We provide seed funding to promising activists, artists, and social entrepreneurs to develop a plan for the long term. The fellowship program empowers individuals and collectives to kick-start an organisation, scale up their careers, or develop a cultural or political initiative.
We provide access to micro-funding at the early stage of the development of an idea. We are looking for individuals and collectives wishing to foster a long-term change in their locality by, for instance, setting up new institutions, opening a public space, permanently scaling up their work, achieving a career change, or any other action that sustainably impacts reality beyond the short-term duration of a project.
The fellowship program is currently focused on achieving an impact in the city of Palermo and the wider Sicilian context. We additionally may provide fellowships to international organisations working in a long-term, structured partnership with Fondazione Studio Rizoma.
Fellows conduct their work independently and are selected following an interview process aimed at defining their project. Throughout the fellowship, we actively accompany our fellows in the realisation of the supported initiative, whether that is by investing our staff time, creating connections that lead to other funding, or developing joint programming. Fellows are invited to take up a role in the activities of Fondazione Studio Rizoma and will often contribute to defining the long-term vision and program of the organisation.
Fellows may be individual or organisational and receive a grant of 10.000,- or more annually, depending on circumstances.
Individual fellowships normally last up to one year and aim to empower the achievement of transformative goals in the professional life of a person. Organisational fellowships are grants offered to collectives, start-ups, or other organisations. They may last up to two years.
Fellows are generally coopted, no open call is issued. You can, however, contact us via email to express interest and share your work or project idea.
Mattia Capelletti is a doctoral student in Sciences of Culture at the University of Palermo, writer and independent curator based in Torino. Interested in sound and the human voice, he has investigated its aesthetics, politics and technologies across theory and different artistic disciplines. More recently his research has focused on the voice as a site of surveillance and the emerging artistic strategies of resistance, as part of his PhD and through a series of curatorial projects. With collaboration at the core of his practice, he is involved in projects such as: Idioletta (with artist Costanza Candeloro), a project aimed at fostering “borderline” literature and orality; Black Med, a platform for the traveling of sounds across Mediterannean borders initiated by Invernomuto, for which he acts as author and researcher; and Palm Wine, a website dedicated to post-global sound cultures he co-edits along with Simone Bertuzzi. His most recent writing has appeared in Flash Art, Il Tascabile, and Black Med, an anthology curated by Invernomuto and published by Humboldt in 2021.
Founded in 2022 by Fabio Aranzulla e Luca Cinquemani, Aterraterra LAB is a multidisciplinary and experimental space that encourages intersection and dialogue between knowledge and practices from the worlds of agriculture, cuisine, art and activism in an urban setting. The project stems from the need to continue and deepen the research on food plants and biodiversity conducted by Associazione Aterraterra, keeping at the centre the idea that has animated the association’s activities to date, namely that cultivation must go hand in hand with political thought, food education and artistic practices. In this sense, ATT LAB will investigate the relationship between human beings and natural ecosystems – and the possibility of changing it – as a process that transversally crosses not only agricultural practices but also social practices of consumption, culinary practices and artistic practices and activism. Aterraterra LAB, starting from these assumptions, will develop a two-year programme that includes a series of international residencies, talks and moments dedicated to cuisine that will involve farmers, cooks, activists, artists, researchers and agricultural labourers. Aterraterra LAB will also offer workshops on the cultivation and reproduction of seeds, and during the two years, the foundations will also be laid for the creation of a seed bank.
Irene Coppola was born in Palermo in 1991. An artist based in Palermo and Milan, she is part of the Room to Bloom platform. After completing her academic studies at NABA in Milan and the Willem De Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, she participated in national and international exhibitions and projects, including: AndAndAnd for Documenta13 in Kassel, the Do Disturb festival at the Palais De Tokyo in Paris, Dolomiti Contemporanee in Pieve di Cadore, Flight Sketches at the Cercle Cité in Luxembourg, Hanging Garden at the Office Project Room in Milan, Badly Buried at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Guarene, and La Natura e la Preda at PAV in Turin. In 2019 she won the sixth edition of the Italian Council for the artistic residency project La Wayaka Current Tropic 08°N based in the indigenous community of Guna Yala (Panama). In 2020, she is among the artists selected for Cantica21. Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere, a public commissioning project promoted by the General Directorate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and the General Directorate of Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. The work produced was hosted at the Italian Institute of Culture in Dakar, where the artist realised a new residency project, part of the collateral events of the Dak’Art 2022 Biennial.
The Centre d’Art Waza is one of the few independent art centres in Congo and provides resources for artists and cultural practitioners of all disciplines to develop critical thinking through artistic research, and exchange with local communities and international art professionals. They develop projects at the intersection of art, research and social engagement and have been working for years on the complex issues of restitution of cultural property, among others. In 2014, they initiated the project “Voix Contemporaines, Echos de Mémoires”, which brings together experts and cultural and academic institutions from Congo and Belgium to reflect on the relevance of cultural mediation tools for audiences in Congo. In 2018, they facilitated exchanges between artists and curators from Congo and South Africa (University of the Witwatersrand) through the Disolo project, which explored the Congolese collections of the Wits Arts Museum. In 2019, Waza initiated and chaired the symposium “Les Musées en Convers(at)ions, Perspectives Congolaise sur la transformation des pratiques muséales et la restitutions des biens culturels africains”, in Kinshasa (Académie des Beaux Arts and Goethe Institut). The conference is considered a reference on this topic in the Congolese context. Since 2020, Waza has been working on the HOME (Humain Remains Origins Multidisciplinary Evaluation) project, conducting consultations with politicians, theorists, cultural actors and civil society on the possible return of human remains from museum collections in Europe. The Centre d’Art Waza is an organisational fellow of Fondazione Studio Rizoma in 2022 and 2023 with curator and author Patrick Mudekereza and curator and project manager Véronique Poverello.