EMMA HARRIS
julio 21, 2025EVERYBODY SHOULD BE A FARMER
agosto 28, 2025ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCY
All images are courtesy of Mali Weil
MALI WEIL
Residency periods: November 2024 - April 2025 & June 2025 . Azienda Agricola Il Poggiolo (Bologna)
Mentored by Kilowatt / Serra Madre.
ABOUT
Mali Weil is an artistic platform founded by Elisa Di Liberato, Lorenzo Facchinelli, and Mara Ferrieri, based in Trentino Alto Adige-Suedtirol, Italy. The platform engages in performative research that probes the disclosure of political imagination concerning ecological and political issues, as well as the role and responsibilities of individuals in social and urban spaces. Her visual productions span performances, product and speculative design, editorial work, and film. Additionally, she organizes curatorial projects and workshops, creating open and itinerant schools, participatory and relational setups, and platforms for discussion and exchange.
RESIDENCY
The artistic collective Mali Weil carried out a three-phase residency designed to support layered, interdisciplinary, and site-responsive research grounded in the entanglements of ecology, memory, and more-than-human diplomacy.
Originally scheduled for an earlier start, the residency was postponed due to an unforeseen incident at the host site. It ultimately unfolded across three main working periods: the first in November 2024, and the second in April and June 2025. This seasonal structure enabled the artists to align their practice with the rhythms of the land and to engage in sustained dialogue with both human and non-human actors at Azienda Agricola Il Poggiolo, a rural cooperative situated within Monte Sole Natural Park near Bologna.
The site was central to the methodology of Mali Weil. Monte Sole is not only an area of ecological interest, but also the site of one of the most devastating civilian massacres in Italy during World War II. This violent history served as a key point of departure for the collective’s long-term inquiry into interspecies diplomacy, offering a rich and complex terrain where questions of death, memory, political violence, and regeneration could be explored through a multispecies lens.
The first phase of the residency involved immersion in the park’s historical, environmental, and socio-cultural layers. Through walks, dialogues, and onsite exploration, the artists developed a relational mapping of the area, engaging with members of the Il Poggiolo cooperative, researchers, park rangers, the School of Peace, and the Dossettian monastic community. This stage also marked a methodological shift: with agricultural activity at the site reduced, the focus expanded toward the landscape’s historical and spiritual dimensions, especially the agency of the dead as political and ecological actors.
Building on these foundations, the second phase deepened the research through additional fieldwork, interviews, collaborative mapping, and video portraits. These activities examined how histories of violence and resilience shape present-day relationships to food, land, and memory. The artists interrogated the edible as a diplomatic interface, asking, “Who do we eat, and how?”—a question that foregrounded consumption and cultivation as multispecies negotiations involving humans, animals, plants, microbes, and even ghosts.
Throughout the residency, Mali Weil drew on a transdisciplinary methodology that merges philosophy, law, biology, and speculative fiction. Their work was informed by thinkers such as Anna Tsing, Annemarie Mol, and Emanuele Coccia, and explored protocols for recognizing the agency of non-human beings—including the dead, marginal ecologies, and legal ghosts—as central figures in the ongoing redefinition of the human.
CAPACITY-BUILDING WORKSHOP
Image by Mali Weil
Worldsongs – A Diplomacy Between the Living and the Dead
Date: June 5, 2025
Location: June 5, 2025 – serra madre, Bologna, Italy
Workshop Format: Participatory dinner-conversation
On June 5, 2025, the artistic collective Mali Weil hosted the workshop Worldsongs – A Diplomacy Between the Living and the Dead at serra madre in Bologna. Structured as a participatory dinner-conversation, the session formed part of the collective’s ongoing research residency at Monte Sole, a landscape marked by both ecological regeneration and historical trauma.
Set within a carefully curated relational space, the workshop invited participants to engage in a speculative, affective exploration of more-than-human diplomacy. Through a guided series of questions, the evening focused on the agency of the dead in contemporary ecological imaginaries, drawing on the symbolic resonance of Monte Sole as a site of memory and mourning.
Participants from diverse backgrounds contributed to a shared dialogue that wove together reflections on ritual, forest imaginaries, and posthuman forms of coexistence.
The dinner was structured to evoke the forest as a multispecies, dreamlike space—a terrain inhabited not only by plants, fungi, and animals, but also by absences, silences, and ancestral presences. Together, attendees reflected on what it might mean to build alliances with vegetal and spectral others, questioning how memory, listening, and relational ethics might shape our political and ecological futures.
The experience unfolded as a temporary micro-community, where words and silences operated as equal tools of inquiry. The performative structure of the workshop allowed personal narratives, symbolic associations, and shared imaginaries to emerge organically. The questions offered by Mali Weil acted as catalysts for thinking beyond the human, encouraging a reconfiguration of the boundaries between the living and the dead.
Worldsongs remains an open-ended reflection on the role of ritual and storytelling in shaping multispecies cosmopolitics—a site of experimentation in which the edible, the invisible, and the remembered converge.
