Carə tuttə,
Finally we are back with our newsletter which we abandoned when everything became too overwhelming – things happening in the (big) world and things happening in our small world. I won’t go into articulated updates on these pasts months since there are many traces online already → You can explore what me, Aljaž, Elena and Maria are reading here, what Elena and Antônio are building here, what Franca is annotating here, and listen to our voices through our radio archive here. Our radio space hosted specially meaningful conversations lately on translanguaging, decomposing languages, speculative infrastructures, smarginature, languages as spaces, mythopoiesis, functional and fictional spaces in Topolò, permaculture – we are very thankful to all those who shared conversations and reflections with us, live on air, during diarietto sessions or just at our tables during dinners and breakfasts. We feel super lucky to have such beautiful minds and dear friends around us <3
During these last months some of us travelled - to Paris, Berlin, Eindhoven, Prato and soon to the US - while others were in Topolò, building dry stone walls, editing books - like the new book Pedagogies of the Art-Proximate by Sophie which we will publish in late spring or the book Footnotes by Franca, which is slowly fermenting - preparing exhibitions, picking primule and hosting friends.
But especially we published the new open call for Robida which this year will be dedicated to HANDS. In these last months the nicest things our hands encountered were: a sewing machine, the double bass strings, friends’ hands (Vida), all cats, the binding tools, big heavy stones, small tomato seeds (Elena), leaves of unexpected textures, the last stone step of a Maya pyramid, the warmth beneath a T-shirt (Lau), old bricks, broken tiles, moist earth, anonymous stones (Antônio), a newborn baby’s skin, baby nettles, sourdough, bread and many pizzas (Dora), microphones and cables (Aljaž).
Read about the open call below. We are curious to read you!
Skip to the end of the letter for events and updates about Robida’s next months.
Thomas Smillie, Hands writing (1890–1913)
Robida 12
ROKE MANI HANDS
Deadline for abstracts or final contributions: May 1st
Read the open call on our website, download the PDF Franca designed and explore the are.na channel where we collected references, quotes, books and images.
The big news we would like to dedicate some space to is that the editorial board of this issue got enriched with three new people who are all already a big part of Robida’s family and whose practice and research are particularly fitting for a publication dedicated to hands → Sasha – bread maker, ex yoga teacher, gleaner and prolific list writer, Elena B. – researcher of conviviality, recipes and textile designer, and Antônio – designer, builder and researcher of crafts.
We asked each of them to share a little thought on this new adventure. Here is what they wrote:
Sasha:
At the beginning of February I received a message from Vida asking if I would be interested in editing part of the upcoming issue of Robida on Hands – of course no pressure, no stress, no expectations <3 only a nice, kind invitation. Her gentle nudge made me smile and it felt very natural to say yes and to try something new. I said to her that I could imagine cosy phone calls, meals and moments around tables while creating something good together – the magazine providing a framework to be in contact with Robida friends in more of a structural way than usual. As someone who is either working with or observing other hands, of course the topic, a bit out of the ordinary for Robida, very much spoke to me too. I’m also finding out that the timeline of the magazine is a nice way to give a soft framework to the openness that I have created for myself this year after making some big changes. I look forward to soon being in supportive touch with the contributors and the exploring the content that we receive. Exciting!
Side note: there have been times in the past where I have been asked to take a little look at the English grammar of the magazine upon which I had the opportunity to discover the Italian tendency to create very, very long sentences. I love making them shorter and I love adding a bit of magic to a text by making sure it reads well. I will do my level best for this edition!
Elena B:
I received the invitation to join Robida’s editorial board exactly after two years of relocating myself from the Netherlands to Italy. A lot has happened since then—travelling around the north of Italy and the Alps searching for work, community, love and blooming times. But even while wandering, Topolò and its inhabitants always embraced me and my practice with tailored collaborations and acts of care ~ together we cooked, wrote, laughed, sewed, ironed, walked, cleaned, dance, sang, gossiped, climbed, washed and shared countless of moments. 🌀As I continue to delve into research on conviviality and recipes, I’m super excited to be working on the new issue dedicated to HANDS, especially because ~ I guess it’s official ~ I’ll be spending this summer living in Topolò and taking care of Izba’s program! 💙
Antônio:
I was handed the opportunity to be an editor of Robida after three years of living among, photographing and working alongside hands in Topolò. I hope this will hold me closer to this place and its people. I look forward to handling manuscripts with tactile curiosity and to coming to grips with unknown gestures.
Hand-Shadows on the Wall, Scientific Amusements, translated from the French of Gaston Tissandier (1883)
Another news of this issue is that we will work (again, after a first successful attempt in Robida 9!) with thematic sections, each curated by one editor. Below you find the description of each section which functions as a small open call.
HANDS SHAPING
By reversing the direction of agency in this passage, Vilém Flusser gestures toward something that exceeds the painter’s will in the relation between humans and materials. As a field of possibilities is disclosed by the working hand, the distinction between forming and being informed begins to blur. Such an intuition of entanglement is not limited to painting, but extends across different spheres of making. As André Leroi-Gourhan argued, the liberation of the hands marked a decisive threshold in human becoming. With bipedalism, the hand became available as a technical mediator, unleashing a long evolutionary process in which organs and memory were progressively exteriorised into tools, techniques and artifacts. Our hands allowed us to transform the world around us, which in turn transformed us.
This section turns to the many ways the hand mediates between humans and materials: weaving, sewing, carving, knitting, cutting, bending, splitting, forging, casting, turning, mending, joining, assembling. How does the hand participate in worldbuilding? Can thought emerge through the manipulation of matter? What role do specific materials and embodied knowledge play in shaping these relations? What are the prospects of manual labour in the face of increasing automation? And how has the appropriation, invisibilization, or suppression of the hand shaped the material world we inhabit?
– Antônio
HANDS TRACING
Hands that trace lines, hesitate, retrace their steps, begin again. In this section, we would like to receive contributions that reflect on drawing and designing as practices that develop through gesture: illustrating, sketching, mapping, scribbling; tracing paths that are simultaneously observation and imagination. Even a gesture in the air, like the trace of an imaginary path to follow.
We would like to collect materials of various kinds: finished images and traces of processes. Completed drawings and uncertain lines, mistakes, trials, which hold within themselves the possibility of transformation: the sketch of a shape, color tests, a set of dots, traces of different tools...These are signs in which the hand becomes both instrument and witness to an ongoing process: it observes, researches, synthesises, organises, translates.
In this section we wish to collect: theoretical or personal texts about drawing and sketching as practices of research, diaries that develop through drawing, research on ancient drawing practices, hand drawn maps and spatial representation, series of drawings as imagination and as observation, with a particular interest in the representation of nature. Hands that trace as a way of thinking through lines.
– Elena R.
HANDS TASTING
This section explores how hands act as environments for shaping and interpreting flavours and matter. Drawing on what Vivian Sobchack evokes in Carnal Thoughts about language’s ability to conjure touch and flavour through the synaesthetic act of reading a recipe—so that we may find ourselves “tasting the recipe as we read it”—I invite you to explore how to bring us closer to the experience of eating, of sharing a meal collectively and of awakening the appetite through the language of food combined with the gesturality of hands.
This section focuses on the modality of touch-as-flavour rather than on smell or taste alone and is open to anyone with the ability to use food as a means to engage corporeally with the reader and to encourage them to experience the contribution through their own hands.
I imagine this cluster as a cookbook in itself, welcoming contributions such as, but not limited to: recipes that emphasise gestures and the senses; theoretical or personal texts about gastronomy and touch; photographic sequences of hands cooking, stirring, kneading, fermenting, chopping, pinching, squeezing; hand-written recipes and footnotes; sensory-focused food abecedaries; grocery lists noted on hands; auto-gastrobiographies; choreographic scores for future meals; culinary-fiction stories, and reflections about fermentation that will become a momentary source of solidarity and comfort for the many hands forming Robida’s community.
– Elena B.
HANDS GATHERING
For this section of Robida 12, I would enjoy being surprised by different reasons, motives and outcomes for hands gathering in order to sustain living over time.
Harvesting ~ how do we relate to natural resources in order to generate food for sustenance? I think of hands sowing, tending, reaping, picking, foraging, gleaning and perhaps even mustering up the courage to steal — all as a means to harvest, contain, store and enjoy for survival. Pantries, agroecology, outlaws, gift economy, uprisings and mischief come to mind.
Collecting ~ what are the different habits for collecting from scattered places and sources? How are elements brought together in archival forms? Here I think of selecting, assembling, listing and remembering. Travel, memories, logbooks, lists and diaries come to mind.
Holding ~ How do we gather and convene as humans, joining many hands to build belonging, to foster intentional interaction and to create communities? Crowds, connecting, dispersing, caring, sharing purpose, spaces, more than human species and reciprocity come to mind.
All of these thoughts, words and images loop around to a sum of parts, an evolving shared harvest for the theme of hands gathering. Hopefully, they inspire different approaches from theoretical to embodied, from experiential to mundane and from personal to experimental.
– Sasha
HANDS LOVING
Every time I find myself enchanted by the beauty of animal fur, I think about what madness it is that human beings gave up such a marvel of beauty and practicality. There is only one gain in this catastrophic loss: we can be caressed more easily.
In this section I would like to explore the role of hands in the language of affection—bodily, loving, physical, nonverbal, intimate, and also social. Touch [(con)tatto] is the first sense that guides us when we come into the world. There is something primordial in the way we use our hands to communicate emotions, desires, and messages. Intimacy is often expressed through the way we use our hands: the familiarity, the care, the intention, and the affection involved in making a gesture.
I invite you to reflect on the theme of hands within the affective, emotional, bodily, and erotic sphere. Intimate languages, secrets transmitted at the fingertips, private and collective rituals. Hands loving seeks to tell a story that begins before, passes through, and goes beyond words.
– Laura
HANDS MANIFESTING
If certain hands had not been raised, clasped, or withdrawn, political worlds might have unfolded otherwise. Through the gestures of something so mundane as hands — their manifestations of meaning, relations, and forms of power — the body enters the public sphere and participates in the shaping of socio-political worlds. These gestures are not only signs but inscriptions of experience: movements through which the body writes the world while simultaneously acting within it. As Carlo Sini writes, “[t]he gesture is the original writing of experience”: a writing that can bind bodies together as easily as it can divide them.
The raised fist of a striking laborer, civil rights activist and anti-fascist fighters; the infamous Roman salute; the V-sign – on the one hand for victory, on the other for peace – all are gestures through which political worlds are enacted and contested.
The hand is at once an organ of solidarity, but also a site of danger: during the COVID-19 pandemic, even the simple handshake was suspended, replaced by gestures of distance. Similarly, contemporary regimes of hand capture – fingerprints and biometric scans – turn the intimacy of touch into trace and evidence. These examples reveal the bio-ethico-political nature of our gesticulation.
This section therefore invites contributions on the one hand exploring emancipatory and, on the other, oppressive political and semiotic life of hands in all its different manifestations.
– Aljaž
HANDS WRITING
This section will explore both hands as producers of meaning that emerges through writing and as carriers of meaning inscribed in their lines, in their shape and gestures.
What role does the hand play in writing practices in times when we mainly write by typing? Where does the carving and the scratching contained in the etymology of writing reside, now that the hand isn’t dragging itself along the paper anymore? But also, what can we read from the hand as a body archive of stories? What do hands, when we read their shape, their skin, their wounds, narrate?
From Medieval maniculae to experimental (hand)writing practices and forms such as calligrams, micrograms, marginalia or asemic writing, from palm reading to hand symbolism and iconography of hands, from citational practices and referencing as handing down to writing as harvesting words – in this section we will dwell on the relation between hands and language: on what hands do when they write and on what is inscribed in our hands.
– Vida
For more information, inspiration and guidance download the PDF of open call where you find everything you need! For questions write to → [email protected]
We look forward to receive your proposals!
Ivan Sabolić (YU, 1921-86), Spomen park Bubanj, Niš (1963)
Now, since we are here, let us also share some of our future and near future events (probably we forgot something → you can remain updated checking from time to time the calendar on our website!).
◯ Saturday, 04.04.2026 at 18.00 → ✨ Robida’s annual assembly in Izba ✨
If you were a member of Robida association in 2025 you probably received the email of invitation. If you didn’t and you are a member and you want to join (irl or online) let us know!
◯ Thursday, 09.04.2026 at 18.30 → Robida at Casa Cavazzini, Udine
Elena and Dora will present Robida in conversation with Lorenzo Lazzari in the context of the exhibition Mind the Gap within which Robida is one of the exhibiting artists. More here.
◯ Friday, 10.04.2026 at 15.00 → Robida at Brown University, Providence
Robida was invited to join the annual Brown-Harvard International Graduate Conference in Italian Studies CHIASMI with the title Fuori Luogo: On Displacement(s) and Becoming. Vida will be there to introduce Robida’s practice and how it relates to questions of displacement, becoming and belonging. More here.
◯ Friday, 17.04.2026 at 16.00 (online) → Robida for Hyper Village, IUAV
Join us for a presentation of Robida’s work in the cycle of lecture organised by Fulvia Larena (IUAV, Venezia) titled Hyper Village. The presentation will be in Italian. More here.
Save the date!
Izba’s birthday party → June 14th
Robida’s Academy of Margins’ Summer school and public weekend → July 20th-27th
Talk soon
love and hugs and sweet things
Robida gang