Residenze Lievito does not work in light. It needs warmth, time, the right environment. It cannot be accelerated: if you try to force it, it dies. If you leave it alone, it transforms everything. Artists, sometimes, function in the same way. In biology it is called fermentation: a process in which microscopic organisms – invisible, patient – convert a matter into something completely different. It is not magic. It is slow chemistry. It is the same thing that happens when an idea enters a body, remains there for months, and then comes out transformed into something that did not exist before, perhaps into a work. Material, multi-material, performative, sonic, it does not matter. Now it exists. It lives. It is there. From this analogy – precise, almost scientific – is born Residenze Lievito, the artistic residency program conceived by La CAP Re|Hub and IPERCUBO.
Podere La capacciola, ph Martina Raffanelli, courtesy Residenze Lievito
Residenze Lievito does not grow everywhere. It needs a substrate: something to work on, something to nourish. For Residenze Lievito, that substrate is a former peasant farm in Valdichiana Senese, in Tuscany. A renovated old stable, an ancient peasant courtyard, the Sienese countryside around. A place that still carries in its architecture the memory of slow, seasonal, collective work. The reminiscence before oblivion of the frenetic contemporary time. It is not a residency in a city. It is a residency in a place where the landscape itself reminds that certain things require time. The program selects ten residents – eight artists and two curators under 36 – distributed in two six-month cycles each. As in a bacterial culture, the number is not casual: enough people to create an ecosystem, few enough not to dilute. Those who come work and live in the same farm. There is no separation between the moment of research and that of daily life, because yeast does not stop fermenting when you do not look at it. It always acts, even at night, even in silence. The fields of origin are visual, performative, choreographic, audio-video arts. The common thread: bodies, images and narratives in movement. Living materials, that change form.
Podere La capacciola, ph Martina Raffanelli, courtesy Residenze Lievito
In breadmaking, it is called refreshment: the act of adding flour and water to sourdough starter to keep it alive, to give it new energy. Residenze Lievito functions in a similar way. Each cycle brings with it a formative program – workshops, lessons, visits, curatorial and territorial tutoring – not as academic obligation, but as continuous nourishment. Something to add to the process so it does not exhaust itself. To this is accompanied a monthly grant of 500 euros, free accommodation, equipped studio and a production budget. Material conditions, that is. Because even the most vital yeast does not survive without glucose. Yeast needs to be guided, not controlled. Each cycle of Residenze Lievito grows around an open question: not an answer to find, but a direction in which to move together. The first is called “Rethinking the aia”. The aia was the place where grain was threshed, separated, shared. It was noise, dust, common fatigue. Today it almost no longer exists, like many spaces where people truly stayed together, without mediation, without screen. What remains of that type of encounter? What does it mean to reconstruct it, even just for six months, in a Tuscan farm? The second, titled “Making good”, starts from further back: from 1338, when a hydraulic work transformed the Valdichiana from marshy area into fertile land. A reclamation. A collective act that changed the landscape for centuries. Residenze Lievito takes this history and brings it to the present: what does it mean to reclaim today? What is there, in art and in life, that waits to be made good?
Podere La capacciola, studio, ph Martina Raffanelli, courtesy Residenze Lievito
These are questions that do not have a preset answer. They are substrates, precisely. Something on which yeast can work. At the end of each fermentation, there is bread. At the end of each cycle, a final exhibition, scheduled for December 2026 for the first residency, for July 2027 for the second. Not an arrival point, but a restitution: to the territory, to the public, to anyone who nourished the process. The call for the first cycle opens on March 3, 2026, with deadline April 30. The first group arrives in Sinalunga on July 11. All information on the project’s official website, to remember that yeast does not know it is making bread. Yet, there it is.
Info:
After obtaining the high school languages diploma, she continued her studies graduating in Art History at the University of Salento, with a bilingual thesis on the Pre-Raphaelites. Since then, she has been actively contributing as a columnist and collaborator with national blogs and with local magazines and TV programs.
NO COMMENT