Curated by Filipa Ramos

With Antoine Bertin, Javier Arce Bueno, Jacob Ott, Belén Rodriguez, Valentine Prissette

William Shakespear’s famous comedy A Midsummer Night Dream celebrates love, illusion, dance, music, and the nature of desire in the setting of an enchanted forest during a warm summer night. Through their dreams in the forest, humans and other animals coexist, share experiences and understand and interact with one another. The animals are symbols and metaphores, as they are used to describe and illustracte human characters, but they are also real creatures, whose life and existence in nature and in relation to humanity is well considered. 

Inspired by the unique natural setting of La Società delle Api, the beehives, chicken and other animals it hosts, and rediscovering Shakespear’s famous tale of interspecies joy, the 2025 Summer Solistice Artists’ Residency will be moved by the desire of embracing art as a form to be close to nature, to recall the love and care for it, and to focus on art that is made through, with, and for nature. The 2025 Summer Residency becomes the occasion to bring together a group of practitioners whose work celebrates the ways in which the presence and contact with art may improve and bring together the space, the people, and the other creatures that live in La Società delle Api, also revealing the profound entanglements between art and the natural world. 

The invited artists are painters, sculptors, performers and sound recordists who make work with, within and for nature. They create natural pigments and dyes out of plants, seaweed and natural materials; have an interest in creating sculptures and other structures that improve and engage with wildlife; perform with and for humans and animals; record and organise concerts around the sounds of nature, and have a body of work that dilutes the threshold between the artistic and the natural. 

The Residency honours the traditions of works exhibited at La Società delle Api: the fountain for birds to drink made by the rabbits of Lin May Saeed, the oven of Gabriel Chaile, made from clay and straw, and the many representations of vegetal and animal life that exist across its spaces and rooms. Artists will be invited to bring, make and share their work in formats known and invented: from exhibitions and installations on site to specific days or evenings and gatherings where they present and discuss it in new ways. Together, in duos and individually, they are invited to engage with the settings of La Società delle Api as a site of inspiration, reverberation, and creation.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Filipa Ramos, PhD, is a curator and writer whose work intersects art, moving images and ecology. She is Lecturer at the Basel Institute of Art and Design HGK/FHNW and Artistic Director of Loop Festival, Barcelona. Ramos has expanded the discourse of art history towards an ecological sensibility, encouraging museums, curators and artists to envisage art as a tool for social and environmental change. Ramos’s curatorial practice is often collaborative. With Lucia Pietroiusti, she runs the arts and humanities festival The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish (2018-onwards). Together, they co-curated the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2021) and curated the 8th Biennale Gherdëina (2023) and the exhibition Songs for the Changing Seasons for the 1st Vienna Climate Biennale (2024). Ramos curated Bestiari, which represented Catalonia for the 60th Venice Biennale (2024). Ramos was Editor-in-Chief of e-flux criticism (2013–20), Associate Editor of Manifesta Journal (2009–11) and contributed for Documenta 13 (2012) and 14 (2017). She authored Lost and Found (2009) and edited Animals (2016). Her upcoming book, The Artist as Ecologist (2025), surveys the ways in which 21st-century artists engage with ecology.

Antoine Bertin (Paris, 1985) is an artist working at the intersection of science and sensory immersion, field recording and sound storytelling, data and music composition. Based between Paris and Alicudi, his creations take the form of listening experiences, immersive moments and audio meditations exploring our relationships with the living world. His work has been presented at Tate Britain, Palais de Tokyo, Serpentine Gallery, KIKK festival, STRP festival, Sonar+D, CCCB Barcelona, Dutch Design Week, Nuit Blanche Paris, le 104, Centre Wallonie Bruxelles, Gaité Lyrique. He produces a quarterly show called Edge of the forest on NTS radio weaving together field recordings, data sonifications and science inspired meditations.

Jacob Ott works with various media – from sculpture, object, painting and installation to film, sound and performance. The form of his work derives from an investigation of the habits and symbols that shape social arrangements and institutions. Much of Ott’s work deals with fundamental elements of art production as well as the individual components and infrastructures of the institution of art itself. In doing so, he tries to create autonomous or context-specific artworks as well as works and exhibition formats that form their own context for other artworks. Through simple, seemingly illogical interventions as well as a de-naturalization of the natural, Ott’s work opens up a possible reflection on the often arbitrary or violent divisions and rules that come with the increasing cultivation of our world by us humans.

Valentine Prissette (Paris, 1998) combines painting, drawing, installation and set design in her work. She often mixes found textiles, wood and wax to explore the relationship between the theatrical and the domestic. Her large, colourful paintings explore the relationship between abstraction and the representation of nature. Through scenography, she creates fragments of interiors, uninhabited scenes of a theater at a standstill. For her solo exhibition Sleeping Pantings at Poush, in Paris (Winter 2024), she summoned through familiar forms the equivocal tales that are recited before sleeping. Her latest series blurs the notions of scale, inside the models the embroidered drawings become new protagonists. After graduating from painting from the Fine Arts School of Clergy, Paris, she became an artist in residence at Poush, in Aubervilliers, Paris, from where she works.

Belén Rodríguez‘s work (Valladolid, 1981) deconstructs the cultural components of textile craftwork, both pictorially and sculpturally. She creates her own repertoire that reaches peak chromatic expression and maximum formal abstraction, delving deep into the mystery of colour and its superficial glory. She has a Master of Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, 2010, where she studied with Professor Heimo Zobernig. She graduated in Fine Arts from the UCM in Madrid, 2007. In 2022, she received the Botín Foundation Grant for Plastic Arts, Santander (ES). In 2023, the artist features Metallic Salt, a solo project at the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid, curated by Javier Hontoria, and participates among others in the group show Doblad mis amores, at Collegium (Arévalo), curated by Chus Martínez.

Javier Arce‘s work (Santander, 1973) is characterized by a special attention to how drawing dialogues with painting, and its relation to installation and sculpture. Recently, the artist locates geographically and thematically his work in a shepherd’s cabin in the mountains of Cantabria, where he presents a lucid relationship between the local and the global, the personal and the political, between the natural landscape and contemporary conflicts and, in short, between the individual desire and the collective impulse. Arce has a degree with Honors in Fine Arts at the Basque Country University and received his Master in Sculpture from the Wimbledon School of Fine Art. He has been artist-in-residence at the ISCP in New York. He was awarded by Botín Foundation in 2006 and was recipient of the Leonardo Grant by BBVA Foundation in 2018. His work is included in numerous collections such as la de Fundación Marcelino Botín, ARTIUM, IVAM, Museo de Bellas Artes de Santander, MUSAC, La Caixa, CAB or La Caixa Foundation Contemporary Art Collection.