In September 2023, Letizia ROMANINI, born in 1980 in Esch-sur-Alzette, presented her first solo exhibition, 5 km/h, a survey of a walking tour of the outskirts of Luxembourg undertaken two years prior. The show, at the Centre d’art Nei Liicht, unfolded in a deliberately sensitive and gradual fashion throughout the space, whose series of adjoining rooms are so particular to the former private residence in the town of Dudelange. Based in the Grand Est region since the early 2000s, and having trained at the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg—where she studied under Edith Dekyndt, graduating in 2009 with a degree in Objects/Soft Materials—a grant from the Luxembourg Ministry of Culture enabled Romanini to set out to (re)discover her native country by tracing its geographic outline. Departing from Esch-sur-Alzette on 1 August 2021, she arrived back 23 days later, after walking 356 kilometres of border (first the French border, followed by the Belgian, and then the German) and nine kilometres of detours—accumulating photographs along the way, as well as a number of objects. “356 is an adventure along the periphery, and actually shifted many aspects of my work. As well as truly introducing photography into my practice—I wished to mechanically record the traces of my movements, in the most intuitive way possible—, it gave me an opportunity to deeply explore a subject that has long been close to my heart, namely the limit, or more exactly, apprehending the (in)visible line or zone of distinction between two neighbouring spaces.” The artist experienced two important yet diametrically opposed feelings in the wake of this autonomous and solitary investigation. On the one hand, an intense gratitude, for a period of “fertile retreat”—a notion dear to the French historian Jean-Miguel Pire and other partisans of otium (idleness, disinterestedness)—, conducive to contemplation and intellectual growth, because exempt from market imperatives towards productivity; and on the other hand, a profound despair in the face of the shattering havoc that climate change is wreaking on the natural world. Notably, this awakened the artist’s interest in and attention to weeds, those opportunistic species commonly referred to as mauvaises herbes in French because of their ability to grow on a territory spontaneously and uninvited; the herbaceous plants of the Asteraceae family, for example, which includes the thistle and the dandelion.
“Today, those brittle, fragile branches, symbols of renewal, have metamorphosed into delicate collector’s items, able to withstand the test of time.”
The practice of gleaning that has accompanied Letizia’s work for many years now finds itself nestled most perfectly in the heart of a somewhat discreet and untitled collection, of twenty-six small objects gathered on the streets of Berlin during a 2009 residency, and which has been hanging on one of the walls of her studio ever since. Each laissé pour compte, “left-behind object”, has been conserved, cleaned up, and then overlaid with a fine layer of gold, before being placed inside a little bespoke wooden case, made to measure for each of its residents. Last year, during a bike ride from her home to her work space on the fringes of the city, the artist was suddenly drawn to some abandoned acacia branches by the roadside and decided to take them with her, without really knowing what she would do with them. Today, those brittle, fragile branches, symbols of renewal, have metamorphosed into delicate collector’s items, able to withstand the test of time. Following a method that extracts the elements from their context or natural habitat, and which generally requires a period of gestation in the studio, the images and the multiple materials and objects collected by the artist in the course of her wanderings only reveal their creative potential once they have passed through her hands, which is to say, once they find themselves transposed, transformed and/or reinterpreted, whether this is in the form of prints on cloth, bronze sculptures, straw marquetry, or composite installations. This is how, in accordance with a total inversion of perspective, scale, and scope, the installation Regno Amicale (2025), produced especially for the space at the Konschthal Esch, unmakes our habitual perceptions by placing us, de facto, in a position of humility before the epochal grandeur of nature, which overwhelms us to the same degree that it offers protection. Amid a vast and immersive construction that mixes photographic prints and mirror-ink screen printing, the artist proffers us an invitation, not to experience the animal kingdom, but to enter into a sort of communion of heightened consciousness with the rocks, trees, and plants that surround us. Romanini’s Regno Amicale makes an impressive plea for a necessary decentring in the face of a situation without limit, conducting the public on a wander against the grain of the present time, simultaneously evoking the Minett region’s glorious industrial past as the capital of iron ore extraction, and the same ecosystem’s capacity to adapt to outside aggression; a subterranean resilience absolutely essential to the survival of the ensemble of living beings on Earth, and which is being continually subjected to ever harsher ordeals. “Humanity, human feelings, appear to begin precisely at the point where each person shows themselves as being capable of surpassing the limited sphere of their own interests so as to consider the interests of another. ... Disinterestedness is thus the capacity to raise oneself up towards that superior sphere. Indispensable to the pursuit of truth, its demand is also what ordains the ethical process. On a political level, it likewise grounds the possibility of conceiving of and investing in the general interest. It is on this condition that the individual can become a subject, which is to say, a free and autonomous consciousness, capable of perceiving and understanding every object in complete independence, notably in relation to their own interests. ... In the history of thought, this initial valorisation of disinterestedness and of contemplative life constitutes a defining event.”
Clémentine Davin
Article appeared in Flux News no. 97, contemporary art quarterly (July - August - September 2025)
Published with the support of the Fonds culturel national, Luxembourg
Letizia Romanini walked around a country, not to achieve a sports feat or an artistic performance, but out of a desire to inscribe landscapes into her body, to see them with her eyes, but above all to feel them through the strength of her legs. Because walking around a country is about experiencing the border, inhabiting it, crossing a peripheral third space that is neither home nor foreign land, a nameless space infiltrated by unruly vegetation. It is about rediscovering a form of lost nomadism, replaced by the recommended 10,000 steps per day in our ultra-sedentary society. Walking around a country on foot is, above all, an experience of slowness, finding beauty in the detour, feeling distances, and submitting to nature's
“Because walking around a country is about experiencing the border, inhabiting it, crossing a peripheral third space that is neither home nor foreign land, a nameless space infiltrated by unruly vegetation.”
In 2021, Letizia Romanini undertook this 24-day walk, covering the 356 kilometers of Luxembourg’s borders. During this journey, she captured hundreds of images but also gathered plants, stones, and small “left-behind” objects, as she calls them. Since this walk, Letizia Romanini has developed an interest in buffer zones, these marginal spaces that she crosses on her way to her studio from home. During these daily trips and on other travels, she continues to pick, bend down, collect, and gather what pricks, tangles, and entwines. Thus, thistles and acacia branches—plants whose thorns act like barbed wire—are isolated from their environment to better highlight their sculptural aspect. The plants she collected have inspired her brooches and jewelry; the images she gathered have left the screen, shedding their two-dimensionality, changing scale to exist in space, printed on fabrics. The compositional lines of her photographs have nourished the design of her straw marquetry.
Through bronze casting, textile or aluminum printing, and the artisanal practice of straw marquetry, the artist transforms what she has gathered in a perpetual process of shifting scales and perspectives. This diversity of techniques reflects Letizia Romanini's varied practice: installation, sculpture, and drawing are all ways for the artist to show what once existed—there, on the ground, or in front of our eyes—but which sometimes escapes our notice.
Juliette Hage
AT 5 KM/H AND A FEW DEGREES MORE
« I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind, »
Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World Thoughts on Words Women Place
Grove Press, 1997, p. vii
A few days before speaking with Letizia Romanini about her work in preparation for writing this text, I took part in a discussion with art, dance, and literary critics about our respective practices. One of the participants noted that critical writing on dance has, since the eighteenth century, adapted itself to the development of movements of dance itself.1 At the same time, we observed the growing interest among contemporary critics in the “making” of the work—an attention that also reveals, in the text, how their own writing takes shape. Could it be symptomatic of our era to prefer what brings the work into being rather than the work itself? Does this reflect a desire, on the part of artists and those who accompany their work, to distance themselves from the material, commercial, and potentially polluting object that further saturates an already overflowing world? Perhaps it signals the need to acknowledge—rather than assert—that things are in motion, complex, and at times contradictory. It may also be a response to an authoritarian, unequal, and domineering world with which one can no longer align.
In a conference entitled “World-making,” which already in 1981 sought to imagine worlds other than our own, Ursula K. Le Guin developed the idea that “to make something is to invent it, to discover it, to uncover it […] Perhaps we think less often of the proposition reversed, thus: To discover something is to make it.”2 She was careful, however, to distinguish discovering from conquering. This text proposes to examine these two relationships to making in the work of Letizia Romanini: first, the “how is it made,” the paths the artist follows in order to create; and second, the inverse proposition, namely the importance of discovery as a form of making the work. This latter approach reflects, above all, the artist’s position of being “at the edge of the world,” maintaining an attentive, thoughtful, restrained, and sensitive relationship with her surroundings.
“Could it be symptomatic of our era to prefer what brings the work into being rather than the work itself?”
Post-Covid, with the rise of artists’ grants and a renewed appreciation for local territories, Letizia returned to Luxembourg—specifically to Esch-sur-Alzette, where she grew up—planning to travel around the country on foot. She set out alone, carrying a tent and provisions on her back, with the aim of staying as close as possible to its borders, on one side or the other. In total: 356 kilometers, three borders (France, Belgium, Germany), four countries, twenty-four days of walking, and nine kilometers of detours at a pace of five kilometers per hour. Along the way, she collected things. She took photographs, and—like a gold prospector—selected tiny, precious elements from the natural environment that have value only through the attention she gives them: touchwood, dried intertwined vine branches, tree bark, small pebbles and stones with singular shapes and colors, as well as a few artificial remnants—fishhooks, bits of car wreckage, and metal wires that almost form drawings. There are very few of them. Not only because she had only her backpack in which to carry these treasures, but also because she rejects accumulation, ensuring that each object preserves its meaning, both memorial (notably in terms of its spatial and temporal location) and aesthetic (shape, color, material). They accompany her as she walks, before revealing themselves fully in the studio.
Though the eye and the hand have, in a sense, already discovered these elements, the time spent in the studio allows the artist to observe, analyze, and transform them—by enlarging them, altering their materiality, extracting details, layering them, and so on. Thus, in the passage from real space to the exhibition space, she discovers them once again, in the sense that she works to “let what is found covered be seen.”3 The fragility of touchwood and bark, which she casts in bronze; the dominant color of a moss, a rock, a roughcast surface, or a sky that she conveys with a simple strip of color; the contour of a photographed landscape which, translated into straw marquetry, creates volumes, redraws territories, and shifts borders that recompose themselves according to the light reflected on the straw and the position of the viewer when looking at the work. The collected materials themselves reveal—and conceal—the path traveled: glossy black slag, residue of the steel industry in the Minett Valley; fine blue stones of slate, tracing the history of another once-prosperous industry, this time on the Belgian side of the territory; and the vine branches, which tell of the winemaking landscapes of the Moselle. Each of these discovered objects (both chosen and made) can be read on multiple levels. Assembled into a pathway through which the artist proposes another experience of walking and seeing, they reveal a cartography of the fragile spaces of this territory—a cartography of endangered spaces. Letizia sometimes evokes a feeling of solastalgia.4
Claire Kueny, Summer 2023
1. Charlotte Imbault, dance critic and sound artist, founder of watt magazine (http://w-a-t-t.eu/) and of the podcast What You See. (https://whatyousee.fr/).
2. Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove Press, 1989), p. 47.
3. Cf. the definition of découvrir (discover) on the CNRTL website: https://www.cnrtl.fr/lexicographie/découvrir
4. Glenn Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Ways for a New World (London: Cornell University Press, 2019), p. 38: “I define ‘solastalgia’ as the pain or distress caused by the ongoing loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory. It is the existential and lived experience of negative environmental change, manifest as an attack on one’s sense of place.”