News
2024-03-15
March/April Artists in Residence
Discover our artists in residence in March-April 2024
With the arrival of spring, we kick off our fourth year of artistic residencies in Milis. The first group of artists has arrived, ready to engage in a residency that extends throughout the months of March and April, constituting the first stage of our programme "The Water Journey": a series of activities and meetings will lead them to discover Sardinia and the area around Milis, following the thematic thread of water. See this link for a more detailed description of this year's theme.
Sub-theme of this month: Mitza, the source. How does an artistic project originate? What are the sources of inspiration for our residents? Before allowing you to enter their studios on April 9th, we'll tell you a bit more about them.
Rose Brookfield has spent the last two years working her way through different parts of the food and farming industry in the UK, Europe and beyond. She founded the podcast, Farming for the Future, which aims to act as career advice for people who might be interested in entering the farming industry but don’t know where to start. She is currently undertaking a MST in creative writing at Oxford University. Her work aims to explore how the written word can help us reconnect our human selves to our animal selves.
More info on her instagram
Originally from the North of France, Fabrice discovered his interest for animation as a child watching Norman Mac Laren's films at the local cinema. Since he studied at Duperré Applied Arts School in 1986, he has lived and worked in Paris. In 1990 he embarked upon a four year collaboration with the directing duo Kuntzel and Deygas. He has worked on many commercials and music videos.
During this time, he started to develop his own ideas and a distinctive directing style. He completed his debut film "Cycle Logical" in 2002, which was selected/awarded in many festivals and events such as Annecy, Mattita, Wissenbourg, Sao Paulo, Auch, Krakow ; and in 2007, he directed his second short film "The Butter Dilemma". Subsequently he directed several children's TV series director, including "Zoe Kezako" - which won the "Certificate of Excellence" in Chicago 2004, the animation prize at the Paris Senate and a nomination for an i-Emmy award 2006 and was distributed in many countries around the world, and « International Hareport », « Mily Miss questions », and recently Presto ! for M6 in France.
As a director, Fabrice demonstrates a unique story telling and directing style, combining imaginative visual humour with strong characterisation and a fresh graphic look. He brings his expertise to every aspect of the production and works very closely with his team, from scriptwriting to storyboarding, animation and sound. Fabrice always carries a sketchbook. He loves drawing, he constantly sketches new ideas and continues to make short films, documentaries and music videos in his spare time.
More info at his website
Hanna Ilczyszyn is a Polish visual artist based in Brussels, Belgium. She works in mediums such as: painting, drawing, installations, ceramic.
She was an MFA student at Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Gent, Belgium, and previously studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland. She has been exhibiting her work at many solo and group shows in Europe, Asia and USA, and has been selling her work to collectors around the world. Her evocative paintings are capturing the innocence and uncertainties of childhood.
More info at her website
Joy Kloman was a tenured associate professor at University of Mississippi, who supervised graduate and undergraduate painting programs and taught drawing in London. She was the recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission Individual Artist State Grant. She had work displayed in The Drawing Center Viewing Program & Slide Registry, NY. Kloman attended an artist residency in Hungary. Her art is in many private and public collections including, Balatonfüred City Hall, Ringling Museum of Art, Gulf Coast Museum of Art, Pensacola Museum of Art, and Meridian Museum of Art.
More info at her website
Lisa Martin is an award-winning Italian-Australian journalist. For the past three years, Lisa was a Southeast Asia Correspondent with Agence France-Presse (AFP) based in Bangkok. In 2023 she served as President of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand. Lisa is a four-time finalist in Australia’s Walkley Awards—the top prize for journalism excellence. Previously, she worked for The Guardian in Melbourne and was based in the Canberra Press Gallery at the Australian Federal Parliament for eight years with the Australian Associated Press (AAP). Her overseas assignments included a military embed with the Royal Australian Air Force in the Middle East and covering prime ministerial trips including to Washington DC and international leaders summits. In late 2023 she moved to Copenhagen, Denmark for love. She is working on her debut novel "The Last Letter Writer in Bangkok".
More info at her website
Born in Sardinia in 1988, he holds a Master’s degree in Philosophical Sciences from the University of Milan, he is a multidisciplinary producer of media outputs, a musician and a sound designer. Primarily a composer and musician, he developes soundscapes. His audio creation process favors the capture of environmental sounds, both artificial and natural, through the practice of audio sampling and their subsequent remodeling, from which he make loops, synthesizers, and rhythmic sections that he use to develop new languages that engage in a collaborative dialogue with his work subjects. Over the years, he has had the pleasure of collaborating with several artists and realities, including Tonino Casula, Caterina Erica Shanta, Fabio Piccioni, Prometheus Lab, Fotoromanzo Italiano, Padiglione Tavolara, My Art Guides, Dolomiti Contemporanee and Progettoborca. Within the latter, he launched the “Studio Campione” project in 2020, where he engages in multidisciplinary work, including microscopic photography, vegetal carbonization, and organic pigment production.
On a more general level, his work involves a strong theoretical framework aimed at achieving a re-application of meaning to the concepts involved in the study of my subjects of investigation. This leads him to uncover specific narrative structures that envelop them, in an attempt to approach their essence and present them in new narrative forms. His operational focus is on technological re-domestication, the repositioning of techniques into an exclusively instrumental role in the production horizon, in order to counteract their typical leading role of the modern era. He thinks this is possible through their re-conversion: by changing the intended use of their tools, conceiving a different product output from what they were originally designed and developed for, shifting the target users, and repurposing obsolete tools and forms of traditional techniques that have fallen into the oblivion of decommissioning and disuse.
More info at his website
Mark van Wageningen is the founder of Novo Typo, a (typo)graphic research- and designstudio and font foundry based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Mark van Wageningen approach to design is deeply rooted in a love for craftsmanship and an investigative approach to design, production-techniques, tools, materials and their context. The output of the studio can be situated on the cutting edge between design, applied arts and craftsmanship. Mark van Wageningen lectures and presents the work of Novo Typo at a number of international design conferences and festivals such as Dutch Design Week and Milan Design Week. Before the books Offgrid and Analog Aesthetics were published, Mark van Wageningen wrote and designed Typewood, Novo Typo Color Book and Type and Color which received several international design awards. His work is translated in English, German and Chinese. During his residency at Nocefresca Mark van Wageningen / Novo Typo present its return to the three fundamental elements of analogue graphic design: letters, ink and paper. The Novo Typo On Site project which will be executed at Milis, Sardinia is a reflection on how to destandardize and autonomize graphic design in order to be truly self-sufficient.
More info at his website
Rose Brookfield - Writer (UK)
Fabrice Fouquet - Animation Film Maker (France)
Hanna Ilczyszyn - Visual Artist (Poland / Belgium)
Joy Kloman - Painter and Art Teacher (USA)
Lisa Martin - Journalist and Writer (Australia / Denmark)
Fabio Talloru - Multimedia and Sound Artist (Italy)
Mark van Wageningen - Graphic and Type Designer (Netherlands)
2023-12-16
Interviews with the artists 2023 #24 Jack Kirne
Urban Schemes versus Rural Escapes
Jack Kirne is a writer and unionist based in Melbourne, Australia. His work has appeared in various publications including Necessary Fiction, the Meanjin blog, Subbed In and the anthologies Growing up Queer in Australia and New Australian Fiction (KYD).
You are a writer and you also work as a unionist. How does your political activism inform and influence your art practice, if it does?
That's a broad question. I think often: doing union work, you meet so many people. So you're always being exposed to sort of different characters and different ways of seeing a problem, which is really productive, I guess, when you're writing, because you've got this bank that 's always being refilled. I think I also get to see people, I guess, at their worst a lot of the time. When they call the union, it's not because they're in a good place. Often they're really having a hard time. So I think I find a lot of very intimate stories with people that, again, provide this kind of material of the world in a way that's very different to my regular life, where I think people are usually trying to be quite optimistic and have fun. I think also those different kind of political perspectives that come with people talking about politics has forced me to kind of nuance my view of the world. And invariably, not consciously, but invariably that ends up influencing how you write and what you think.
What do you think are the most challenging aspects to be a writer nowadays?
I think perhaps the most challenging thing is, in Australia, and I'm sure abroad, the sort of death of small presses. I think there are less and less places for people to get published. What does get published is increasingly conservative or playing to a particular market. And so I think the project of writing, for me anyway, is about trying to sort of think about your community of people who are making art around you. So it's those writers that you like and working with them and sharing work with them. And that is being a different way of kind of making writing that isn't about the book or, you know, finding a wide readership. It's about finding people who care about this craft that you're doing. Remember reading an interview a few years ago that was talking about the novel as going the way of the easel painting. And I think there's some truth to that . But when your art form becomes obscure, well, then it goes from being this thing that is kind of lauded and celebrated and becomes something that's quite intimate. So that's a challenge, but it's also something I find humbling and moving about that.
Even if Sardinia is not the location of the novel you wrote during your stay, what elements of the island do you think had an impact on this novel?
Oh, well, actually, the final sequence of the book will take place in Sardinia, which was not something I sort of expected. So the escape into goat life will take place in Sardinia. It sort of in a funny way that only became clear once I was here.
Part of the reason why I wanted to do this residency was because I'd sort of joked about this goat life thing for years and being somewhere remote and doing that was one of the things I found really appealing. And once I got here, I mean, I knew that that fantasy was silly. But being here has been on one hand totally magical and very inspiring to see how community works. But also, then you speak to people and they'll say the same things about wanting to escape to the big city, you know, and how, you know, they can 't find a job or they feel like they're at a lost end. And they have this dream of escape into the city.
So for me, that sort of produced like what I can imagine is kind of the full circle of the novel, this dream to escape into the countryside and then realising that the escape in the countryside is just to find another place where people want to escape to the city.
Is the rest of the novel set in Australia?
Yes. In a big city. So I mean, the middle of the book is just the characters pulling off a bunch of like schemes to steal a bunch of money to then elope into this house in Sardinia.
Okay. Okay. Okay. We are curious. Very, very curious .
Yeah. I mean, here has been so inspiring. Like, there's just so much. I mean, I think also because the community has been so welcoming. But you just walk into places and people tell you all kinds of really odd stories about this place. And so when you start to put them together, what you build, I mean, it's not Millis. It's sort of like a mythologised Millis that sort of collapses the wider populace into this like imagined island. But it's all there and it's just so exciting. So I actually felt it was that night of the choir performance and we ended up with a big community dinner. I felt that like that was the sort of end of the novel in the sense that this is the most, it represents the dream of kind of this community and everyone coming together. And yet there are all these kind of sinister elements kind of working in the background.
Did it also shape like the way the characters move or interact or behave? Like seeing all this?
Not really. I think, as I said, I had a very clear idea of sort of what they wanted. I think it just sort of clarified what I was trying to do, which was good. Yes, cool.
More info about Jack on his website.
2023-12-16
Interviews with the artists 2023 #23 Nils Olsson
Editoriality as a collective process
Nils Olsson is a writer, editor and senior lecturer, primarily active at the departments of Literary Composition and Comparative Literature, University of Gothenburg . His research has probed aesthetics and modernism in general, as well as Gertrude Stein’s writing in particular. His teaching is mainly focused on editorial practice and creative writing, with special attention to collective processes and extended notions of publication. His latest book (“r.”, 2022) is an experimental treatise on “editoriality”, which explores the limits and possibilities of the physical book through collaboration, chance, algorithmic writing, and alternative modes of distribution.
Your current research is focused on making connections between the concepts of publication, community and food , food sharing. How did you arrive to this step of the research?
The act of making something public is always a collective endeavor. So, it all goes together. Even if you take someone who’s a self-published author, like the woman who runs the bar in Milis, Irene Lai; well, even in that case, someone else is running the print shop, someone else made the paper, etc. So, from a material standpoint, publication is always a collective effort. And of course, we can talk about where you find the formats, the inspiration, the genres you are writing in, and so on.
There’s always a collective kind of machine involved.
The food thing is basically just me being into food and wanting to find a way to combine interests so I can do more fun stuff. That’s like the honest answer. But then again, food, the meal, is something that has to do with so many things related to sharing, collectivity and the communal, but also in a broader sense with regards to distribution and cultivating and collecting things, putting them together, sending them out – basically editorial practices.
So, I haven’t really arrived anywhere. I’m just trying to think about in what ways food is related to my work on editoriality. Thanks to this residency I have been able to take a few steps by being invited to work with the Food for Thoughts project.
That was my second question: you were one of the artists involved in the second episode of Food for Thoughts. What did this experience give to your art practice?
It provided a situation where I together with someone else – or with several other people actually – could try to combine thinking about editoriality with cooking, with sharing food, sharing and presenting a meal. It was an opportunity to conduct an experiment, to try things out –trying out a concrete format for working with food in an aesthetic and critical situation dealing with editing and making a publication.
Personally, I prefer to work with what is handed to me. I prefer to react to situations or surroundings. Which of course is because I’m a critic and a scholar first and foremost. I need something to work with or react to.
And in this case, there already was a format, there was a situation, there were collaborators, so that suited me very well. In contrast to, let’s say, sitting down and just from nothing planning out something that’s going to invent stuff from nothing. I don’t think I can do that. Actually, no one really does that, and I don’t think that’s what the world really needs.
So many words, ideas and things are and have been produced and uttered that it’s more a question of what to do with them. How do we take care of the stuff that is already here? To take care of, understand, challenge, get rid of, recycle … The world is there. It’s not to be invented anew in that sense.
Your work is focused on the concept of editing and publication . What do you think about the future of the physical book in the digital era?
Channeling media thinkers Marshall McLuhan Friedrich Kittler, and their respective notions about how the history of technology works, we become aware of a medium as such first when it is replaced by a new medium. Fifty years ago, we didn't really think about the book as a machine. The codex was something totally natural, a dominating technique for holding knowledge or information together.
The digitalization, of basically everything, made us become more aware of the printed book as a kind of mechanism, as a kind of machine, as well as a bearer of different kind of values. When you write a literary review, of a novel for instance, you don’t begin with: “This is a 500-gram object, built up of different leaves of pulp, which you’re supposed to open and operate with your hands, read it from, left to right (in the Western world), etc…”
I’m have no clue what the future of the physical book is, but my point is that the fact that it has been partially replaced by screen-based media and audio books has at the same time made us more aware of the book as an object. It certainly hasn’t made us forget about it.
Vinyl records sales have increased a lot during the last 20 years. And of course, the market has been driven partially by hipster dudes with lots of facial hair who treasure their hi-fi equipment. Sure, it’s a cultural identity kind of thing; a material culture thing. And one could perhaps see some similarities in how our relationship with books has developed, at least partially, for some of us.
The limited editions, the small networks of small presses making precious objects – a materiality reflecting the preciousness of poetic (or even intellectual) discourse. But then again, today more physical books are printed and produced than ever. It doesn’t seem to decrease. So, I think the question of the physical book is one thing, and then another question would be: what’s the future of literature or poetry?And in what ways is literature as we have known it connected to, and will or won’t continue to be connected to, the physical book? It won’t be in the same way. I don't think so. And I don’t think it should! Literature is about inscription, and there are many practices of, and surfaces for, inscription. The book is actually a pretty recent one. Printing isn’t that old, relatively. And it has been superseded by other techniques, as in digital formats. So, literature, I’d say, is something that potentially takes place when an inscription is made. Even just saying a word out loud is kind of an inscription into the ether, the air. It’s certainly not very archivable, it goes away immediately, and thereby becomes all the more precious, perhaps. While carving letters in a rock has totally different longevity. They are just different kinds of inscription surfaces, both potentially serving as vehicles for literary practice. I don’t know what the future is for the book, but neither the book nor literature is going away, and perhaps neither of them are dependent on each other.
More info about Nils on this website https://www.gu.se/en/about/find-staff/nilsolsson
2023-12-15
Interviews with the artists 2023 #22 Giulia Ricciotti
The memory of the stones
Giulia Ricciotti was born in Italy in 1984. She graduated in anthropology at the University of Bologna but since she was a little girl she became familiar with the world of photography and thanks to several scholarships she was able to study in countries like Colombia and Argentina.
She started to publish in some photo magazines in Argentina and around the world like Ballad Of, Curated by Girls, Girls on Film, Chicle Mag, Pompayira Mag, Splendor Mag and Whitelies Mag.
At the same time she started to collaborate with an important fashion magazine in Buenos Aires called Regia Magazine and she became one of its most important writers.
During the past 10 years she has participated at several exhibitions in Argentina and Italy but she also started a self-taught gastronimal career.
Cooking was always a significant part of Giulia's life. Cooking was something she learned from her family, and she has always worked in restaurants throughout her life.
Cooking for friends was the initial step, but she gradually increased her culinary activity by cooking for different customers.
His experience in restaurants throughout the world, such as New York, Portugal, and Mexico, led her to collaborate with several chefs and organize various pop-ups.
She is currently residing between Italy and New York, where she works as a photographer and continues to organize private dinners.
You arrived with a specific project in mind. How did it evolve during the residency and why?
It was not easy to find materials, to develop rolls that I'm used to, so obviously the process takes longer, also considering the fact that we've had a bit of bad luck with the weather. I had to make some modifications in my originary project. I couldn't do the work on the rocks of Pinuccio Sciola: I just took the photos of them.
But I thought that, having a very small space, maybe this would have been an exaggerated surplus because the portraits I did of the people with the rocks came out very well. I decided to focus more on that and also add other things like a printing experimentation on the carasau bread or some small canvases with small details. These changes had more to do with technical and material aspects, not conceptual.
I was inspired both by meeting the people and by the places I went to photograph, like the nuraghes.
Your project relates people to the landscape, what is the aspect that interests you most about this relationship?
It is linked to what Pinuccio Sciola said about Sardinia and the Sardinian landscape, which is linked to stones. This presence of the stones is much stronger in my opinion than in other places in Italy and there is something firm but flexible in the stones and something ancient but at the same time extremely soft and gentle. It's something that I have also found in the older inhabitants of Milis who seem a bit tough but then they are very soft. They have all their memory, their desire to recount their past, their life, to be present, and they have these signs of time that are the same signs of time as the stones. This is also true of the houses themselves, which are built with basalt, with local stone. There is such a strong contact with the land.
You were one of the artists involved in the first episode of the Food for Thoughts format. Did this experience give you new stimuli for your artistic practice and which ones?
I did more installation with food. Some were things I'd already done, others were things I tried and a bit of innovation. I'm quite happy, especially because it was the first time I had a collaboration with someone. I'm talking about Isabella Morrison: it was a good challenge for me to learn from someone else, to take suggestions from someone else, to exchange opinions and create something together that I think worked very well.
I'm very happy with the collaboration with Isabella. We managed to achieve exactly what we wanted, which was to make people feel comfortable, to have this experience of closeness with each other... I think that's the most important thing.
Did you find a link between what you did here at the residency and what you develop in Food for Thoughts?
Stones and found objects were involved in both projects. Objects that I found during this month, walking around, observing, made part of the installation that I made in Food for Thoughts. I like the concept of finding objects that for us can tell something or link with the earth, and with the concept of origin that was the topic of the dinner of Food for Thoughts.
I like to present these simple objects to the people. And it is more or less the same thing in a different way that I have done with my project at the residency: presenting objects that we always see around us, but presenting them well, put in a frame, so we can maybe observe them and give them a new definition, a new meaning.
More info about Giulia at his website: https://giuliaricciotti.com/
2023-12-15
Interviews with the artists 2023 #21 Jessica Gorlin Lidell
Pieces of life into murals
Jessica Liddell is a mosaic artist based in Philadelphia, PA. She specializes in architectural ceramics. Her work can be found in public and private spaces throughout the United States. She fabricates her own tiles out of clay and glass. Enthusiastic about her medium, she often teaches children and adults, leading them in collaborative mural products.
You have a business as a mosaic artist. You work a lot by commission. How do you find a balance between the external request and your personal artistic touch?
It can be hard. I try to deliver what people want. I think my work has a specific style that I bring into my commissions. However, sometimes I have to consider myself more of a technician than an artist. I'm taking what somebody wants and I'm translating it into tile. Sometimes, if I have a particular vision, I have to set that aside. I guess it's a balance. The way that I combine handmade ceramic tile and commercial tile shards feels unique to me. I use the same technique or approach almost every time so there is consistency.
A big part of your work is made of public art interventions, like community art. What is your process? How do you involve the communities? Do you have a particular approach, participatory approach?
My approach is always different depending on the situation. In some cases, I might have hundreds of people making tiles. When they are complete, I take them and put a mural together myself or with an assistant. At other times,people from a community will be involved with the assembly of mosaics I'll teach them my process so that they can help cut up tiles and put everything together. Usually, the tile making part of my projects is always done by project participants. When you see pictures of community projects I've done, I haven't made many tiles on those walls. I take on more of a role of facilitator, providing materials and instruction so that others can do the work.
Sometimes I bring stencils, stamps or cutters relating to a certain theme so that making the tiles is easier. I often tell people specifically what to make so that everything comes together in a way that is visually coherent. I also incorporate a lot of words into community projects. Frequently people feel insecure about their ability to draw, so I like to give them the option to come up with a word instead. When they create a tile with the word in it it feels creative but in a different, interactive way. When the mosaic is finished, the public is able to get up close to it and read what the tiles say.
And here at the residency, did you find a difference between your practice by commission, the daily practice and your time at the residency ? Which new things did the residency bring to you?
In my daily life, I have to focus more on the business side of being a full time artist. I always have so many things needing my attention and a busy teaching schedule . I don't feel the same freedom just to, “be an artist”. You won't find me sitting outside painting with watercolors, when I'm at home, in Philadelphia. I just don't get to explore my creative process very much. To do that research and development is so important and I know that but it's hard to make time for it.
That's the primary thing that I wanted from this residency- time for myself. I have definitely had that here and it's been an amazing gift. An ability to really think about and reflect on my studio practice over the last few years. I think it's been a challenging time for artists through COVID. I have really been able to process everything that has happened with my work and plan future projects, really move forward. That must sound strange here in Sardinia, because things are so much slower paced but to make a living as a professional artist in the United States can be very stressful. I will make it my goal to take the wonderful things I have learned in Milis and bring them to my life back home.
More info about Jessica at her website: https://www.bellamosaic.com/
