Intensive Weeks in San Cesario di Lecce

The so-called ‘intensive weeks’ of the simularr intervals live up to their name. We open our senses, our intellects, and we let others into our working processes, which are interwoven with collaborative and group activities. For the spring 2024 interval, we were lucky to work at the Palazzo Russo in San Cesario di Lecce, hosted by Alessandra and Nikolai Pomarico (Free Home University). With an uncanny resemblence to some of our prior imagined drawings of a suitable ‘house of simultaneous arrivals’, the palazzo is based on a circular layout of rooms encompassing a patio. The space offered ample possibilities for distributing the research team, consisting of the core researchers, the two invited researchers (Elena Redaelli and Fulya Uçanok), the invited facilitators (Susanne Bosch, arriving by bike from Rome, and Miguel Castillo).

Our stay also included excursions with our hosts to local artists and nearby activists, developing tree diversity and resisting a major car company implementing a huge test track on ancient forest ground. An open studio day connected to the local community, and gave us the opportunity to set up additional experiments and perform texts developed in-situ. Communication boards and log books were set up in the hallway (where we were visited by a nesting couple of swallows) and on the terrace, and besides the working rooms of the building, many works and activities moved to the roof top whose parcellation mirrored the layout of the house.

A mixture of drifting daily routines and rhythms developed, with the work processes reacting both to the found situation—the affordances of the space, from the particular architecture, acoustics and soundscape to the pervasive coverage of the pietra leccese with lichen and the allusive shapes of the walls—and to materials that had made their way with us on the roadtrip from Austria—rudimentary musical instruments, magnets and graphite, transducers, papers and pigments.