This project has been organized in collaboration with the artist, Jason Dodge.

 

"Oh indeed we do what we can! This dream of bringing together ten poets and ten artists to co-exist for a short time in Tuscany has evolved, like so many things in these days into something improvised, Some brilliant people in person and more virtually coming together with the sense that collaboration can be the most powerful on the cellular level of conversation and proximity, in this case both physical and virtual.

 

The invited (physical guests) will use the time in Italy to be, and to work in a new place, to experience something rare, being out of their homes! Breathing different air, working, walking, talking, meeting, reading, watching, occasionally varied conversations can emerge with guests in far away places.  Allowing the results to be without any expectations or specific objectives feels important, The relief from a goal can promise a bounty unexpected results. 

 

This global situation rhymes with other situations from the past of war, depression, and other systems of change. In Russia during the great purge, families waited for news of their loved ones, day after day in the freezing cold, week after week, month after month, never receiving any news. (think of all the families waiting for any news of their loved ones in a over crowded Covid ward)  The great poet Anna Akhmatova wrote in her book Requiem, "In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):

“Can you write this?”

And I said: “I can.”

Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.””

 

 

Jason Dodge