Introducing AFIELD digital residencies with Robida

This new program seeks to highlight the talented artistic and social projects happening all over the world. Robida is a cultural association and collective of researchers, architects, designers, artists and activists based in Topolò/Topolove, a small village of 25 inhabitants on the border between Italy and Slovenia.

The collective works with multidisciplinary approaches to various projects rooted in Topolò or that take Topolò as a starting point for reflections and actions. Robida operates at the intersection of written and spoken words and spatial practices, carrying on for almost ten years a multilingual magazine, a community radio, its own Academy of Margins and actions of care on the nature-culture that surrounds the village, beside constantly reflecting on new possible ways of inhabiting the village and its landscape.

In the coming weeks, Robida collective will introduce itself as AFIELD’s first digital residents, exploring its genealogy and its inspirations and researching in its archives. The collective will share references, foundational concepts, and vernacular which became meaningful for the work in Topolò, still open questions and photographs.

What knowledge can we collect from abandoned micro-landscapes, the stream, the young humble forest, the fallen fruit trees, covered by brambles but still blooming? What do ruins teach us? How to stay in the in-between of stasis and fluidity that characterizes margins? What methodologies can stem from the hyper-local context Robida is producing the magazine from? How to remain porous, to make-with and think-with landscapes? These will be some of the open questions we will try to explore within the space of AFIELD’s Instagram account.