Regenerating territories: residenze d’artista a scuola

Accademia Italiana’s photographic exhibition 

It’s a project by MAD Murate Art District, curated by Valentina Gensini, designed with the aim of bringing real contemporary artistic practice into schools in Florence.

The 2024 edition of the project involved 9 artists in a workshop with the students of 8 secondary schools in the city of Florence.

The second-year students of the Photography Bachelor’s Program at Accademia Italiana, under the guidance of the teacher Letizia Francini Naldi, followed the project and made a story by images. In particular, Giovanni Bandieri photographed the school buildings inserted in the context of the different districts of the city of Florence, testifying to the capillary nature of the project; Fahed Hussin, Bettina Lindblad, Nicoletta Matera-Szczesniek, Marta Meinardi, and Matteo Russo documented the workshop activities, exchanges, relationships, and emotions; Arav Wattal, on the other hand, devised a sort of participatory workshop with the students, inviting them to collaborate in creating their own portraits. Zuzanna Rokwisz, Gerardo Sanchez Serrano and Ward Qassem instead focused on the artists involved, creating respectively a series of portraits within the schools and interviews that reveal their poetic and educational approach. The documentation work covered the different phases and the different figures involved in the project Regenerating Territories: Artist Residencies at School project, mapping out its different specificities.