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.
৺ ෴ ර ∇ ❃ ﹌﹌ is a feminist research group born in September 2020 in the virtual space between Palermo, Naples and Turin. Each person is somewhat connected to the South of Italy and came together with the necessity to discuss the intersection between feminism – both in its historicity and in more contemporary forms – and the Southern Question. The dialogical form as a collective practice of knowledge production and self-enquiry, starting from our own experiences and memories, is the methodological approach we share together, by looking at feminist self-awareness through a contemporary, critical lens.
Irene Coppola (Palermo, 1991). Artist based in Palermo and Milan member of the Room to Bloom platform. After completing her academic studies at NABA in Milan and the Willem De Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, she took part in national and international exhibitions and projects, including: AndAndAnd for Documenta13 in Kassel, the Do Disturb festival at Palais De Tokyo in Paris, Dolomiti Contemporanee in Pieve di Cadore, Flight Sketches at Cercle Cité in Luxembourg, Hanging Garden at the Office Project Room in Milan. In 2019 she won the 6th edition of the Italian Council for the art residency project La Wayaka Current Tropic 08°N based in the indigenous community of Guna Yala (Panama). In 2020 she won the Cantica21 grant promoted by MAECI and MiC.
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.