The Reverse Grand Tour (2013)

Inspired by the Grand Tour and the experiments conducted by the philosopher of science Bruno Latour, Valerio Rocco Orlando analyzes how context and relationships influence an artist's practice in Rome today. In order to investigate this idea, the Italian artist films his conversations with a number of artists-in-residence in the foreign academies spread out around the city, such as the Swiss Institute, the Real Academia de España, the Deutsche Akademie Villa Massimo and the Skandinavisk Forening in Rome. Ideally moving from one country to another, Valerio Rocco Orlando retraces a Grand Tour in reverse, collecting a series of portraits of cross-generational artists inside their studios. The alternate editing of all these stories creates a dialogue in which shared perspectives and individual methodologies overlap, exploring a network of relationships between artistic communities that belong to an educational system which is unique in the world.