, is already taking care of you and the people around you, before you even realise it, devoting part of their time to putting together a meal that they will never know for sure how many will eat. It then implies the sudden reorganisation of the activities in progress, the calculation of the remaining time, the strategic choice of the place to eat, the division of tasks between who will go to help, who will spread the word, who will start the comments, who will go to set the table (or the wall, the lawn, the stones). Automatically it will become clear who has to tidy up and wash the dishes. "Who is cooking?" is a question whose answer suggests new flavours, experiments, exchanges of recipes and secrets, surprises. The person or persons who take on this precious task choose to share a part of themselves, the place they come from, memories and habits, dirty hands, aprons and sweat included. So, who is cooking?

Written in 2022

Laura Savina

Wild Tongues

How to walk through the wilderness of languages and landscapes?
We - members of Robida collective - always choose a guiding question for the year and the one mentioned above was my question for 2023. It manifested itself after reading the book by Gloria Anzaldúa Borderlands: Towards a New Mestiza that poetically and politically presents the author’s experience and reflections around the borderland territory between Texas and Mexico where she grew up.
Wild tongues are those tongues - hybrid, mixed and fluid - spoken at borderlands: “there, at the juncture of cultures, languages cross-pollinate and are revitalized; they die and are born” (Anzaldúa, 1987).

Written in 2023

Vida Rucli

With-ness

The concept derives from the text “Meteorology of Media” by the media theorist and artist Brett Zehner who proposes that, during extreme meteorological events, people develop a specific embodied intimacy and therefore they become with-nesses rather than witnesses of the event. We borrow this concept from him imagining that temporary dwellers coming to Topolò are not just witnesses, observers, of what surrounds them (working eventually with these observed things/situations/places/faces…) but they are included in the dynamics of the place, in its rhythm, sharing response-abilities and acts of care, being therefore with-nesses.

Written in 2021

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

Calendar

Robida @Sprint26, Milano

Robida @Luoghi (non) comuni, Mezzago

Radio Robida s05e07

Robida @Dear books fair, Amsterdam

Radio Robida @La Foresta, Rovereto

Robida @Storie contadine in ortofonico, Rovereto

Elena Braida in Topolove

Dindin by Elena Braida, closing event

Robida @Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM

Robida @Leštnice, Maříž

Summer School 2026 - Public Programme

Summer School of the Academy of Margins 2026