We run two residency programs to generate and produce innovative ideas in and around Palermo. 

Generative Residencies allow an artist, collective, activist, or thinker to familiarise themselves with Fondazione Studio Rizoma and Palermo and to develop a joint project idea on-site for approximately 2-4 weeks. 

Production Residencies build on the results of the generative residencies and enable the resident to return to Palermo for a more extended period to produce the devised project. 

Generative Residents will be invited and accompanied by the Rizoma team to meet people with relevant expertise or possible cooperation partners and to get to know the city of Palermo and the region of Sicily. Residents can arrive in Palermo with a concrete project to develop, or they can let the city guide them to develop one. Residents receive a per diem of €300 per week plus travel and accommodation.

Residents deal with issues and have developed practices that can be fruitfully connected with Palermo and the working focus of one of the Nodes of Rizoma. The generative phase of project development jointly makes a project tangible, fostering the opportunity for a longer-term collaboration with the resident. In this sense, the generative residency scheme also opens up the definition of Rizoma’s work program enabling participatory co-design.

Where deemed of mutual interest, and depending on the financial requirements and funding availability, residents may return to Palermo as Production Residents. In this case, they will be engaged in producing the generated idea, normally in collaboration with Rizoma and with local partners, they have identified during their first, generative stay. We place particular value in tandem or cooperation with Palermo-based individuals or groups. Production residencies are assessed and planned on a bespoke, individual basis, with a dedicated production budget additionally made available.

Residencies emerge organically out of the work and partnerships of Fondazione Studio Rizoma, and there is no advertised open call. However, if you have a specific idea in mind that would require a residential period in Palermo you are invited to get in touch by email and briefly present yourself, your idea, and your timescale in a one-page word attachment.

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Current and past residents

Abou Bakar Sidibe

Researcher and Filmmaker—Mali

Abou Bakar Sidibe

Researcher and Filmmaker—Mali
On his journey from Mali to Germany, Abou Bakar Sidibé spent fifteen months at the border fence in Melilla. He documented the fates of the people at the border with his camera, resulting in the multi-award-winning film “Les Sauteurs – Those who jump”. He then made the short film “ma nouvelle vie européenne” about his first months in Germany and the bureaucratic hurdles he faced. In his films, Sidibé is always the protagonist and cameraman at the same time; he embodies the dual identity of a migrant and an artist. With “Campobello”, Sidibé continues his documentary investigation into the realities of life for migrants from West Africa around the borders of Europe. 

Jonas Staal

Artist / Researcher — 2024

Jonas Staal

Artist / Researcher — 2024

Jonas Staal is a visual artist whose work deals with the relationship between art, democracy and propaganda. He is the founder of the artistic and political organisation New World Summit (2012-ongoing). Together with Florian Malzacher, he co-directs the training camp Training for the Future (2018-ongoing) and with human rights lawyer Jan Fermon has initiated the collective action Collective Facebook (2020-ongoing). With writer and lawyer Radha D’Souza he founded the Intergenerational Climate Crimes Tribunal (2021-ongoing) and with Laure Prouvost he is co-administrator of Obscure Union.

Exhibition projects include Museum as Parliament (with the Rojava Democratic Self Administration, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2018-ongoing), We Demand a Million More Years (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2022) and Extinction Wars (with Radha D’Souza, Gwangju Museum of Art, 2023). His projects have been widely exhibited at venues such as the V&A in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the M_HKA in Antwerp, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Centre Pompidou-Metz and the Nam June Paik Art Center in Seoul, as well as at the 7th Berlin Biennale, the 31st São Paulo Biennale and the 12th Taipei Biennale.

Doireann O’Malley

Trans-disciplinary artist - Zurich & Ireland

Doireann O’Malley

Trans-disciplinary artist - Zurich & Ireland

Doireann O’Malley is a trans-disciplinary artist based in Berlin, Zurich, and Ireland. Their research-led work experiments with collaborative methodologies, meditative and visualisation practices, auto-theory as well as performance to create films, video installations and performances with a characteristic emphasis on Virtual Reality, AI and 3D technologies. Doireann was shortlisted for Ireland’s contribution to Venice Biennale in 2024, longlisted for the Neue National Galerie Prize in Berlin in 2021, and was the winner of the Berlin Art Prize in 2018. They are the recipient of several grants and awards, including the “Künstleriche Forschung” prize from the Berlin Senate (2020/2021); Stiftung Kunstfonds, Edith Russ Haus for Media Award, and the Irish Arts Council’s “Next Generation” and several bursary awards.

BA from University of Limerick (IE); MFA from University of Ulster, Belfast (UK). 2020-2024 Guest Professor on the Masters in Fine Arts at ZhdK, Zurich; 2021-2022 Professor of Gender & Space at Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien; 2021 Guest Mentor Live Arts MA / AdBK Nürnberg; 2020-2021 Fellow, Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung; 2019-2020 Fellow, BPA / Berlin Programme for Artists. 

Exhibitions, talks and screenings at The Granary Theatre / National Sculpture Factory (IE); IMMA, Dublin (IE); Art Institute, Basel (CH); Biennale Zielona Góra (PL); Goethe-Institut New York (USA); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (DE); Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (SE); Rencontres Internationales–Forum des Archives, Paris (FR) & Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (DE); Mumok Kino, Vienna (AT); Dublin City Gallery, Dublin (IE); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (DE); Berlin Art Prize 2018, Berlin (DE); Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg (DE).

Elisa T. Bertuzzo

Urban sociologist and ethnographer - Germany / Italy

Elisa T. Bertuzzo

Urban sociologist and ethnographer - Germany / Italy

Elisa T. Bertuzzo is an urban sociologist and ethnographer based in Berlin. In academic and literary texts, teaching, as well as curatorial collaborations, she valorises the everyday life facets of solidarity, resistance and self-organisation (especially) among marginalised and migrant communities. Her transdisciplinary and mixed-method research practice, evolved in more than a decade of fieldwork experiences in Bangladesh and India, typically bridges critical discourses in Environmental Humanities, Visual Anthropology, Migration Studies and Postcolonial Studies. Understanding research as part of the eco-feminist project to strengthen and, where needed, reassess epistemologies, practices of care and economies which extractivist, colonial and patriarchal logics tend to oppress, through her work she strives to support translocal solidarity.

2004 MA in Comparative Literature, Sociology, Media and Communication Studies from Free University Berlin; 2008 PhD in Urban Studies from Technical University Berlin; 2008-10 Post-Doc Studies, Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies / Free University Berlin. 2010-2016 Principal Investigator in the project Karail Basti: A socio-physical mapping with Habitat Forum Berlin; 2011-12 Associate Researcher, Humboldt University Berlin; 2012-2015 Principal Investigator of Archives of Movement at University of Technology Berlin; 2017-2018 Senior Researcher at Future Cities Laboratory, Singapore-ETH-Centre; 2018-2020 Visiting Professor “Spatial Strategies”, weißensee kunsthochschule berlin; 2021-22 Senior Fellow, Indo-German Centre for Sustainability, IIT Madras; 2022 Curator of the artistic research and exhibition project The driving factor for nGbK/neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst.

Books: Fragmented Dhaka. Analysing Everyday Life with Henri Lefebvre’s Theory of Production of Space (2009); Archipelagos. From Urbanisation to Translocalisation (2019). Co-edited: Smooth and Striated. City and Water, Dhaka–Berlin (2008); Kontrolle öffentlicher Räume. Unterstützen Unterdrücken Unterhalten Unterwandern (2012); Lefebvre for activists (2020).

Marta De Pascalis

Sound Artist—Italy

Marta De Pascalis

Sound Artist—Italy

Marta De Pascalis’ sonic world acts as an uncanny translator that freezes and expands emotions, conveying them into unique soundscapes. Her solo works employ analog, fm synthesis, and a tape-loop system, whereby she carves waveforms to shape cathartic sound bodies. She has performed at several festivals and venues, notably Berlin Atonal, Museo Reina Sofia, Biennale di Venezia, Berghain, Volksbühne, Café Oto, and Mutek Festival.Sky Flesh, her latest album, has been published on Caterina Barbieri’s light-years imprint.

Aylin Çankaya

Researcher/Activist—Turkey

Aylin Çankaya

Researcher/Activist—Turkey

Aylin Çankaya was born in 1989 in Antakya, Turkey. She graduated from the Department of Architecture at Eskişehir Osmangazi University in 2013 and received her M.Arch. in History, Theory, and Criticism in Architecture at Istanbul Bilgi University in 2016. Her master’s thesis problematized space through the state of being an island (islandness), which cannot be considered a city or a rural area, and argued that the pre-acceptance of the urban-rural dichotomy is no longer valid. She is currently working on her Ph.D. thesis entitled Back-to-the-Land Movements at The Periphery of Istanbul: The Expanding Commoning Networks based on Accessing Fair Food in NTUA (National Technical University of Athens). With the support of Sivil Düşün (a European Union program), she conducted a video series with seven different food producers entitled Back-to-the-Land Initiatives in the Periphery of Istanbul: Seeking the Right to Access to Fair, Healthy, and Clean Food in the City. The project revealed the importance of soil, seed, and water for these food producers, who argued for cooperation and degrowth in the face of massive urban expansion. In light of this fieldwork, she wants to continue approaching Istanbul as an urban ecology and explore the social, political, and economic processes that produce it.

Patrick Mudekereza

Curator—Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

Patrick Mudekereza

Curator—Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

Patrick Mudekereza is a writer and cultural operator born in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where he currently lives and works. He initiated several art projects, including one with the collective Vicanos Club, concomitantly studying industrial chemistry at the Polytechnic faculty of the University of Lubumbashi. He then worked as administrator and curator for visual arts at the French Cultural Centre in Lubumbashi, and he is the editor of the cultural magazine Nzenze. Mudekereza has initiated and collaborated with many publications and exhibitions both in Congo and internationally. In 2014, he received the National Award for Art and Culture from the Congolese Ministry of Art and Culture. He is the director of the Centre d’Art Picha and co-initiator of the Rencontres Picha, Lubumbashi Bienniale. Over the past ten years, Mudekereza has initiated a number of different projects, such as a magazine, cultural events, and exhibitions. He was a member of the steering committee of Arterial Network from 2009 to 2014 and is now a member of its cultural policy task team.

Ibrahim Owais

Sound Artist—Palestine

Ibrahim Owais

Sound Artist—Palestine

Ibrahim Owais, is the founder of Recordat, and one part of Radio Alhara. His work revolves around designing, developing, and creating cross-media experiences for both digital and physical spaces.He specializes in creating spatial sound performances and immersive space projects that utilize sound, architecture, and science to fabricate imaginary environments. As a sound artist, he focuses on the intersection of these elements to bring new experiences to life.Whether it’s a DJ set or a sound performance his sound is in constant change, evolving with time and resonating in space. Owais uses Dj tools as instruments combining improvisational elements to create soundscapes and form cinematic sonic narratives.

Adrien Buyukodabas

RESIDENCY ON THE ROAD—Designer, Italy

Adrien Buyukodabas

RESIDENCY ON THE ROAD—Designer, Italy

Highlighted by a diploma from the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, his studies in Object Design was punctuated by a stopover in Mexico and preceded by two years of multidisciplinary training in arts and design in Lyon. Following the encounters, he deploys since 2019 his projects between France and Italy; seeking to inscribe his work in the territory of Sicily alongside the Palermitan design structure MarginalStudio. This path through multiple context leads him to conceive his work as an activity at the meeting point of plural approaches: artistic and anthropological, historical and scientific… as much concerned with forms as with exchanges and narratives as with expertises.
From the scale of spaces — pretexts for encounters and exchanges — to the one of objects thought as a multitude of tools supporting transmissions and collective reflexions, he conceives the design as a way to question territories and their socio-economic realities ; a method to probe with their inhabitant the constructions of the identities and the future of the local cultural and economic specificities.

Adrien Buyukodabas is one of the winning residents of the Residency On The Road programme.

Piero Consentino

RESIDENCY ON THE ROAD—Researcher and Farmer, Italy

Piero Consentino

RESIDENCY ON THE ROAD—Researcher and Farmer, Italy

Piero Consentino (Ragusa, 1987) has a degree in history and philosophy with a specialist training in philosophy of language and aesthetics. He has been working in the social and educational fields with a focus on migrations, then he took part in publishing and independent theater productions. He was really active in movements for the commons and for food sovereignty.
Since six years he was a farmer in the center of Sicily. His project is called Convegno di Marte, from the name of the place: it is inspired by the principle of agroecology and the ethics of permaculture: caring for the earth, caring for people and sharing resources. He cultivates and preserves ancient grains and legumes and is about to open and artisanal stone mill and pasta factory. He is involved in collective network projects to recreate connection in the inland rural areas. Living and working with the earth, seeds and plants meant for me being able to reconnect to natural cycles and rhythms, go through adversity and learning to rejoice in the extraordinary abundance and diversity that surrounds us.

Piero Consentino is one of the winning residents of the Residency On The Road programme.

Genny Petrotta

RESIDENCY ON THE ROAD—Artist, Italy

Genny Petrotta

RESIDENCY ON THE ROAD—Artist, Italy

Genny Petrotta (1990) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Palermo.Her artistic practice, guided by poetry and through video installation, seeks the sublimation of a wide range of interests and influences, from anthropological and philosophical to historical. Since 2016 she has been part of Il Pavone, an artistic collective with which she has exhibited in festivals and exhibition spaces including Manifesta12 Collateral, Spazio Y Rome, Adiacenze Bologna, Festival Effetto48, Cassata Drone Palermo, Festival Main off Palermo. Since 2017 he has been working with the artistic duo MASBEDO as assistant director and also covering other roles. In 2022 she directed the production of the video installation “U scantu” by Elisa Giardina Papa presented at the 59th Venice Biennale and coordinated the production of “Alkestys” by Beatrice Gibson and Nick Gordon presented at the British Art Show.

Genny Petrotta is one of the winning residents of the Residency On The Road programme.

Diana Lola Posani

March 2023—Sound Artist and Performer, Italy

Diana Lola Posani

March 2023—Sound Artist and Performer, Italy

Diana Lola Posani, sound artist, performer and curator, is a certified Deep Listening facilitator by the Deep Listening Foundation. She performs internationally, writes in the journal A Row of Trees, curated by the Sonic Art Research Unit (SARU) – Oxford Brookes University, and debuted in 2022 on Fango Radio with the podcast Kaikokaipuu. She is currently interested in working on the shared space between sound and poetic imagery through interdisciplinary works and sound poems. Her work has been presented at Errant Sound, Tsonami Sound Art Festival, NEXTONES festival, and in the sound art platform Licheni, curated by NUB project space.

In March her translation of the book “Deep Listening – The Sound Practice of a composer” by Pauline Oliveros, was published by Timeo publishing house.

Gloria Dorliguzzo

March 2023-Choreographer, Italy

Gloria Dorliguzzo

March 2023-Choreographer, Italy

Starting from martial arts and the art of the Japanese sword, which she still practices, she approached contemporary dance. After graduating from the Italian Professional School of Dance, she immediately started collaborating as a performer with the National Academy of Rome, the Wuppertal Theater and the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, coming into contact with internationally renowned choreographers and directors such as: Nikos Lagousakos, Cindy Van Acker, Claudia Castellucci, Crysanthi Badeka, Ariella Vidach, Gisele Vienne. Her meeting with Yoshito Ohono, MaluAiraldo and Adriana Boriello was decisive in her choice to direct her choreographic and performance language towards a continuous research on the body and its movement, including Visual Art, theater and new digital media in her poetics and multimedia. From 2010 to 2018 she collaborated as a performer for Monica Casadei’s Artemis Danza company, taking her shows all over the world. Her works include “Narcissus’s way,” presented at Infinito Studio Gallert TriBeCa, in which body, sensuality, interaction with the audience. With the OltreModo collective she presented the performance “Corpi” at the Infinito Studio Gallery in New York. A post-apocalyptic scenario in which real elements and imaginary references are mixed constitutes the performance of a hybrid nature. In collaboration with Did Studio and Studio Azzurro, she created “In Fieri – Dissolvenza del divenire,” a performance installation in which body and sound dialogue. Since 2013, she has collaborated with director Romeo Castellucci, both as performer and choreographer, further developing the qualities of plasticity, dynamism and compositional rhythm applied to the totality of the performing and visual arts. As a performer of her shows, she worked on such extraordinarily important stages as: Adelaide Festival of Arts, Festival dAutomne, Holland Festival, deSingle, Peak Performance Montclair, Festival Transamerique-Montreal. Under Castellucci’s direction as choreographer, Gloria performed in The Third Reich and at the Bonn Beethovenfest: “Pavane für Prometheus” for the Bonn Festival in September.

Eliza Collin

November 2022—Designer, UK

Eliza Collin

November 2022—Designer, UK
Contacts

Eliza Collin (Plymouth,1993) is a British designer and researcher. Her practice spans areas of ethnography, art, co-design, curation, and education. She develops bodies of research and methodologies focussing on new systems, perspectives and ways of relating to material, resources and the environment. Delivering design-led, third party projects from Cornwall to Kuching, she’s worked as a Project Manager and Community Director in the ongoing Palestine based cross-cultural collaboration Samak Bilab Bi Delo and been commissioned to develop research projects from Studio Rizoma (Sicily, 2020), LIPA festival (Makassar, 2020) and Narratives of Soil (Kuching, 2021) with architect Wendy Teo for the British Council to name a few. As well as being an active member of the United Matters collective she holds an MA in Material Futures from UAL Central Saint Martins.

She was first inspired by the accounts of Sicilian farmers on how deforestation and overuse have rendered the water cycle unpredictable. She collaborated with researchers in Ghana and Jersey to design the regenerative water recycling kitchen, Aqua Dentro (2021). This work on the displacement of water, its consumption and recycling, stemmed from a body of ethnographic research carried out in Sicily, highlighting the potential of design to affect human perception and in turn promote best practice. She accomplished this through international expert engagement and researching indigenous systems and technologies. She explored their potential for laying the foundations of advanced contemporary methodologies through the focus on challenging how we see water, how we understand it as a resource, how it moves through the land and is pulled into the cities, and how it is expected to be used and disposed of. The work challenged old inflexible and hierarchical systems and produced community projects providing strategic support, direction and navigation to achieve excellent, relevant and long-lasting outputs.

Since then she has been working on water-related projects within the government design team PolicyLab, collaborating on a rainwater harvesting system for the BlueCity Rainwater Hackathon (Rotterdam, 2022) and is currently in residence in Utrecht for Gemene Grond: Water is what we make it (Utrecht, 2022).

Lena Chen

September 2022—Artist, US/China

Lena Chen

September 2022—Artist, US/China
Contacts

Lena Chen is a Chinese American writer and artist creating performances and socially engaged art. A recipient of Mozilla Foundation’s 2022 Creative Media Award and “Best Emerging Talent” at the 2019 B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, her work has appeared at Transmediale, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Färgfabriken, Baltimore Museum of Art, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Sheffield DocFest, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, among others.

She has been awarded grants and residencies from Sundance Institute, Millay Colony for the Arts, Burning Man Global Arts Fund, Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Pittsburgh Foundation, and Arthur Boskamp Foundation. She has spoken at Oxford, Yale, Stanford, and SXSW. She is founder of Heal Her, an expressive arts initiative that supports survivors of gender-based violence.

Currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, she earned a B.A. in sociology from Harvard University and a M.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art. 

Hervé Youmbi

June 2022—Artist, Cameroun

Hervé Youmbi

June 2022—Artist, Cameroun

Born in Bangui, Central African Republic, in 1973 and raised in neighbouring Cameroon, Hervé Youmbi studied art theory and developed an interest in installation art, which he later pursued, through both practice and research, in France at ESAD (Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg). 

Youmbi often integrates traditional Cameroonian sculpture techniques within his installations and into performance and video. This allows him to juxtapose indigenous African art traditions with contemporary global art conventions, and destabilise what is regarded as “traditional” versus “contemporary.” Youmbi’s series Visages des Masques/Faces of Masks transgresses these established categories in several ways. His departure point is to insert mask forms that diverge from the Western stereotypes of “African Art” for this region of Cameroon into “traditional” Bamileke ritual performances, thus embodying them with efficacy and authenticity.

Youmbi’s Les Trônes Célestes is an installation of beaded caryatid thrones “traditional” for rulers of the Cameroon Grasslands, each seat of power supported by an animal traditionally symbolic of idealized leadership—except for the tortoise that Youmbi has slyly inserted here to suggest that the deliberate creature might epitomize better leadership than, say, the leopard, a stealthy killer. His series Totems to Haunt Our Dreams confronted how difficult it was for artists to travel and network within Africa, despite shared aspirations and similar subordination to commodification, which reflects the globalisation of capital that nevertheless serves to constrain African artists within parochial silos. 

Hervé Youmbi is a founding member of Cercle Kapsiki, a collective of five Cameroonian visual artists established in 1998. The K Factory, the collective’s home, based in New Bell, one of the poorest but also one of the most dynamic districts of Douala, is a flexible space, experimental and open to a wide range of collaborations. 

Articles from our residents

19 Abril 2024

REDISTRIBUTE EXTINCTION: Jonas Staal x Earth Day Med Palermo 2024

25 Maio 2023

ELIZA COLLIN: Wet Zones

25 Maio 2023

GENNY PETROTTA: Kumeta

16 Abril 2023

Gloria Dorliguzzo in conversation with Studio Rizoma

10 Fevereiro 2023

Interview with designer Eliza Collin: “The question we should be asking is not one of quantity but one of quality”

25 Janeiro 2023

Eliza Collin: WET ZONES

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