IDA-Ebbio-%C3%82%C2%A9-Romain-Ricard-1-e1783619694850.jpg?quality=80&w=970″ alt=”A photograph of a rural Italian landscape showing terraced gardens, a stone farmhouse, scattered trees, and distant hills under a partly cloudy blue sky.” width=”970″ height=”706″ data-caption=’The restored 13th-century farm where IDA hosts its biannual residency. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Courtesy IDA</span>’>
IDA, a four-year-old Parisian consulting agency specialized in the development of art acquisitions, exhibitions, custom commissions and events, primarily connects corporate enterprises with artists. But founders Florence Marmiesse, a French art consultant who came up through Sotheby’s and Artcurial, and Camilla D’Alfonso, an Italian photographer, also launched a short-term summer residency in Italy as a distinctive way to foster artist projects.
Since founding the agency, they’ve teamed with players in the world of hospitality—hotels, restaurants, real estate—to, as Marmiesse puts it, determine “how art can be injected in different aspects of companies.” It’s imperative, on the one hand, to understand the company’s needs: “we make sure it’s made on budget, it’s made on time, the deadlines are respected,” but also, “we do a lot of pedagogy”—meaning educating organizations about artistic value and pushing their thinking to be more elastic.
(The two are regularly contacted by hotels that say, we have a wall, can you fill it? “We’re like: that’s not really the way it works to create an exhibition,” says Marmiesse. D’Alfonso affirms: “We’re not decorators.”)
On the flip side, Marmiesse adds, the artist’s needs are just as important. “You need to pay the artist; they need to be raised up… we, as the intermediary, are making sure the artists feel well understood and respected, that they have freedom and are able to do their art properly. We make sure the artists are not used as a marketing tool: we want to value their work.”
Throughout the year, they accompany their clients on art buying missions, supporting patronage and commissions. They’ve collaborated with modeling agency Eileen Ford and Hoxton Hotels. Some of their time is spent scouting for artists at art fairs, attending graduation shows at École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and other schools of their ilk and doing studio visits.
The agency name references the highest mountain in the most populous island of Greece, Crete, where Marmiesse and D’Alfonso once traveled and where, according to legend, the Greek god Zeus was born. Although based in Paris, both travel frequently: “it’s very important for us to be able to get out of the Parisian microcosm.”
Thinking beyond the Paris microcosm prompted the creation of the artist residency at Ebbio, a restored 13th-century farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside in proximity to Siena and an hour’s drive from Florence (also not far from Castello di Ama, a winery that also hosts artists). Set among an especially fertile landscape beneath which roils a volcanic geology, the program is open to artists worldwide regardless of medium. It is very short, taking place every two years, two weeks apiece for four artists across two summer sessions, but comes with curatorial, administrative and logistical support.
The partnership with Ebbio is incumbent on the property’s availability, since at other times it’s a yoga retreat and operational hotel. The residency is anchored around a perennial theme, “Seeds Grow,” championing experimentation and artistic development. The theme helps refine the selection process, which respectfully aligns with the naturalism of the seven hectares, given its bounty of olive trees, lavender fields, summer garden bursting with herbs and vegetables, and array of chicken and geese. The emphasis on nature is “not a greenwashing, but really because we want to give value to it,” Marmiesse says.
For the residency’s second year, the selection was guided by a jury of art world figures including Sotheby’s auctioneer Phyllis Kao, journalist George Nelson, gallerist Romero Paprocki—whose Parisian space will host the results of the residency in Paris in July 2027—and the two founders of IDA. They seek diversity in terms of medium, nationality and career path, with each juror proposing several candidates in addition to reviewing outside applications, which this year spanned 27 nationalities.
The first cycle of artists culminated in an exhibition in 2024 in Rome at the Institut Français and in a hotel. Beyond that, Louise Vendel did an exhibition in a deconsecrated church, shifting her typical black and blue palette to Tuscan orange and yellow. Jade Tang did a large-scale piece about Tuscan vegetation, shown at the DRAC in France. Yoan Estivenin had a show at Art Paris inspired by animals on the property and objects in the farmhouse. Dancer Solian Rios worked for two weeks on a choreography that was presented last year in various theaters.
The two artists appointed to this year’s June session were Taiwan-born, New York-based composer Shiuan Chang and Spanish-born, London-based artist Almudena Romero. They were inspired by birds and local plants, respectively.
Nominated by Kao, Chang—who has only recently recovered after a health issue—applied to work on a solo for contrabass flute (an instrument two octaves lower than a “regular” flute) and was adapting his performance art project People Concerto. His residency rhythm was reading in the morning, walking, composing and watching the sunset after dinner. His normal days working in his Queens home are typically 8-11 hours of composing and writing music for commissions. After having rejected academia and the conservatory system in favor of interacting with the general public, he organized concerts at galleries and museums in New York. He recently composed a violin concerto for the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, as well as a composition reproducing sounds of the forest for Cloudgate Dance Theater of Taiwan (soon touring in Berlin, Turin and Singapore), in addition to creating music to accompany patients at a psychiatric hospital in Taiwan throughout their day. During the residency, he was inspired by the high frequencies of two species of owls on the property—”the sound of nature is very rich,” he acknowledges—as well as cicadas and various birdsongs. His signature is implementing a lot of glissando, pitch moving from one point to another point: a kind of migrating sound.
Romero, an expert in 19th-century photography techniques who has taught and worked with museums on cyanotypes and wet collodion, was inspired by English polymath John Herschel’s findings that spearheaded the beginnings of color photography. As an environmentalist, she wanted to produce work without harmful chemicals like silver nitrate, instead creating with organic plant-based pigments and natural dyes, which are more fragile and ephemeral in their results (and less secure archivally) but without the risk of polluting. Sustainability and working with nature is something she’s always been steeped in, coming from multi-generations of organic orange farmers in Valencia. “I do think that my practice aligns very well with the ethos of seeds growing,” she says.
She did two types of research during her residency: extracting pigments from plants in the summer garden, including purple cabbage, onion skin, beetroot, spinach and turmeric—making the hues more alkaline with sodium bicarbonate or more acid with vinegar, to then see how colors vary when placing leaves (also from the garden) on a wooden surface covered with the juices of the pigments and left in the sun to create “fossils of our time.” She’s also looking at the chromatic green tonalities and crop cycle growth of barley, rye and wheat grown in the same patch of soil, functioning as a kind of “farmed photograph,” which she winkingly plants in former darkroom equipment. Her current exhibition in Toulouse, “The Eye,” (part of her Farming Photographs series) is a one-hectare installation of a human eye shaped into a French field using nothing but wheat and winter grasses.
Marmiesse says Ebbio is “our lab. It’s super important for artists to have the safe space to be able to experiment. They are free to create—and also to rest… We really believe artists are the solution to a lot of issues of the world.” If that sounds hyperbolic—and indeed IDA’s mantra is a cheerleader-y one, “art can do it”—she qualifies, “they allow all of us to see either things we don’t want to see or can’t see. Sometimes it’s hard but it [can be] done with sincerity and ingenuity in a world where… money can smash everything. We want to protect that with this residency: making sure these voices are heard.”
