Fondazione Pistoletto and UNIDEE Residency Programs announce the curatorial statement for the 2025/26 biennium of the residency modules. It is signed by the new visiting curators Nina Fiocco and Gaia Martino, who will inaugurate the cycle with the program Languages, Please. The title itself is a declaration of intent: Languages, Please is a collective invitation to rethink language as a space of encounter, conflict, and transformation. The modules become sites for experimentation and shared practice, where language—in its written, vocal, bodily, and spatial forms—is questioned and traversed in all its political, emotional, and ecological complexity.

Language, body, justice
The new curatorial program positions itself as a political, aesthetic, and collective action. In a global context marked by crises and polarizations, Languages, Please invites us to remain polyphonic and porous, to inhabit the paradoxes of communication, and to acknowledge the importance of the invisible and the incomprehensible. The program explores language as an open field, where what is uncodified—the unsaid, the unheard, the unseen—takes on crucial value. The focus shifts from dominant narratives to the micro-processes that generate them: muscles, memories, interweavings, and errors. This reflection also extends to relational ecologies, in which human and more-than-human bodies assert their right to remain plural and complex.

The first two modules: June 2025
The first module, titled The thing with commas, periods, dashes and parentheses, will be led by artist and writer Verónica Gerber Bicecci, with the participation of singer and vocal researcher Meike Clarelli. Through sound, visual, and bodily practices, the module will investigate the role of punctuation marks, exploring their apparent silence and the hidden implications they generate in language.
The second module, Unknowing Listening / Transfluent Aurality, will be conducted by researcher and sound artist Pedro Oliveira, alongside performer and musician Ece Canlı. In this lab, listening becomes a tool for deconstructing and redefining what it means to know, understand, and act in the world, moving beyond the idea of knowledge as a linear and univocal process.
Both modules will take place at Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte Onlus in Biella, from June 9 to 20, 2025, and will involve both the internal spaces of the institution and the surrounding urban and rural landscape.

Introducing the new curators
Nina Fiocco is an artist and curator, lecturer at SOMA (Mexico City) and IBERO (Puebla), and co-director of the ERROR project. Her research focuses on orality and microhistories, aiming to construct counter-narratives in response to official historical discourses. Since 2016, she has collaborated with the Museo Amparo (Mexico), curating numerous public programs and presenting her work in various international contexts.
Gaia Martino is a curator, educator, and cultural coordinator. She holds a PhD in the performativity of listening and works with spatial and sonic practices in collaboration with artists, musicians, and researchers. She is co-curator of the Public Program of the Italian Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, has co-directed Standards Studio in Milan, is part of the Sound Studies Hub (SSH!) at IUAV University of Venice, and has collaborated with Archive Books in Berlin.

An open call to explore together
With this new cycle, UNIDEE reaffirms its vocation as a dynamic space for artistic research, interdisciplinarity, and direct engagement with local ecologies. All the information, together with the project context and program objectives, is available on the official UNIDEE website.

Partners
UNIDEE’s supporters are: Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Regione Piemonte, illycaffè S.p.A., Fondazione Zegna, UniCredit Group, Fondazione Deloitte, CRT Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Torino.
Research residency partners of UNIDEE: A.M. Qattan Foundation, Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation, Institut Français Italia, Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Bienalsur.

Cover image, courtesy: Oscar Formacio Mendoza.