As part of The Work We Share programme, artist and curator Carolina Ongaro presents the newly digitised film Scuola Senza Fine to the 2022/2023 OSE cohort of associate artists. She invites Rose Gibbs, artist and organiser, into conversation to reflect on past and current work and projects on creating spaces for encounter, collaboration, and different economies, based on feminist legacies and methodologies, drawing from the film and the histories and narratives it documents.

Carolina Ongaro is an independent curator based in London. She holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is co-founder and co-director of Jupiter Woods, an exhibition space, residency programme and research and studio facility established in 2014 in in South-East London. She has here been initiating artists’ residencies, exhibitions and long-term projects, collectively and individually. She works both collaboratively and independently in London and internationally.

Rose Gibbs is an artist with several different strands to her practice: using the voice in participatory performances, sculpture, writing, organising and presenting talks and collaborating with others. All are interconnected and attempt to elicit thinking about gender and its role in shaping the cultural landscape where the place of women seems fragile. Through her practice she endeavours to create the kind of art world of which she would like to be a part: reconfiguring the grounds upon which participation in the cultural landscape is made possible by building networks, organising discussions and collaborating with others. She founded the community organisation Mountford Growing Community on the Mountford Estate in 2016 and launched the community cookbook that emerged from that project Tate Modern in 2019.

Scuola Senza Fine, Adriana Monti (IT, 1983, 40 mins)
Scuola Senza Fine was directed by Adriana Monti in collaboration with students from the adult education 150 Hour Secondary School diploma course with whom she had been working for a year. The film shows how the experiment extended into the lives of women taking the course, most of whom were housewives. The work turns the curriculum’s question about the representation of women into the questions about the representation of themselves.

The Work we Share is supported by Arts Council England and Feminist Review Trust.