The road into Mompantero doesn’t rush anything. It bends through the Susa Valley at a pace that makes you notice more than you expect to. Mountains rise sharply behind clusters of stone houses, forests stretch across the slopes, and the sense of arrival feels less like stepping into a residency and more like stepping out of the tempo most artists based in the UAE are used to living in.
This is where the Vertygo Residency Program brought together its May 2026 cohort: UAE-based artists originally from across West Asia and North Africa, living and working inside Villa Clivio, a historic house in northern Italy’s Susa Valley. The residency sits within Vertygo’s wider network of cultural partnerships across Safir Art, Mouhit in Tunis, SWALIF Collective, and institutions across Italy and the UAE.
But inside the house, none of that infrastructure is visible in any obvious way. What matters more is what happens when artists who are used to working alone suddenly share the same space for weeks at a time.
No group projects. No forced collaboration. No shared aesthetic direction. Just proximity – and the way it starts to reshape how attention works.
Someone is editing images at a table while someone else is working with materials nearby. Another artist returns from the mountains carrying branches or stone. Conversations start in passing and continue later in fragments – about memory, migration, image-making, or nothing in particular. Over time, Villa Clivio stops feeling like accommodation and starts feeling like a shared working environment where process becomes visible again.
For Syrian-Armenian artist Stephany Sanossian, the shift is clear.
“The Susa Valley slowed my thinking down in a good way. The silence, mountains, and layered history made me pay more attention to traces, structure, and what remains over time. It pushed me to remove noise from the work and focus on what actually carries weight.”
That idea of “noise” becomes one of the underlying threads of the residency – not as a concept, but as a condition. Less urgency. Less clutter. More time spent staying with things instead of moving past them.
Emirati artist Sara Ahli describes something similar, but through the body itself.
“I wake up every morning with the intention of literally breathing, intending to move my body – a state where I’m becoming more conscious of my presence within the space I’m inhabiting.”
Her work during the residency forms part of a larger project titled ما كان هنا و لم يعد (“What Was Once There and Now Is Gone”), where photography is pushed through image transfer processes that resist stability.
“I approach memory as it is continuously transforming through time and emotional residue. The transfer process became essential to me because the image itself begins to resist permanence. Details fade and textures interrupt visibility.”
As the process continues, even the body starts to lose definition.
“My body gradually appears less as a traditional self-portrait and more as a figure. The body starts dissolving into architecture, into textures and obscurity.”
Palestinian artist Aya Afaneh approaches the residency from a different angle – less image-led, more observational, working through materials directly shaped by the estate and landscape.
“The residency has encouraged me to slow down and become more present with process.”
Her work in Mompantero includes woven textiles, fused glass, pastel rubbings, and watercolour studies drawn from the surrounding environment.
“I’ve been creating woven textiles, fused glass works, pastel rubbings, and watercolor studies inspired by the historic estate we are staying in and the surrounding natural landscape.”
What ties it together is less subject matter than attention – especially toward what is usually overlooked.
“I often think about my work as a way of uncovering and bringing attention to the overlooked or hidden parts of ourselves and our environments.”
Even the house itself becomes part of that reading.
“The house itself has deeply influenced me, especially knowing it has remained within the same family bloodline and is being carefully restored and preserved by its current owner, Mattia Longoni.”
Across the residency, there is no single theme running through the work. No shared statement or attempt to turn different practices into one narrative. What connects the artists is simpler: they are working alongside each other, in real time, in a place that doesn’t flatten difference.
Villa Clivio carries its own weight – not as metaphor, but as presence. A house like this doesn’t disappear into the background. It shapes how people move through it, how long they sit with ideas, what they notice without meaning to.
By the end of the residency, there is nothing to summarise into a neat collective idea. Instead, there is something more understated: the experience of making work while other work is being made around you, and the way that alone shifts everything.
