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.
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 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 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’ 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 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 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, 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.
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.