The I-Portunus has been for Ramdom as a host Institution a great opportunity to reconnect with in-person international mobility experience after two years pandemic. 

The experience has been very positive and goes towards our objective to implement the presence of international artists in Castrignano de’ Greci (Lecce, Italy), a small village in the very South of Italy where the daily challenge is to deal with many geographical, logistic, linguistic and cultural barriers. 

Here Ramdom, which has a very strong experience in the Residency as a research format, acts as a special facilitator able to switch what is a limit into a strength creating for the artists the conditions to feel lost but integrated. 

KORA – Contemporary Arts Center is Ramdom’s headquarters: a 1600 sqm place with exhibition rooms, artists’ studios a library, and a media library. This is where artists worked and created connections with the internal team of professionals and the locals.

The whole team of Ramdom welcomed the artists inside this safe and inclusive environment providing spaces, a network of contacts, facilities, and equipment but also support. We helped sharing everything they need to develop their projects. 

The heterogeneity of the team defined on many levels such as age, background, education, interests, skills, and nationality also allowed the artists to interact with different stories, ideas, suggestions, opinions and to be inserted in a dynamic, inclusive, multidisciplinary environment where a non-hierarchical approach and open communication was central in their everyday lives.

Ana Luìsa Gouveia Caldeira’s practice was for example strongly connected to social issues such as  privilege in various social contexts. Lixo is a Portuguese word that means trash: a strong metaphor to question the social conditions at the base of the social chain.

For this matter, her residency at Kora Contemporary Arts Center focused on questions such as how to connect to a territory and community in such a short period? Which community? How to build connections taking into account the specificity of experiences of those who reside in a place and those who arrive there for the first time?

Caldeira pursued her research on baking. She came into contact with Anna and Giuseppe, the owners of a bakery in the village, she spent a lot of time with them and she learned how to make bread.

The bread has functioned as a trigger to link with the community of Castrignano.

The results have been unwrapped in a public discussion at Kora where the community integrates the main issues discussed with the artist.

This can be considered as the kick-off of long-term research that the artist will develop

afterword.

The project Trainscapes and their cities by artist Thomas Nicolaou reflect instead upon the necessity of rethinking mobilities “after the pandemic”, traveling, and shipments considering the environmental and climate crisis we are facing. The starting point was the discussion – between the artist and Ramdom – on the possibility of connecting two very extreme territories within the European area via train: the United Kingdom and the extreme South of the Apulia Region (Italy).

To arrive at KORA-Contemporary Arts Center, Thomas Nicolaou decided to travel by train from Oxford (London, UK) to Lecce (Italy), passing and spending days also to Lyon (France).

The goal was to experiment with a greener and slower alternative to air travel and think of what progress means in the contemporary world. Throughout this train journey, the artist produced a lot of documents, mainly videos and photographs that document the situation within European post-pandemic cities, and surrounding landscapes, and their attempts for restorative urbanism. At the same time, through chat and connections with other passengers, Nicolaou activated an analysis of how travelers’ experiences, and how travel habits have been affected by the pandemic.

The residency at Kora consisted of a critical analysis of the materials collected and resulted in a research presentation shared with the staff and resident community of Kora. On this occasion, the artist presented a small booklet that point out a series of questions and instructions for the reader to answer. This edition of 100 copies is functional to collect more data on the subjective experiences of spaces.

Nicolaou’s research takes the form of open research that could be increased and adapted to other urban contexts. Nicolaou’s research is based on his empirical experience and the collection of qualitative data. Ramdom has contributed to this research with a reflection on its territory, on the issues of infrastructure and mobility, questioning this impact the cultural production.   

Trasmundane Economies – the original title of the project – by Theodoulos Polyviou and Billy Roch changed according to the ongoing research becoming Research of embodied urban geographies.

Starting from the term Derive Theory by Guy Debord, the artists intended the residency as the stage to explore the relationship between psychology and the urban environment. During these two months, Theodoulos and Billy collaboratively explored and reflected on environments in which norms and cultural values have an emotional attachment to them. Through a series of mapping exercises and site interventions, the artists looked at Situationist Psychogeography & geosophy and more specifically they elaborated on the works of Guy Ernest Debord, David Stea, Kevin Lynch, J.K. Wright’s, Peter Gould, and many others.

Taking the landscape around KORA as a site of inquiry, their practice consisted of impersonating Lynch’s approach to mapping and analyzing impressions, mapping the results to envisage a new urban potential in which architecture reflects an emotional engagement with its inhabitants. In short, by using psychogeographic tools, they studied the effects of the geographical environment in the area [consciously organized or not] on the emotions and behavior of individuals and hence think of the site as an ‘organization of the juxtaposed” that express the possibility of multiplicities while at the same time indicates the possibility of layered and shared relations.

Theodoulos and Billy have also started potential research on the possibilities of digital technologies to strengthen the capacity of studying, analyzing, visualizing, and interpreting a range of cultural materials and practices, through the making of virtual worlds, mapping and geospatial analysis, graphical and network analysis, data modeling, text encoding, online data sharing, etc. 

The collaborative research at KORA has to be intended as an intermediate point of a

theoretical and embodied exploration at the same time.