[A black and white photo of people standing in a big circle in the woods. In the center of their circle is a tree, and placed in front of each person’s feet is a long vertical rectangle of paper.]
Robida is a collective of friends who live and work together in the mountains between Italy and Slovenia, in a small village called Topolò/Topolove (in Italian and Slovene, respectively). Due to their concept of “total hospitality,” and the residencies and summer schools they host throughout the year, the collective swells and shrinks with the changing seasons, but the core group is Vida and Elena Rucli, Dora Ciccone, Laura Savina, Aljaž Škrlep, and Antônio Frederico Lasalvia. They work as artists, teachers, graphic designers, curators, and architects. There are a few houses between them, which they open up to guests and artists-in-residence, and a cafe in town called Izba that they collectively run. Alongside their various programs, which they fund through grants from public and private foundations, Robida also publishes a yearly magazine and has a radio station.
I first heard about Robida a few years ago at the conference Naive Yearly through Ben Earl, who spoke about being inspired by the collective’s dedication to place when designing their website. The next year, at the same conference, I met Vida who, along with other members of Robida, had helped design the conference space. On the drive to Ljubljana from Topolove, Robida pulled over multiple times to collect wildflowers alongside the road, which at the conference decorated the long tables where we sat and ate together during breaks. Since then, I’ve heard from several friends who visited Robida in Topolò to teach and learn from each other about radio gardening or site specificity or situated publishing. When I talked to Vida late at the end of last year, she said she was starting to realize that “what we’re doing here is really just exchanging hospitality for knowledge.”
[A group of people in the woods with Vida as the central focus of the photo, pointing to something out of frame. Behind her is a felled tree with wooden objects lined up along it. Everyone behind Vida looks in the direction she is pointing.]
Meg Miller: I wanted to start with a question I stole from you [laughs]. When you had Laurel [Schwulst] and I on Radio Robida, you asked us to introduce ourselves by emphasizing the things we find important about ourselves but that don’t usually make it into the “official” bio. Could you start us off by doing that for Robida — what are some things about the collective that can’t be succinctly summed up in the bio? What’s central to Robida on a more mundane, daily, or intimate level?
Vida: One thing that is a big part of our story but we often forget to mention is that many of us — at least three of us — have known each other for a very long time. Elena and I are sisters, but also Elena and Dora were classmates from kindergarten to high school. And there are others who became part of this group of friends quite early on. I think that this is quite important, that we didn’t all meet at university and at that time realize we shared some interests and similar ways of doing things or looking at the world, but that our connection is even more essential and intimate. For this reason, I would say that Robida is not a project, it’s our life. The basis on which we built it feels so stable.
Meg: I knew you and Elena were sisters, but I didn’t know that there was more of a foundation for the group stretching back that far.
Vida: Yeah and that’s why when people ask us things like, “what happens if you stop getting funding? Would you still exist?” Our answer is “yes, sure.” Maybe we would have to do less or we would have less money to invite other people to do things with us. But Robida is already so much a part of our life and of our friendship, it's really a way in which our friendship built itself.
[A far-away view of Topolò/Topolove nestled in the mountains, the sun shining directly on the valley.]
Meg: When you all started the collective in 2015, who was involved at the time? Did you make the decision to move to Topolò/Topolve at the same time as deciding to start the collective, or did one happen first?
Vida: When we started Robida in 2015, we were around 20 years old, which is such a strange time to start something. Your life is just starting and you are just beginning to become a person. Me and another co-founder, Maria, who was my classmate at high school, had started a little magazine in high school. We and the other editors abandoned it after school, but Maria and I wanted to continue this way of building a friendship through doing something that is outside of the friendship itself. She was studying literature in Glasgow, I was studying architecture in Ljubljana, and we decided to start a new magazine. We didn’t have a big project in mind, but we had a name, Robida, and we had a space. The space was in Topolò and it was the place where the idea came up.
At the time, Topolò was not the place where we were rooted. She’s from a little town nearby and my father is from Topolò. We were staying in my grandmother’s house here during the summer. In Slovene, robida means brambles, or the blackberry plant. This is a plant that grows very aggressively; it’s a bit invasive and covers abandoned landscapes. It’s the first plant that grows out of an abandoned agricultural field. We chose this name not only because this is the plant that covers a lot of the landscape around here, but also because of our previous magazine, which was left abandoned.
[A scan of a magazine spread of scans. Paper ephemera layers on top of each other: photographs of a lake, a drawing of flowers, a postage stamp, a note to Dora, an image of space.]
Meg: So you started Robida, the publication, while in Topolove but you didn’t live there yet?
Vida: Yeah, when we moved there, we had already been doing the publication for quite some time. The concept of the magazine was to pick a topic that was somehow connected to this place. But for us, the magazine was also a concrete way of nurturing far away friendships and building new ones.
Around 2018, I was studying in Brussels and I needed to come back to finish my exams at the university in Ljubljana. I didn’t really need to be in Ljubljana to study, so I decided to come here to my grandmother’s house instead so I didn’t have to pay rent in the city. It was supposed to be totally temporary, and I think that this perception of temporariness made it so much easier to make this move, in a way. And now after eight years, I’m still here. It was just me at first, and then others slowly joined, especially during COVID.
Some of us have family here, but what’s more important is that in elementary school, middle school, high school, and university all of us used to come to this village every year for three weeks in July when Topolove hosted a contemporary art festival called Stazione di Topolò/Postaja Topolove. This place became so important for us because of this festival, because we were meeting super cool people, getting to know art, getting to know literature, and encountering the wider world from such a small place. This place has for a long time been meaningful to our lives.
[Two friends walk down a stone path in the village. Concrete houses with terra cotta roofs line the path. The mountains can be seen in the distance.]
Meg: I think part of what makes Robida so interesting to people is how intentionally different your daily life looks to a lot of the wider circle of people you collaborate with, who are maybe living in cities, in apartments, working for others, etc. To me, Robida’s “output” — the publication, summer school, various initiatives — are familiar, at least in their format. But living in a village with 25 inhabitants, somewhat remote, living and working with friends, this is less familiar. I find it really interesting and admirable, but also hard to imagine. Would I feel lonely? Disconnected? How would I even begin to set up a life this way?
How hard was it for you all to move from cities and build your lives in Topolove? And, 10 years later, what do you feel are the continued benefits of it, or could you imagine it any other way?
[A blue-sky day, the side of a blue-tinted concrete house, a blue towel hanging out to dry, and a satellite dish receiving, we can only assume, signals in various shades of blue.]
Vida: To really understand our story, I think it’s important to realize that for us Topolò was always the center of the world. To give you the idea, we met the New York composer Phill Niblock here, who introduced us at a very young age to drone minimalist music. We also met the performance artist Ulay and the experimental film director Bill Morrison, the field recordist Jez Riley French, the musician Rie Nakajima — just to mention a few of the many artists who came to Topolò from 1994 to 2022, when the festival ended.
So for us Topolò was really our own micro-metropolis. It was never remote, it was never only a village surrounded by wilderness and silence. And when we moved here, the whole community was very used to seeing the village full of artists. It was natural for us to start experimenting with our own projects.
This said, yes, I can understand that it’s hard to imagine and, yes, maybe it can be a bit lonely — though I am not sure, we have so many people living here with us for long or short periods that some loneliness is needed [laughs]. We live very simple lives: in winter my main worry during the day is keeping the fire on since we heat our house with only one stove. During the morning I meet Elena or Dora, who pass by my house and we do something together — it can be picking up sticks in the forest, preparing packages to ship our publications, or doing some admin work. Sometimes we have collective dinners, where everyone cooks something and this usually happens at Dora’s house, which is the cosiest. In winter we go to bed very early.
[Three views of a magazine with a chartreuse cover and faint brown rubbings: front cover, spine, and back.]
Meg: That sounds very serene. I also like this idea of corresponding with people you don’t live nearby through a publication. This is also how I think about publications, as a way of relating and corresponding with others, and gathering a public that exists over time in space.
Vida: When you grow up in a village, you understand that it’s not so easy to build a relationship with someone who you don’t meet every day at school. In high school, this was so concretely visible that for Maria and I, the magazine we started before Robida was our way of reaching people, of encountering them, of maybe contacting an illustrator we like, or building our little romances with people we admired.
Now, opening up and hosting is so much a part of how we live here, and how we learned to live here during the festival when we were younger. During the festival, the houses were constantly open. Artists were hosted in the houses of people from the village. There was a kind of proximity constantly, where art or culture in general was really part of daily life. It was not separate. It was not like in a city where maybe you go to an event in a cultural center and then you return to your private home. There was always this idea of the house opening up and reaching into the outside space, but also the house as space to pass through. The house is a space of movement in many ways.
This idea of total hospitality was something that was also quite openly taught to Elena and I by our mom. It became very natural when we spontaneously moved here that we felt that this place should be shared.
[Elena in a minimal but beautiful kitchen with a stove, coffee pot, hanging textiles, window, wood floor, and jute rug,]
Meg: All of the people that I've been speaking to for this series at some point got access to a studio or some sort of space and decided, instead of just inhabiting it themselves, to open it up to other people. I’m interested in the decision to do this because, of course, you could have just moved into your grandma’s house and lived there alone. But this sense of movement and hospitality that you’re describing is so central to the existence of Robida, and so many people have gotten to experience Topolò because of it.
Vida: It is true that this place has become meaningful for other people, not only because of the place itself, but because of its emptiness and because of a certain feeling of freedom that you get when coming here. Topolò/Topolove, in itself — maybe even topographically — is hospitable. It allows for different uses of space. Since it is very scarcely inhabited and poorly maintained, each space in the village becomes a possible place to imagine something.
It’s interesting to see how the landscape is used by the people we host, as a place of intimacy and silence, as a place to do collective work, as a place to be free and play. Each person that we host here — artist, researcher, and so on — carve their own spaces, mainly in the landscape, but also in the village itself. So this idea of living in the village as if it is a house, including the landscape, I think that’s maybe even somehow natural. It’s not us imposing a concept over a space, but it’s the space itself that allows this way of dwelling and moving through it.
[People sitting on a homemade wooden bench, ensconced in woods. The vibrancy of the green looks new and Spring-like.]
Meg: Speaking of people who come through there, I love the scrolling roll call at the bottom of the Robida website (designed by Benjamin Earl and Kirsten Spruit) that shows who’s there at the moment. It looks like the people who are there now are more or less the core group. Is that typical for this time of year? What are the fluctuations like for when people are there?
Vida: In the beginning, other people were here mainly during summer. But this year summer became quite long, starting in March and ending in October [laughs]. It’s really a constant movement of people who come here. We invite them, we organize residencies. We try to keep a rhythm, and in the summer and spring when the weather is warm, these are the moments of total openness. The house itself extends outside and becomes bigger. In the winter, the house becomes mainly one or two heated rooms, and that becomes a time for intimacy, for planning, writing, and slower activities. In January, we’re planning to have an artist stay and edit her book, and winter is really the best mood and setting for that. So we are trying to understand how to work with the seasons.
Meg: What was happening during this year’s long summer?
Vida: We had different types of projects for which we had different types of residencies and collaborations. For example, we did a radio project titled The Other Radio, which explored the concept of a border. We live on the Italian/Slovene border and we have two ethnic identities, Italian and Slovene.
Then we had this very big project that now is coming to an end called Uncommon Fruits where we did research on the fruit landscape around Topolò/Topolove, mapping abandoned orchards and trying to experiment with fruits and rediscover the knowledge around fruit trees that is almost forgotten. We did this with two artists and designers, Suzanne Bernhardt and Philipp Kolmann from Erba, who are here for very long periods and come back consistently. We also like this idea of the return, you know, which not a lot of residencies at institutions do — encouraging people to come back and also to be in a longer engagement with us and with the ideas that come up just by staying here. We also had the Academy of Margins, our summer school in August, which also brought together many people for ten days.
Alongside that, we also have a dense calendar of things happening in the village itself with the rest of the inhabitants — from taking care of Izba, our little cafe-bar-social-space, every weekend to organizing birthdays and the village party, where, I don’t know, hundreds of people come to join a procession and a mass. So there is also a lot of activation and moments of collectivity that put our guests in relation to the other residents here, which is the sweetest in many ways.
[A book spread with the cross-sections of various fruits, in purple ink.]
Meg: When did you start Radio Robida? And how do you think about the radio differently than the publication?
Vida: For us, it's totally different. The radio was developed in 2021, together with our friend Jack [Bardwell]. The idea with the radio was not so much building community or relations like with the publication, but more about maintaining these relations. Our intuition was that maybe people who were not here in Topolò, or had maybe been here before, would like to eavesdrop on what is happening here at the moment — just the sounds of the landscape or the voices of people passing by, or hearing who's here.
So we started with this idea of a very spontaneous way of making radio. It can be reading aloud in the morning for an hour, or having conversations with others. The radio is a place where we cultivate spontaneous encounters, experiments, little ideas. This was very much influenced by Jack and by the way he does Good Times Bad Times radio out of Extra Practice in Rotterdam.
[People sitting around a wooden table in a sun soaked room, wearing headphone and talking into microphones.]
Meg: Since we’re talking radio I want to bring us full circle, back to the Branching In, Branching Out episode that we started the interview with. This radio show is about experimental pedagogies and you talk to people who are engaged with teaching and learning. I was wondering if you personally think about Robida as a pedagogical project or a site of learning. I’m also curious, more generally, how you think about continued learning in your own practice.
Vida: I started doing this radio show after thinking about some questions that had come up around our Academy of Margins program. This is a summer school, but it can have, depending on the year, other moments of learning, from philosophy seminars to workshops on dry stone walls. I was wondering what it means for a place like Topolò/Topolove to be a site for learning— which we have experienced since we were young as the site of this art festival — instead of being, as frequently happens to villages in the countryside of Italy, just the scenery for events.
I started to realize that, at the end, what we’re doing here is really just exchanging hospitality for knowledge. We started the summer school because we realized that when we were hosting people passing through, we were sharing moments of everyday life — going to the river, sharing meals — but we weren’t talking as much about their research or the things that they were thinking about. It just wasn’t coming up, I think because they were in holiday mode. So the Academy of Margins became a way of calling the class to order a little bit, even if learning also happens in all the everyday moments and we are constantly learning from each other. This is a more active way of sharing knowledge — sitting down and listening actively to each other. So in that way, Robida is absolutely a site for learning.
After eight years of being here, away from the city, away from big centers of cultural production, we see that this is what we need. We need people to come through and bring with them their knowledge, things, books, ideas, and discuss them with us. Even bring their proposals, which is the most beautiful thing. I would say that through everything that we do, even in the magazine and in the radio, we strive to remain not only open to the world, but also pulling the world here a little bit.
[A big group of people sit lined up along the stairs between two buildings in the village, their backs against the walls.]
Meg Miller is the editorial director at Are.na.
Vida Rucli is an architect and cultural worker based in the village of Topolò/Topolove, situated on the borderland between Italy and Slovenia. She is editor of Robida Magazine (2014-) and co-curator for Robida’s public programmes and projects (2017-). She lectured in different universities, collaborated with the festival Climate Care (Floating University, Berlin, 2023) and is a member of the international research group Ecologies of Care and of Floating University, Berlin.
Robida collective works at the intersection of written and spoken words – with Robida Magazine and Radio Robida – and spatial practices. These are developed in relation to the village of Topolò/Topolove (IT), a hyper small village of 25 inhabitants, located on the border between Italy and Slovenia, where the collective is based. Robida takes care of the abandoned terraces, occupies houses and gardens, opened a communal space (Izba) and constantly re-imagines the village’s future.