Vida Rucli

Hands writing → Last three days to participate to the open call for Robida 12 on hands 🤞🏽(Deadline for abstracts: May 1st) Here we are, again, starting the process for this thing - called Robida magazine, which is not anymore a magazine perhaps given its 400 pages - that we are doing every year since eleven years which allowed us to meet special special people while reading their words! For the 12th issue of Robida, dedicated to hands doing things, I will edit the section titled 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. On the one hand: writing practices, calligraphy, micrograms, asemic writing, citational practices, referencing, marginalia, Medieval maniculae, tavole parolibere, calligrams, concrete poetry; on the other hand: hands as body archive, palmistry, graphology, chirology, iconography of hands, hands symbolism. I am looking forward to reading your proposals! ❤️ Find more in the open call and on @r_o_b_i_d_a Image captions in the comments!

One of the things that came out in 2025 and I am happy about is my new website. It was born on a spring afternoon when with Elena we sat down and for half an hour sketched our desired website. I took the sketch quite seriously and designed the website in the next days! Then dearest @elliott.computer coded it and we used @aredotna as repository of all the things contained in the website. It’s very simple and I am happy it came out lightly. → vidarucli.com (check it on the computer where you can enjoy a split scrolling and some sentences appearing when you hover over images…) Thank you html energy master @elliott.computer for the joyful process ☁️💌

On Saturday, November 22nd, at Museum SMO in Špietar we present the latest issue of @r_o_b_i_d_a (we still call it magazine but it’s actually a fat book of 416 pages!). I am so proud and happy about this issue and so thankful to the authors I worked with 💜 I learned so much from you, thank you @idasaai @maquis_latroupe @serebondanza @eeda_aslan @faccinale @paolo__bosca @jipisvansteen @ife.collective @seilor__greta Vittoria Rubini, Silvia Mascheroni, Anastasia Kolas! Se vidmo to soboto v Špietru and then at fairs, presentations and in bookshops 🍐 First image: (or crazy orchard) beautiful 170th fragment by René Char from Feuillets d’Hypnos, starting point for the beautiful contibution by Luca Vettori @maquis_latroupe Second image: me, holding a test sheet of Robida 11 in front of the printing press Grafika Soča in Nova Gorica (which is also, btw, an architectural masterpiece by the Slovene architect Savin Sever!)

One month has passed since the (official) ending of my May residency in Berlin (then I stayed 9 days longer). A month that started with a crazy storm and ended with a hammam visit. A time of wetlands, downpours (that wash the dust from the leaves and fertilise what is dormant — says the tarot card I picked at @becaboca ), unexpected rains and undercurrents 💦🌱 I wrote a list of 39 things I am thankful for (one for each day I was in Berlin). n. 32 says “for old people with kind eyes”, n. 25 “for all of those who were opening up their spaces”, n. 7 “for the smell of flowering lindens”, n. 12 “for Tito, sweet being”, n. 2 “for the nightingales and for the night walks”, n. 13 “for all the beautiful friends who made me feel needed and appreciated”, n. 3 “for the downpours, wind and other forces” 🌀

The last in our series with Naive Yearly — an epilogue of sorts by @vidarucli of @r_o_b_i_d_a collective on spatial poetry and designing the spaces of the conference https://www.are.na/editorial/meandering-through-the-sites-of-naive-yearly

How it started and how it ended 💦 Thank you @francescalucchitta and @aljazskrlep for the adventure along the Soča. (Something more about the book - scans from the pages and some nice photos - soon! Now we are mesmerised by the silver print of the cover ✨)

the nights the nights the days the days the earl y dawns the eve ning glows the nights the nights the days the days the dawns the eve ning glow R. Lax - - - - - - - Some skies from the bed in 2024

Žvinice. More-than-humans of 2024!

Last thing I publish about Robida 10 dedicated to correspondences. This time is a contribution made of letters written by Katherine Agard, Esyllt Angharad Lewis, Sophie Mak-Schram, Alejandra Santillana Ortiz, Jeanne van Heeswijk and myself. “A Longing Lingers: Letters to others about Aimee Carillo Rowe’s ‘Be-Longing’” was born as an invitation from @makschram to engage with Carillo Rowe’s text we all love a lot and write about it to friends and other others. The first letter we received from Sophie starts liks this: “Finding a form of address is hard. I find myself tending towards intimacy, a gesture of ‘you’ that makes it feel like conversation between (a speculative) us is within reach. Especially now. This is a brief letter to you, in your many forms, in the hope that you might lean into correspondence in turn.” And it ends like this: “I wonder who else might find correspondence in Aimee’s text and how these correspondences could offer us all more webs of relation - so I invite Katherine, Esyllt, Vida and Jeanne to write out from Aimee’s text. Jeanne writes to Alejandra, who ran a version of the Be Longingworkshop together with Anna recently. Jeanne asks Alejandra to write back to her. All of these letters respond to Aimee, reflect on themselves and - hopefully - address you, too. May we share a sky well and remain on first-name basis, Sophie”. Mine was dedicated to Philipp, Suzanne and Franca, and to all those friends who are looking for a place where to be and where to long from. 💌 Thank you Sophie for the invitation to engage with the text once more. The first image shows my first encounter with a fragment of the text through the workshop/reading session Lecture par arpentage guided by Irene Lunghi during the Academy of Margins summer school in August 2023! More in Robida 10 correspondences! @r_o_b_i_d_a

Robida 10, our latest issue dedicated to correspondences, opens with a conversation I did with Donatella Ruttar – long-time co-curator of Stazione di Topolò/Postaja Topolove, designer of the festival’s identity and my mum. I was interested to learn about the relation between the event and the editorial production of Stazione, between the (non)festival and how it was narrated through the catalogues. Between the publication and its intersections with the memory, the idea of future, the traces, the identity, the history, and the community of Topolò. Leafing through 29 years of books, leaflets, booklets, postcards made for Postaja Topolove I realise that this idea of situated publishing we are working with derives maybe from there and especially from some special non descriptive and subtle ways in which Topolò leaked in the pages of Postaja’s publications… → Find some fragments of Donatella’s answers here and read the whole interview (in Italian and English, two slightly different versions!) in Robida 10 correspondences. @r_o_b_i_d_a

I wrote many times, here and there, about situated publishing and Robida’s editorial practice. And yet, the same questions resound. We see low mountains around us, covered by the dense forest, a hill drawing the horizon in front of us, clouds moving vertically, almost as smoke, up from the valley to the sky – how can this lightly moving cloud, the slowly approaching fog and the sound of rain enter our publications, shape them while they are also shaping us? I shared some words (and mainly questions) about this with @romankarrer for his Publishing Anecdotes booklet. Super super grateful for the invitation! ❤️ You can find the pdf of this little text on my @aredotna (are.na/vida-rucli)

Tomorrow (after having postponed this for too long!) my daily Morning Reading Room starts again! ☁️ I will be reading – every day from 7am to 8am, who knows for how long – texts from two Robida’s summer school readers, from 2023 and 2024 selected by the summer school participants 🤍 I you want to join me in this early morning tour de force, come on robidacollective.com, click play and be with me, listening to (sleepy) words and sounds of coffee, landscape and a house waking up! - - - - Reader 2024 – Texts by Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Anna Tsing, Sandor Ellix Katz, Isabel Naverán, Lorea Alfaro, Marie Bardet, María Garcia Ruiz, Raquel G Ibañez and Andrea Soto Calderón, Paola Granato, Sophie Strand, Yamakage Motohisa, Tim Ingold, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Annelies Moors, Sallie A Marston, John Paul Jones III and Keith Woodward, Jane Rendell, Hélène Frichot, Naomi Stead, Lauren Fournier, Ana Teo Ala-Ruona, Sam Jacob, Rasha Dakkak. Reader 2023 – Texts by William W. Braham, Giulia Mattalia, Renata Sõukand, Paolo Corvo, Andrea Pieroni, Mark Emil Tholstrup Hermansen, Eva Weinmayr, Zoé Maus, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Megan Warin & Simone Dennis, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Guy Debord, Beatrice Ferrara, Leandro Pisano, Federico Campagna, Chris Gosden, Gio Ponti, Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Sara Ahmed, Jussi Parikka, Matthew Fuller, Steve Paxton, Anna Puigjaner. Both readers can be downloaded from Robida’s @aredotna space 〰️ are.na/robida-collective (folder Reader—Academy of Margins) @r_o_b_i_d_a