Crafting Pedagogies of Togetherness Residency 2025
The Residency brought together photographers, filmmakers, experimental artists, and students in Florence and Prato, Italy, from May to July 2023, developed as part of Ricardo Dutra's PhD research on awareness-based design and transformative learning. One question guided the investigation: How do we make the intangible visible?
Emotions, thoughts, sensations, the things we feel but rarely see. Giving them shape and form, the residency proposed, is itself a path to make aware.
Process Open call
It started with an open call, and fifteen residents answered it — most from Tuscany, many studying photography at Fondazione Studio Marangoni, joined by a smaller international group who came for shorter stretches: two designers, a school teacher, an anthropologist, a lawyer. Different backgrounds, different questions, all folding into the same room.
For two months, the group had gatherings every two weeks, moving between Florence and Prato. Monash University in Prato anchored the programme, while sessions at Il Conventino Caffè Letterario and PARC (Florence's Performing Arts Research Centre) pulled the work into new cultural contexts each time, keeping the residency porous to new encounters and unexpected exchanges. Across these gatherings, participants turned the guiding question into experimentation, testing, through photography, film, and performance, how something as elusive as a feeling could become something others could see.
The residency closed with a public exhibition at Monash University in Prato, where the work made over those two months was shown for the first time. The full process, and what came out of it, is documented in Ricardo Dutra's PhD dissertation.
The Erasmus+ funding that later made the 2025 Paris residency possible grew directly out of this experience, and several of the formats later used in Paris and Helsinki in 2025 were tested here first, alongside early conversations with local municipalities in Tuscany about a permanent home for the project.
2 months
May–Jul 2023
In-person
Biweekly
15
Local + international
1
Public exhibition
Monash University, Prato
Main host and site of the closing exhibition
Il Conventino Caffè Letterario
Florence sessions, informal exchange
PARC — Performing Arts Research Centre
Fifteen people, fifteen starting points, one shared question, photographers from Tuscany, alongside designers, a teacher, an anthropologist, a lawyer, all folding into the same space.
“This was an amazing residency and a wonderful way to participate in a dynamic artistic community. What surprised me the most was how quickly we got into meaningful deeper reflections and conversations. The artistic exercises and interactions made this possible. Some exercises we did together allowed us to move freely in and out of topics that touched, inspired, and surprised us all. Several of the participants said they had missed such conversations and this way of meeting. For me personally, it was a reminder of belonging across borders and cultures, and the importance of creating possibility spaces for this to happen.”
Ingvild Øverland, former Stavanger Waldorf Steiner School Teacher
Ingvild Øverland, former Stavanger Waldorf Steiner School Teacher
“During the summer of 2023, I had the pleasure of being a resident artist at Studio Atelierista in Florence. The residency offered a dynamic and collaborative environment, fostering rich discussions, ideation, and prototyping alongside a diverse group of global artists. The opportunity to explore themes such as the tangible and intangible, self and collective, and learning and unlearning was truly transformative. Studio Atelierista’s thoughtful structure and inclusive spirit made space for genuine creative collaboration, which continues to resonate as the community grows.”
Julienne DeVita, Innovation & Strategic Foresight Consultant
Julienne DeVita, Innovation & Strategic Foresight Consultant