Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte and UNIDEE Residency Programs are pleased to present the curatorial framework for the 2025/26 edition of the UNIDEE Residency Modules, curated by the newly appointed Visiting Curators, Nina Fiocco and Gaia Martino.
Languages, Please is an invitation to a collective series of rehearsals that explores languages as geopolitical spaces of dispute, narratives, and encounters. It is a call to engage with the porosity of our bodies in action and the narratives that can infuse and strengthen our practice of remaining polyphonic, amid the crumbling circumstances of the present.
To meet in a language embraces the paradox of feeling foreign but inside the language, consciously rejecting to be bound by borders and rules that the language itself may impose. The fragility and fleeting temporality of this process embody the very essence of the community as a political space—a plurality of possibilities forged by the acceptance of implicit differences and affective responses that sharing a language fosters in each of us. What is incomprehensible yet invisible–uncoded, unseen and unheard–is just as vital as what is comprehensible and visible.
Moving beyond the individual existence as an isolated experience, our human and more-than-human bodies are constantly engaged in negotiating ecological relationships to defend our right to remain plural, precarious and complex. This is a call to delve into what it could mean to engage with sustainable acts of storytelling, reception, and the reclamation of spaces of coexistence—an ongoing, heterogeneous multiplicity of stories so far, in which collective imaginaries emerge from the reorganisation of the senses, rewriting and acting for justice, rather than from resonance or empathy. The next two years of the UNIDEE Residency Programs will be about breaking the habit of synthesis, shifting our attention from the stories that worlds tell us to the intricate micro-processes that compose these stories—memories, muscles, and multiple interwoven connections occurring at once.
Furthermore, we are pleased to announce the first two modules within the programme Languages, Please. The Summer 2025 modules are curated by UNIDEE Visiting Curator with invited mentors: visual artist who writes Verónica Gerber Bicecci with singer, composer and vocal researcher Meike Clarelli, and researcher, sound artist, and educator Pedro Oliveira with performer, composer and musician, Ece Canli.
Module I—“The thing with commas, periods, dashes and parentheses”, led by Verónica Gerber Bicecci with guest Meike Clarelli, will engage in conversations with punctuation marks through sound, bodily, visual and written approaches to explore the matters behind their supposed silence as well as their hidden implications in language.
Brushing against the idea that the world is something external to ourselves, Module II—“Unknowing Listening / Transfluent Aurality”, led by Pedro Oliveira with guest Ece Canli, will engage in thinking with and through listening as a mode of redefining what it means to “know”, to “understand”, and to act in the world.
The Residency Modules will take place at Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte, in Biella, Italy from 9 to 20 June 2025. The UNIDEE and Cittadellarte spaces will host a large part of the programme, while further opportunities for exploring the urban and rural landscape of Biella and its immediate surroundings will be offered.
To learn more about the project’s context, objectives, and the call for applications, please explore all the details on our website.
Languages, Please is curated by 2025/2026 Visiting Curators, Nina Fiocco and Gaia Martino. Appointed in Spring 2025, they bring to UNIDEE strong experience on curating educational and public programs, fostering dialogue across diverse contexts through projects rooted in listening, oral history, writing, spatial practices, and performativity. Nina Fiocco is an artist and curator, professor at SOMA (Mexico City) and IBERO Puebla and co-director with Oscar Formacio of ERROR. Her practice focuses on orality and microhistories and seeks to construct subtle counter-narratives to official historical narratives. Since 2016, Nina has constantly collaborated with Museo Amparo (MX) curating several public programs and projects. Her work has been presented in various museums, festivals and galleries in different countries. Gaia Martino is a curator, educator, and cultural coordinator, with a PhD in performativity of listenings. Her research explores spatial and sonic practices, forged by close collaboration with artists, musicians, thinkers and people from different fields, primarily within small-scale, and independent organisations. She co-curated the Public Program of the Italian Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia ’24, co-directed Standards Studio in Milan, is a member of the SSH! (Sound Studies Hub at Iuav University in Venice), and worked with Archive Books in Berlin.
About UNIDEE
In 1999, Michelangelo Pistoletto founded Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte’s residency programme for art and social transformation. Open to artists, practitioners and creative professionals worldwide, the objective of the programme is to provide the participants with the inspiration, motivation and instruments to activate, develop or strengthen artistic initiatives based on the involvement of local ecologies. UNIDEE-University of Ideas began as a 4-month residency (1999-2013) and has since evolved to offer different residency types, including UNIDEE Modules, Research Residency, Connective Residency, and UNIDEE Projects, each with unique objectives.
Partners
UNIDEE patrons are Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Regione Piemonte, illycaffè S.p.A., Fondazione Zegna, UniCredit Group, Fondazione Deloitte, CRT Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Torino. UNIDEE research residency partners: A.M. Qattan Foundation, Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation, Institut Français Italy, Ambasciata del Regno dei Paesi Bassi, Bienalsur.
