C’e La Luna Residency at the EMCA


“ C’É LA LUNA (pr. ‘che’) means ‘is it the moon?’; a playful Italian expression that questions individual behaviours in relation to what is happening in nature... Bringing nature and art together is at the heart of our approach and vision as artists and arts professionals.“


Ruby Swinney decided to use her two weeks at the ECMA as a time for documenting, research and sourcing. She took multiple videos, sound recordings and photographs that have later informed paintings, video works and ideas for installations. The residency became the jumping off point to a 2 month research trip in which she documented buildings and gardens in Portugal, Italy and France, images which were used in her next body of work, most notably Red Garden.


Artist’s Residency
01 - 10 July 2017
The ECMA 
Cinema Mele, Pizzo Calabro, Calabria, Italy


Cinema Mele



Cinema Mele, conceived by the engineer Francesco Mele, was built where once stood the walls that were part of the Pizzo fortification. Part of this structure still exists behind the screen, around and under the cinema theatre. After remaining closed for 20 years, his grandson Giuseppe Mele, began working on the building in 2013 and gradually began to create the conditions to foster artistic projects – residencies, workshops, band recordings – following a non-institutional logic where the priority was given to the quality of the meetings. The current use of the space by groups of international artists, open to the involvement of individuals from the local population, marks a new era for the cinema as an interdisciplinary space for meeting/discussion of ideas and ways of accessing the world (residency creative brief).