Schedule

Resonance Public Programming

• 10 May, 2026

  Opening Event | A Gathering in the Key of Resonance

  Resonance opened with a full day of listening, in all forms. Conversations, screenings and sonic interludes—each one another way of attending to what resonates across time, place and practice.

• 12 May, 2026

  Performance | Jeannette Ehlers: We’re Magic. We’re Real #3 (These Walls)

  This durational performance—previously staged at Fisk University’s Cravath Hall with students from Fisk and Vanderbilt and Nashville’s Afro-diaspora community—took place along the canal side entrance of Fondazione Giorgio e Armanda Marchesani, including two additional performers of African ancestry. The work implemented hair as an identity marker across communities of African descent.

• 16 May, 2026

  Performance | An Evening of Resonance

  Guests gathered in the Sonic Listening Room for a Sonic Welcome with María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Kamaal Malak, offered in the spirit of In Minor Keys and in memory of Koyo Kouoh.

  The evening continued with a performance of Cantiga del Merolico—a collaboration between Blair School of Music flutist Molly Barth, dancer Emiliano Moncada Zohn and composer Ricardo Zohn Muldoonon.

  The program closed with a conversation with Campos-Pons, Malak and curator Dan Cameron.

• 18-23 May, 2026

  Micro-Residency | Vesna Pavlović

  Vesna Pavlović is the Paul E. Shwab Chair in Fine Arts and Professor of Art at Vanderbilt University. Showing internationally, Pavlović examines photographic representations of political and cultural histories of the cold war era. Recent publication includes Vesna Pavlović, Stagecraft, 2021.

• 18-23 May, 2026

  Participatory Performance | Searching for a Perfect Sunset (Venice) with Vesna Pavlović

  Vesna Pavlović led a guided walk through Venice in search of a perfect sunset. With a Polaroid camera in hand, Pavlović invited us to photograph, write and share a memory. In this meaningful yet futile endeavor, something is lost but a sense of hope, promise and renewal remains. Participants met Pavlović at the gardens of Fondazione Marchesani and took a short walk over to Ponte dell’Academia bridge. 

• 23-29 May, 2026

  Micro-Residency | Jana Harper

  Jana Harper, professor of the practice of art at Vanderbilt University, is a research-based multiplatform artist who transforms the burdens of history through gestures of empathy and reciprocity. Her work addresses topics such as the erosion of democracy, U.S. gun policy, Native American sovereignty and the Rights of Nature.

• 26 May, 2026

  Participatory Program | Resonance of the Water

  Jana Harper, whose works Song for the Water and Ancestor Bulletin are featured in Resonance, led a short participatory program honoring La Laguna and the waters of the Veneto.

• 28 May, 2026

  Dialogue | Signals and Matter

  Led by Jessica Ingram, artist and director of Vanderbilt's Dyer Obersavatory, and Lutz Koepnick, Max Kade Foundation Chair in German Studies and Professor of Cinema & Media Arts.

  What does science carry that art can hold? This session brought together two perspectives on resonance as method and as meaning—and asked how we listen across time, distance and discipline:

  Signals Across Time: Jessica Ingram’s work explores the resonance of history in the American South, tracing signals that persist through memory, archives and lived experience. In Frank’s Shoe Service, she reintroduces Frank Morris’s life and unsolved murder by republishing his shoe shop advertisements in the Louisiana newspaper where they first appeared. As both an artist and director of Vanderbilt’s Dyer Observatory, Ingram examines how artists and astronomers interpret signals—visual, sonic, historical and cultural—that reverberate across time and space. Echoing Galileo’s 1609 observations from the Campanile of St. Mark’s, her work at Dyer reflects a shared impulse across art and science to imagine, observe and record, and to invite public wonder.

  On Resonance: A Minor Key of Contemporary Art: Lutz Koepnick, the author of Resonant Matter: Sound, Art, and the Promise of Hospitality, discussed the theme of resonance within a wider context. Modern physics played a crucial role in defining the meaning of resonance. Today, however, the concept offers a keyword for a wide range of artistic practices that probe the entangled nature of human and nonhuman entities. What explains the popularity of resonance as an aesthetic concept? And how does it situate contemporary art amid our world of political polarization and environmental emergencies? 

• 5-9 June, 2026

  Micro-Residency | Tamara Reynolds

  Tamara Reynolds, documentary photographer and lecturer in Vanderbilt's Department of Art, was in residence at Fondazione Giorgio e Armanda Marchesani, where her work Melungeon was featured in Resonance.

  Supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Reynolds spent three years living in Sneedville in East Tennessee, building a relationship with the Melungeons—a mixed-race people of African, Native American and European descent, marked for generations by suspicion and racial indeterminacy. Her project engages issues around documentary methodology, the ethics of sustained presence and what it means to photograph a community that is also family.

• 6 June, 2026

  Open House | Film, Poetry and Multimedia Talks

  Resonance opened its doors for a daylong open house at Fondazione Marchesani.

  12:00-17:00
  The exhibition—galleries, screening room and garden—were open to the public

  14:00-17:00
  The public was invited to an afternoon program of film, talks and poetry with artists and scholars Javier Castro, Gigi Castro, Luis William, Elvira Aballí Morell and Tamara Reynolds.

  Detailed Schedule >>

• 8-12 June, 2026

  Micro-Residency | Raheleh Filsoofi

  Raheleh Filsoofi is multimedia artist and assistant professor of art in Vanderbilt's Department of Art and Blair School of Music. Her work Meeting Ground was featured in the Resonance exhibition. During her residency, Filsoofi collected dust and clay sediment from Venice to produce a new series of prints using her argillotype process—a clay-based method in which dust serves as both pigment and trace.

• 11 June, 2026

  Performance | Resonance: Between Shores

  Resonance: Between Shores is a new performance work exploring migration, displacement and the relationship of land, body and sound through clay and performance. This two-person performance, between Raheleh Filsoofi and Reza Filsoofi, brings poetry and resonance into dialogue through a pair of ceramic vessels made from Nashville soil. Connected and partially veiled with beads and threads, the vessels create a fragile landscape of instrument, body and archive.

  As Reza Filsoofi activates one vessel through rhythm and vibration, Raheleh Filsoofi recites poems through the other—texts reflecting on earth, war, movement and the experience of living between places.

  Developed in relation to Venice and its long histories of exchange between East and West, the performance considers how materials and voices carry traces of distant geographies across borders and water. Through resonance, breath and clay, the vessels become chambers of accumulation, holding the sediments of memory, passage and survival between shores.

• 16 June, 2026

  Discussion and Performance | Rising Waters

  This program was created through Vanderbilt's Department of History of Art and Architecture and the minor in Museum and Market Studies.

  Introduction of “Rising Waters” with Kevin D. Murphy, Vanderbilt Department of History of Art and Architecture

  “Crescere in acqua: Living and Learning in Venice on the Sea”—a discussion with Betsey Robinson, Vanderbilt Department of History of Art and Architecture

  “We Rise Together”—a performance with Kanako Uzawa, Hokkaido University (Japan) and the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo (Norway). Introduction by Susan Dine, Vanderbilt Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Program in Museum and Market Studies.

• 23 June, 2026

  Dialogue | African and Diaspora Art and the Remaking of the Venice Biennale

  For more than two decades, African and African diaspora artists have reshaped the contours of contemporary art on one of the world's most storied stages. This panel brought together curators and artists behind two consequential efforts at the Venice Biennale to mediate African presence, inviting them to reflect on a generation of creative transformation, critical inquiry and hard-won visibility.

  Panelists:
  Kader Attia — Curator, 7th edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and participating artist, Fault Lines
  María Magdalena Campos-Pons — Professor of Art, Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Fine Arts, Founder, Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice at Vanderbilt University, and participating artist, Authentic/Ex-centric
  Olu Oguibe — Artist, scholar and co-curator, Authentic/Ex-centric
  Gilane Tawadros — Director, Whitechapel Gallery, London, and curator, Fault Lines

  Moderator: 
  Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi — Steve and Lisa Tanabaum Curator in Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, New York

  Introduction: 
  Grace Aneiza Ali — Curator, Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice, Vanderbilt University

• 2 July, 2026

  Sonic Listening Session

  with Kamaal Malak & Friends

  featuring Tracy Silverman, Roy Wooten and Samuel Alexandre

  Resonance presented a Sonic Listening Session led by Artistic Director Kamaal Malak (electric bass), with Tracy Silverman (violin), Roy Wooten (percussion) and Samuel Alexandre (modular synthesis). The four musicians converge at 40Hz, the gamma threshold where sound is felt before it is heard. The bass anchors the room and vibrates through the body, while the percussion entrains the nervous system to its pulse. The violin ascends through harmonics and dissolves, and the modular synthesis builds a living architecture of sound around it all. This was both a concert and a shared altered state, where music became medicine, ritual and communion.

  Learn more at https://kamagproductions.com/

• 2-7 July, 2026

  Micro-Residency | Artist and Scholar Dawit L. Petros

  Dawit L. Petros (Eritrean/Canadian) is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher and educator and is associate professor of studio art at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. His practice, spanning over 20 years, traces a long-standing inquiry into the legacy of colonial history across Africa, Europe and North America. Rooted in rigorous scholarly research and extensive travel, Petros' practice is defined by his creative use of archival photographs, colour and abstraction. The artist challenges photography’s documentary function while investigating migration, belonging, displacement and the lingering effects of colonial memory. Petros is the winner of the 2025 Scotiabank Photography Award; his recent exhibition venues include The Image Centre, Toronto (2026); Remai Modern and the University of Saskatchewan’s College Art Galleries, Saskatoon (2025); the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2024). 

• 4 July, 2026

  Film Screening & Artist Talk | Dawit L. Petros: The Sea in its Thirst is Trembling 

  Eritrean-born Dawit L. Petros—whose practice spans photography, video, sculpture and sound—opened his artist talk with a screening of The Sea in its Thirst is Trembling (2019), filmed on the San Juan River in Matanzas, Cuba, where musicians from the Ashé Olorun group gather on a small fishing boat singing a song that holds the African continent and Cuba in the same breath.

  The film, which debuted as part of the the 13th Biennial of Havana, Matanzas, Cuba (2019), features Agustín Drake (1934–2022), noted Matanzas sculptor (and teacher of María Magdalena Campos-Pons)—whose work is also an abiding presence in Resonance.

  Petros then connected the film to his second work in Resonance, Istruzioni (Transits, Trajectories, Invisible Networks), Parts I–IV (2021–2024), four serigraphs drawn from a 1931 fascist aviation manual that render the invisible flight routes and geographies of Italian colonial empire in the colors of water, sea and sky. With Istruzioni, shown in Italy for the first time, Petros reclaimed these manuals and returns them to the very seat of their colonial power. Both works are steeped in water—its memory, its geopolitics, its crossings.

  Together, the screening and talk traced a cross-current between Matanzas and the colonial archive, between sonic witness and the blueprints of empire, held within the larger frequencies of Resonance.

• 7 July, 2026

  Community Dinner | Comida Casera with Evelyn Rydz

  Artist Evelyn Rydz led Comida Casera, an intimate evening of storytelling and meal-sharing honoring the people and places that form our sense of home. At the shared meal attendees exchanged recipes and the memories they carry across generations and geographies.

  Since 2016, Comida Casera has brought together participants for multigenerational gatherings grounded in active listening and open exchange as a means of cultivating community across divides. Together, participants explore ways migration, familial traditions and environmental change shape our relationships to food, place and belonging.

• 7 July, 2026

  Performance | Columnas de Luz

  Columnas de Luz, a captivating concert blending violin, electronics and visuals, featured evocative music by Cuban composer Ileana Perez Velazquez, whose work transforms the rich sonic memories of her homeland through a contemporary lens.

  Violinist and interactive electronic music visionary Mari Kimura will bring these pieces to life while performing her own interactive compositions—using her innovative MUGIC® motion sensor to seamlessly process sound and visuals. Together, their program weaves a vibrant dialogue inspired by Cuban culture and urgent environmental themes.