Valentina Vella

In this episode we tried to tackle a sticky topic: love! We rambled a lot, from romantic love to politics, from bad exes to spirituality and art. There will definitely be a Part Two! Some of the people we mentioned/songs we listened to: Byung-Chul Hang, John O'Donohue, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Bini Adamczak, Vacation from Love (Michelle Gurevich), Slurf Song (Michael Hurley, The Unholy Modal Rounders, and Jeffrey Frederick & The Clamtones).

The project was an intimate exploration of my personal struggles with love and relationships, but it also aimed to address questions about the commodification of love and its political repercussions. It culminated in a performance at Paviljoen-aan-het-Water, with Luke Deane as co-performer and Amy Gowan as wrangler. It was largely improvised: we conceived it as an “open book/open album,” an opening up the artistic process since its early stages.

performance and interview during an event about the Praktijk Bijdrage

Performance of some Netherworld pieces during the DAI fundraiser

The first full live performance of Netherworld, an album of sonic poetry about personal and planetary crises set to electronic music. Weaving together the literary and the utterly mundane, it is brutally funny and often danceable.

performance of sound pieces from A Ride West and Netherworld

The current art system is broken. It creates artificial scarcity, exhaustion, anxiety, needless competition. How do we make good art while taking care of ourselves and each other? How do we set the old model on fire and build something new? Valentina doesn't have the answers (yet?) but she will be exploring these questions with the help of many books and friends in her (monthly) radio show. There will also be sounds/music!

performance of some Netherworld pieces during Museum Night in response to Lisa Tan's installation.

In a complex, profoundly unequal and ecologically imperiled world, most of us don't feel at ease. In this workshop I guided participants through somatic exercises based on the Polyvagal Theory and my own embodied artistic practice that gave them a taste of what is possible when we work with and not against the needs of the body and the nervous system.

The launch event of the longer and revised version of my sound album Netherworld. Supported by Dream and Deed Foundation.

An installation comprising photos and a sound album. Netherworld is composed of spoken word recordings and sound pieces about failure, depression, involuntary nomadism and the pathologizing of perfectly normal emotional responses to the social and ecological crises we are facing. It achieves epic levels of mundanity and it will make you feel uncomfortable about the state of the world but your body will want to dance to it.

I presented a piece from my upcoming sound album Netherworld.

my piece Urbi et Orbi was broadcasted during Rava Vavàra, a radio show by Eva Macali

poetry reading during the festival Women Out of Joint

exhibition of texts and artworks made during the Saas-Fee 2018 Summer Institute of Art | Berlin

I worked on a hybrid memoir based on A Ride West

performance event during which I presented Dirge Circuit

practices. In 2015 I led creative workshops during the micro-residency program Dark Matter, which I developed with Pamala Bishop and Jay Murphy in New Orleans. We embraced the principles outlined by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi in Thought in the Act (which explores the intimate, embodied connections between thinking and creative practice). I worked with thirty American artists during three days of experimentation, exhibition, play and rest.

I performed in a collaborative piece by Caleb Yono

I participated as performer and collaborator in a performance by Kirsten Leenars about police violence

I participated as performer and collaborator in a performance by Kirsten Leenars during the Doris Salcedo exhibition.

A theatrical performance based on the film A Ride West written and performed by Valentina Vella; featuring a live band (Nathan Paulus, Sharon Hoyer and Josh Miller from the I Ching Quartet and Daniel Schneider from The Singleman Affair) and live video editing and processing by Michael LaHood. Sound design by Alex Drosen. Lighting by Chelsey Shilling.

An experimental film on love, fear, desire and the violent, masculine American myths of conquest and self-reliance. The projected started as a durational performance (riding a horse across America in the summer 2013) and culminated in a video installation presented at The Center for Book & Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago in May 2014.