Among the most interesting realities offered by the Roman contemporary sphere, there are certainly foreign academies, which were born to host and support artists, researchers and scholars coming to Italy to deepen their knowledge of archeology, art, history or classical languages and which today host scholarship holders in humanistic studies.

Anybody who has ever entered one of the many foreign academies in Rome probably happened to get the odd feeling of being catapulted into a world apart, where nuances differentiating cultures of nowadays globalized world get emphasized, showing new possibilities for mutual understanding and revelation.

Entering the British School at Rome is not right as visiting the UK Pavilion at the 55^th Venice International Art Exhibition – where artist Jeremy Deller set up a sort of mythical pavilion putting together all those elements which usually build the concept of Britishness, the essence of what means, or it is supposed to mean, being specifically English.

Founded in 1901, the British School at Rome is to date an important research center for history, archeology, contemporary art and architecture, proposing every year a rich program of events, conferences, workshops and seminaries, as well as a publications program and a dense residency program. Every year, the BSR hosts scholars and artists from the UK and Commonwealth, nationally selected in Great Britain for the quality of their work. Chief aim of the Fine Arts and Humanities programs is that of supporting and promoting the intellectual exchange between Italian artists, architects and scholars and the residents at the foreign academies, “in a pluralistic perspective, never to favor a specific trend or kind of practice”, as the director of the Fine Arts program Jacopo Benci underlines.

Every year the Fine Arts program proposes three exhibitions where resident artists are invited to show their work. The choice of the works to put on show and the arrangement are up to the artists themselves: this is not only consistent with the figure of the artist/curator which is very common in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but it also allows for the creation of a real working group stimulating critical dialogue among residents. The outcomes of this mix are obviously always new and every exhibition becomes a sort of big bang, especially for those artists who get annual scholarships and have therefore the opportunity to participate to all the exhibition dates.

Some months ago, we had the opportunity to interview three residents form 2012-2013 Fine Arts program, Todd Fuller, John Di Stefano, Zed Nelson: what came out form their words was an interesting and articulated panorama showing how different the residency experience might be in the very same context. Todd, John and Zed also told about the research they did during the residency and the itineraries that brought them to present certain works during the exhibition Please Be Quiet, which opened from the 14^th to the 22^nd of June 2013 at the BSR gallery.

This year as well the British School at Rome has the opportunity to present to the city of Rome an extremely interesting group of artists, whose researches trace the route towards the future of Anglo-Saxon art and not only.

Besides Archie Franks (Sainsbury Scholar in Painting and Sculpture Fellow October 2013- September 2014), a painter focusing on the research around non-linear narratives, and Danièle Genadry (Abbey Scholar in Painting, October 2013 – June 2014), whose research mostly focuses on the way memory, migration and movement influence perception, there will be four artists at the British School during the trimester October-December 2013: Ann Marie James (Derek Hill Foundation Scholar 2013), whose work ranges from painting to drawing, sculpture and photography, making quotation the key element through which the elements in her works can recognize and confront with art history; Marius von Brasch (Abbey Fellows in Painting 2013), whose research aims at exploring the forces in the flux of things in the tension between manual production and new technologies, between strategy and emotion while doing art; Johann Arens (Rome Fellow in Contemporary Art 2013), a German artist producing video installations which make us reflect over perception and behavior in front of digital images; Julia Davis (Australia Council Residents 2013),  artist from Sydney whose site-specific works investigate perceptions and relations between objects, places and spaces. The artists will be participating to the usual exhibition date next December the 13^th… it is needed to get ready for a new big bang!

The different lifes that Yasmin Fedda tells seen together seem to compose a variegated world of emotions and perspectives and hopes, distant in space and time, but concretely nearby in the representation of the Other. The Other told by Yasmin has never declared as such by either synonym of exclusion or marginalization, what clearly emerges from her work is rather as the other – intended as a different point of view, of experience, of culture or condition – can easily become a collective self, different each time, in which each person can recognize its own identity. On the other hand, is Boutrous the Syrian monk protagonist of the film Milking the Desert (2004) to reveal the crucial point in the Yasmin’s work: telling the relations between the Muslim and Christian communities Boutrous says, with tangible genuineness, which in deep “a person is a person”.

The Yasmin Fedda’s work, in fact, is focused on people, individuals symbol of springtime cultural.

Yasmin looks to these universes with authenticity and raw purity with through the camera, and it is evident in the two works exhibited last March in Rome for the group exhibition “Ides of March” at the British School of Rome: the award-winning Breadmakers (video of the 2007, filmed to the Garvald Bakery in Edinburgh, where a community of workers with learning disabilities, makes a variety of organic breads for daily delivery to shops and cafes in the city. The Garvald Bakery’s project is inspired by the Rudolph Steiner’s ideas, according to which the workers realise their potential for self-discovery and creativity in a social environment) and the unpublished Siamo Tornati/We are Back (2013) outcome of the roman experience.

Siamo Tornati/We are Back tells about the growing phenomenon of italian social occupations – Teatro Valle, Cinema Palace, and others – as a reaction to the cuts on public services and the unemployment significant increase. In roman district of San Giovanni the boxing teacher  Gianni other sports trainers and activists have come together to create S.C.u.P (sport e cultura popolare) a popular gym, school and community centre. I ask Yasmin why her decided to show together these two works that clearly address the theme of community as a place of positive growth: «because I felt that both films, in different ways, show how different communities are finding positive ways to deal with the issues they face. I found both projects inspiring and I felt they complimented each other».

The films are however stylistically quite different: Breadmakers is fully observational, without any voiceover or interview. The public can only look at the bakery, the bread and the social interactions while everybody is working. In Siamo Tornati/We are Back the main protagonist is Gianni; he explains what is the project S.C.u.P and why he realized that, and tells about this experience’s meaning for him and for the entire community. Yasmin select the players for her films in different ways adapting each time to the circumstances, this happen also in the editing phase where the style does not overlie the content, but is sculpted on it making every work unique and complete. It is in the film phase that Yasmin tends to propose always the same pattern of approach, spending long periods of time with the people who will film, this is in aid of her to obtain trust, and be able to film life ‘as it happens’.

Yasmin Fedda has palestinians origins, she lived in Syria and in different parts of the Middle East, after moved to UK and spent the first three months of 2013 in Rome at the British School of Rome, as winner of the Creative Scotland document24 Fellowship 2012-13. When I ask her if she feel herself a world citizen she answers: «It is sometimes hard not feeling rooted anywhere, but at the same time I enjoy feeling a part of many places and not any one place in the world».

Yasmin Fedda, Siamo Tornati/We are Back, 2013 http://vimeo.com/63646958