Discover the program for the summer of 2023 at Villa Medici in Rome!
The Villa Medici – The French Academy in Rome is a prestigious museum and cultural institution located near Villa Borghese. Like every summer, this year it is ready to host numerous events, with a rich program that includes art exhibitions, landscape architecture interventions, and film festivals. With its 18 hectares of gardens, fountains, and sculptures, Villa Medici remains an oasis of artistic expression that evokes the French countryside, despite being situated in one of the most central areas of Rome.
Let’s take a look at the artistic programming of Villa Medici from May to October 2023.
Festival des Cabanes di Villa Medici | May 24th – October 1st
Festival des Cabanes at Villa Medici was created to offer architects, artists and researchers the opportunity to ‘take possession’ of the historic gardens of the site, designed by Ferdinando de’ Medici at the end of the 16th century. Seven original creations of ‘cabins’ will find space throughout the summer in the heart of Villa Medici’s gardens, specially designed for the festival by architecture and design studios ArchiSculpteurs, Atelier CRAFT, Atelier Poem, Aurel Design Urbain, Nelson Wilmotte Architectes, Offset, and Orizzontale. Throughout the summer, the cabins will host various educational workshops, readings and yoga courses. Moreover, on Tuesday, June 27th, there will be the Nuit des Cabanes (Night of the Cabins), featuring a program of artistic, musical and literary performances involving artists and thinkers.
A Tense Crooked Line / Exhibition of Villa Medici Fellows | June 10th – August 6th
The traditional appointment with the exhibition of Villa Medici fellows, curated by Saverio Verini, returns, bringing together the proposals developed by sixteen fellows during a year of research in Rome. The title of the exhibition, A Tense Crooked Line, aims to represent the journey experienced by the fellows during their residency at Villa Medici—a journey that includes fixed points and reconsiderations, in a thread that knots and constantly changes shape, becoming an emblem of their own path of research and study. The works range from artistic installations, performances, literature, video, photography, and music.
Exhibition: Bad Timing, Théo Mercier | June 10th – September 25th
Former Fellow of Villa Medici, Théo Mercier is now an artist and director. The scenario of the exhibition BAD TIMING unfolds as follows: a rain of cars has fallen on the courtyard of Villa Medici. Moving forward, one can catch a glimpse of a series of bronze chairs melting under the sun, abandoned and distorted. It is a sort of enigma that will find its solution within the interiors of Villa Medici. It is in the exhibition halls, in fact, that Théo Mercier stages the resolution of this dystopian situation through a series of structures that are hybrids between used household appliances and amputated marble sculptures sourced from the collections of Villa Medici. Through them, the artist showcases the pleasure he finds in juxtaposing sumptuous remnants of the past with post-industrial residues of contemporary chaos.
Villa Medici Film Festival | September 13th – 17th
Created in 2021, the Villa Medici Film Festival offers an international selection of films that explore the connections between cinema and contemporary art. For the third consecutive year, the festival aims to present pioneering works with diverse profiles that challenge, disrupt, transform, or re-enchant our relationship with images.
The Villa Medici Film Festival is divided into three sections: the International Competition, consisting of twelve recent films of various genres and formats, the parallel program Focus, featuring non-competitive films by artists, masterclasses, and exceptional encounters, and the Piazzale screenings, which gather the audience for outdoor screenings of new films, including premieres and restored classics. The 2023 jury, composed of director Alice Diop, artist Cyprien Gaillard, and the director of Centre Pompidou-Metz, Chiara Parisi, will award two prizes: the Villa Medici Award for Best Film and the Special Jury Prize for an original film that has captured the judges’ attention.
These will be the movies in competition:
- Saodat Ismailova, 18 000 worlds
- Aria Dean, Abattoir U.S.A.!
- Ramata-Toulaye Sy, Banel & Adama
- Basma al-Sharif, Capital
- Eduardo Williams, El auge del humano 3
- Declan Clarke, How I became a communist
- Laura Ferrés, La imatge permanent
- Maryam Tafakory, Mast-del
- Mehran Tamadon, Mon pire ennemi
- Paul Heintz, Nafura
- Valentin Noujaïm, Pacific club
- Friederike Pezold, Revolution der Augen
Exhibition: Stories of Stones | October 12th – January 14th, 2024
Stones have always exerted a certain fascination for human beings; poets and artists of all ages have testified to the profound influence that these silent presences have had on their creations. The exhibition “Stories of Stones” aims to celebrate this relationship through a journey that unfolds across ten rooms, where trail stones and crystals, votive stones, objects of scientific study, and objects of romantic contemplation have been brought together. Among the featured names, we find Auguste Rodin and Giuseppe Penone, Charlotte Perriand and Antonio Tempesta, Tatiana Trouvé and Facteur Cheval; all artists inspired by this magical mineral world.
Villa Medici
Viale della Trinità dei Monti, 1
