It is allowed to walk on it only 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 Topolò, and find little blue pieces felted into the white, knitted sock — tiny memories of soft, blue walks.
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Summer School 2023
Topolò/Topolove
Monday 07 – Sunday 13 August 2023
Programma del 12 agosto qui / Program 12. avgusta tukaj / August 12th program here
with Antônio Frederico Lasalvia ✼ Elena Braida ✼ Emma Kaufmann-LaDuc ✼ Francesca Farris ✼ Giulia Paradell ✼ Irene Lunghi ✼ Jean Ni ✼ Antonio Sotgiu ✼ Lara Bongard ✼ Marianna Dobkowska ✼ Mathilde Cahill ✼ Nina Blume ✼ Olya Korsun ✼ Sara Maragotto ✼ Sophie Mak-Schram ✼ Tiziana Bertoncini ✼ Thomas Lehn ✼ Niko Novak ✼ Alessandro Ruzzier ✼ Titta C. Raccagni ✼ Robida
Introduction - about the Academy of Margins
Robida is welcoming everyone to the 2023 program of the Academy of Margins.
The Academy of Margins is a long-term project started by Robida in 2022: it is conceived as a learning platform that stimulates collaborative and discursive learning and is based on intimacy and rootedness where the margins are not only the site but also the widely intended content of the Academy itself.
The Academy of Margins transforms Topolò into a learning site, where one can put in relation different knowledges brought to the village by researchers, professors, activists, artists who encounter the place and the landscape and are transformed by them. Contents are situated in the place, adapting to it, changing through it: the context ceases to be the scenery of learning, and becomes a participant to the development of reflections, questions and knowledge articulations.
The program of the summer school of Academy of Margins 2023 will revolve around the reflections opened by the project Topolò/Topolove: The Village as House, exploring (and questioning) dwelling practices, (un)domesticated spaces and rural territories.
The topic of the summer school
The architectural project Topolò/Topolove – The Village as a House, which started as a master’s thesis by Janja Šušnjar and it is now embraced by Robida collective as a long-term research, architectural concept and everyday practice, proposes a new understanding of the village of Topolò, where Robida is based, enabling new content and meaning for existing abandoned buildings and envisioning a different way of dwelling in the place.
Who can be considered an inhabitant and how can this definition be stretched to include different modalities of dwelling and to recognize different agents that produce, transform and care for the place? How to become that which we want to inhabit? How to balance maintenance and life’s dreams? How to mirror through dwelling the cycle of nature? What is comfort? What can be a model for a sustainable life and work environment in the village? How to live collectively without forgetting each one’s needs? When and how does a space become domesticated? Where are the boundaries between wild and domestic?
Modalities
Reflecting on last year’s edition we decided to abandon the idea of having on one side invited lecturers and workshop facilitators and, on the other side, participants.
Last year’s edition closed with a moment during which we shared comments of the just ended experience and suggestions for the future! Many of the comments were about the opportunity of participants to propose, facilitate or share something to the rest of the group: we reflected about the term collective learning and realised that maybe by withdrawing the distinction between teachers and students we could come closer to that idea.
Explore the open call here (closed)!
Programme
Monday 07.08.2023
Morning: walk toward the border at Javoršca
curated by Robida
reading of texts by Catriona Mortimer Sandilands, Anna Tsing, bell hooks
Afternoon: presentations and group activities
Tuesday 08.08.2023
Morning: walk around Topolò in presentation of the project Village as House
curated by Robida
Morning: Trail Maintenance Crew // maintenance and care towards a forgotten old path
curated by Antonio Sotgiu & Jean Ni
"We propose quotidian exercises in practicing care and reciprocity. We have been experimenting with—intellectually and through habitual practice—ethics of maintenance. It does not necessarily mean a return to any particular condition, or even transformation into a new state. Nothing performative, we just gather together. 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."
– Jean & Antonio
Afternoon: Working through Waste // reading and daily recycling practice
curated by Emma Kaufmann LaDuc
"The proposal outlines a sensible intervention which happens on-site, a collective negotiation between inhabitants—both short-term and long-term—and the waste they create. The project functions within the theory of the village-as-house: here, we can rethink the front-and-back linearity of its consumption as an ecological circularity. The residue of such consumption becomes, in turn, productive. Compost offers a different kind of cleanliness, one that makes the organic processes visible."
– Emma
Afternoon: Lovestone // natural laundry detergent workshop
curated by Elena Braida
"Laboratory of Natural Detergent for Laundry. Starting from the notions of community and reproductive work rooted in the architectural structure of public wash hourses in Northern Italian towns, Elena Braida will guide a collective moment of production of natural laundry detergent and sharing its recipe with others. The recipe is an extension of her book "The Perfect House Has Become a Ruin", an invitation to question the hierarchy between the act of creating and cleaning."
– Elena
Wednesday 09.08.2023
Early morning: Communal odes to specificities // ode writing workshop
curated by Sophie Mak-Schram
"My proposal is to expand on what commitments to localities, to living with and worlding together, can include. Belonging has a risk of being homogenising or naturalising if yoked too strongly to locality or physical presence alone. Yet, situatedness and specificities of place also matter. I propose a gentle activity of ode and letter writing, to occur at dusk or dawn over a series of days. We will write to kin whose methods helped us arrive here, to tools we’ve brought from elsewhere, to species or paths right now that shift our approaches to future localities."
– Sophie
Morning: (Re)discovering our places // intimate mapping workshop
curated by Mathilde M. Cahill
"How can maps connect us with the place we’re living with? How can they help us understand the entanglement of perceptions that constitute our experience? Our maps represent our spaces, our borders, our habitats, ways of living, social connections, power dynamics, as well as our unknowns. Our task will be an exploration and individual mapping of Topolò, guided by sensible mapping prompts. We will freely drift through the space, documenting in whichever means we prefer our experiences and feelings and then put everything on a collective map of Topolò."
– Mathilde
Afternoon: Why End of the World is a Good Thing? // seminar about living in ruins
curated by Olya Korsun
"In this research seminar and drawing/writing session we will try to imagine how one can not only dwell in ruins, but play with them, reimagine them, haunt them with the memories of magic and otherness, deconstruct and make them appropriate not only for living but, also for building new life by those who we, most probably, will never meet."
– Olya
Evening: Watershed Whispers // sonic walk
curated by Nina Blume
"What kind of narratives, practices, and knowledges could emerge to re-imagine our watery relations through listening to and recording the sounds of the running, sprinkling, and rippling watery infrastructures of Topolò?
By actively listening to the sonic nuances of the surroundings, the proposed sound walk is intended to detect subtle shifts, interactions, and tensions that can reveal underlying socio-political dynamics and environmental devastation. With a field recorder, we will dive into the sonic worlds from the flux of listening practices, bodies, and ideas activated by listening to water’s retelling through soundscapes and conversation along the way."
– Nina
Thursday 10.08.2023
Early morning: Qui non si balla // contact improvisation movement workshop
curated by Antônio Frederico Lasalvia
"Qui non si balla, which could be translated as no dancing here, is a proposition for physical encounters between bodies. In this two-part workshop, the basics of Contact Improvisation will be presented, both theoretically and in practice, as tools to explore usually uninhabited places of somatic perception. Beyond dancing, the concepts laid-out in the workshop can be extrapolated to aspects of life in general and interpersonal relations in particular."
– Antonio
Morning: Living in color // workshop of observation of colours
curated by Sara Maragotto
"Color - if it exists - exists only as a relationship. Color is cultural memory, childhood imprinting, projection, decoration and desire. Color is the emotional atmosphere, the ecosystem that our bodies inhabit. It is stubbornly and hardly tamed by theories and control mechanisms. The proposal is to create chromatic experiences to awaken and train personal sensitivity and collective vitality; to experiment with color as a space and community — as a three-dimensional, inhabitable and perceptible dimension."
– Sara
Afternoon: Lecture par arpentage & Village as Library // collective readings and discussions about a future library of Robida
curated by Irene Lunghi e Giulia Paradell
"La lecture par arpentage is a shared, collective form of reading, developed and practised in working-class circles at the end of the 19th century in France and, who knows, potentially elsewhere. A simple, non-dogmatic process that can be adapted to the context and desires of readers. A reflection on the sharing of knowledge and practices, demystifying the object of the book or academic text, which is physically torn apart when it is distributed between readers. For a collective understanding, localized in time, place, into a specific context with particular beings."
– Irene
"If Topolò is imagined as a place of everyday assemblies, putting together traces, ruins, plants and fibres will let a new expanded sense of reading emerge, where each page created will map out new paths in both contrast and dialogue with the already existing landscape. Thinking then of living the village as a library of knowledge, learning from directly working with plants and matter, exploring new reading and publishing forms, embodying publishing as an attitude, where our bodies, together with the landscape, become books unfolding in space."
– Giulia
Friday 11.08.2022
Early morning: Communal odes to specificities // ode writing workshop
curated by Sophie Mak-Schram
Early morning: Qui non si balla // contact improvisation movement workshop
curated by Antônio Frederico Lasalvia
Morning: Honorable Harvest // reading and gathering of herbs
curated by Marianna Dobkowska
"I would like to propose a simple, slow, collective and meditative morning activity. Reading of some excerpts from the chapter of the book by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants - The Honorable Harvest - combined with walking and harvesting edible plants. We would reflect together on the reading and how we understand the principles of honorable harvest in relation to our lives, in the context of creating and sustaining intentional communities, how they can be translated into our daily practice."
– Marianna
Afternoon: Travelling Dinner Ta(b)les // cooking and collection of stories
curated by Lara Bongard
"In this activity, we are going to be interested in how personal stories interact with specific environments and local ingredients, and how they carry the potentiality for new connecting narratives. We will co-create a menu based on the local environment of Topolò and our personal (culinary) stories and create a table scenography with the communal textile. The table will become a place to explore the notion of ‘home’ in a sensory and embodied format through tasting, smelling, seeing and storytelling."
– Lara
Saturday 12.08.2022 – public day
Morning: Consuming a day's work: marve in štakanje // collective cooking
curated by Francesca Farris
"Researching the area’s traditional dishes, wild edibles, local products, I would love to find a dish that requires hand processing (from gathering, cleaning, making, etc), a dish that can only be made if you have a village of hands to help. We can find an existing tradition of the area of Topolò/Topolove or we can collaborate to “invent tradition.” As a community that is forming, I think it is important to intentionally create traditions that pull from its inhabitants as well just as much as the history of the land." – Francesca
Afternoon: Installations and spontaneous events curated by the participants to the Summer School
Later: Presentation of Titta C. Raccagni's book "Sull'inforestarsi/O postajanju gozd" (2023, Robida)
Evening: Hexagonal Dialogues // concert for violin, synthetizer and bees by Tiziana Bertoncini & Thomas Lehn
Tiziana and Thomas have been coming to Topolò for 18 years now. This year they have finally bought the Pihuova house, a house on the brink of the village, with a beautiful view on the valley and a terrace in front which was transformed into a micro-apiary by the Robida Collective this year. Tiziana and Thomas proposed a concert about, with and especially for the bees of Topolò as a first encounter with their buzzing neighbours.
Collective dinner
After dinner: The Time of the Fireflies (2023, 33’) // a film by Alessandro Ruzzier
Night: A Place Called Our Place // concert, voice and bass by Niko Novak
Partner
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile Edile e Ambientale (DICEA) dell'Università La Sapienza di Roma, Roma
Ordine degli architetti della provincia di Udine
Fondazione Pietro Pittini, Sistiana (TS)
ISK, Istituto per la cultura slovena, San Pietro al Natisone (UD)
In collaborazione con / V sodelovanju z / In collaboration with
Associazione Topolò-Topoluove per l'utilizzo della Juljova hiša
Topolò, i suoi abitanti e i suoi boschi
La summer school dell’Academy of Margins è un progetto di Robida supportato da Regione Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Fondazione Pietro Pittini e Ufficio per gli sloveni nel mondo e oltreconfine del governo sloveno.
Poletna šola Akademije margin je del projekta Akademija margin za leto 2023, ki nastaja ob finančni podpori Dežele Furlanije - Julijske krajine, Fundacije Pietro Pittini in Urada Vlade republike Slovenije za Slovence v zamejstvu in po svetu.
The summer school is part of the Academy of Margins project for 2023, made possible thanks to the support of Regione FVG, Fondazione Pietro Pittini and the Government Office for Slovenians Abroad (Urad Vlade republike Slovenije za Slovence v zamejstvu in po svetu).
ABC
Glossary
>>- the action of cultivating land, or the state of being cultivated.
- the process of trying to acquire or develop a quality or skill.
Blue carpet
Boundaries
“What are the boundaries 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, “Honor your boundaries” in Undrowned – Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, 2020.
Written in 2021
Vida RucliBuzzing 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: like 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 of the hives in my care. Paradoxically, any intervention might be one too much because every intervention leads to more effort on the part of the hive because the Bien 'knows' how to survive and it is then, that it is the most beautiful to observe, because it shows itself in its true form. Indeed it is not about thy physical care and interventions, but it is about consciousness and care that lies ways beyond.
Written in 2023
Erika MayrCalendar
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
Franca LucchittaCare
“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 RucliCats
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 RucliColour 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 SavinaConviviality
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
Franca LucchittaDai
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 KorbańskaDwelling 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 ŠušnjarFear 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 RucliGrounded
“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 RucliGuest
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).
See also conviviality.
Written in 2021
Vida RucliHospitality
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 CicconeIntense 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 RucliIntimate 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 RucliIrrigation
"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 WildIzba
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
RobidaJoyful 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 TaleviKozolec
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 RucliKuota (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 WildLei
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 KorbańskaListening
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 MoschioniMargins
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 RucliObserving
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 RucliParasitic 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 TaleviPolyrhythm
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 BardwellRadical 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 RucliRe-cultivation
RE-CULTIVATION → to cause to grow or flourish anew
Written in 2022
Studio WildRe-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 RucliRelaxed 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 ŠkrlepResidency
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.
Written in 2021
Vida RucliResponsibility
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 RucliReturn
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 BernhardtRoutines
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
Franca LucchittaRuin
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 ŠkrlepSituated 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 RucliSpirit
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 BardwellStones
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 KorbańskaStrategic 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 ŠkrlepSupport
“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 CoxSymbiosis 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 ŠušnjarSymposium
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 RucliTacit 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 WildToolbox 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 SavinaTramontana (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 BernhardtUndisciplined
“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 RucliUseless 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 RucliVernacular
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 RucliVine
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 BernhardtVisiting
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 RucliWho 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 SavinaWith-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 RucliZappa
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.