In this blog, Janette Parris, Bridget Riley Fellow from October 2025 to March 2026, reflects on her residency experience and the research she presented at the Winter Open Studios in December 2025.
I am a London-based artist and researcher working across music, animation, and forms of participation, performance, and community engagement rooted in my working-class background. My practice centres on the everyday—capturing lived experiences through chance conversations, casual walks, playing instruments, and listening closely to one’s home city alongside other daily activities. My work continues to explore the rhythms of the everyday and the interactions that shape life for people living in cities.
My focus is now on Italian and Roman encounters while I live and experience life at the BSR.
My work has always centred on life in London, so it’s amazing to observe and take part in Rome. I love its customs, its people, and its unfamiliar traditions. Rome offers an urban experience that is both cultural and exceptional, shaped by interactions that function in distinct ways—ways that continue to shift the narrative of my practice, influenced in part by Italian sensibilities. I am interested in how Rome, and its layered history, connects to the historical development of London, as both cities evolved from Roman foundations. I want to observe how historic buildings coexist with contemporary architecture, and how this coexistence shapes the character and the music of this city.
My aim is to visually document conversations and reflections on the ongoing transformation of the high street and the wider urban environment. Not to frame these changes as inherently good or bad, but to understand how they reveal the city’s evolution as a living, continually shifting place.
There are three specific sites I have responded to so far and made corresponding digital drawings and written songs about: a music shop, which I discovered was permanently closed after an extremely long walk trying to find it. Documented on my iPhone, this appeared as being open which in some ways embodies what my work is about – shops constantly changing and turning into something else.
The second location is a famous squat in Rome which holds a lot of events. I am drawn to the political aspect of it and how living in a squat is inherently a political statement.
The third one is a building in Rome that replaced a historical villa and which the locals were pretty upset about, because they liked the sort of classical villa that was then demolished and replaced with a generic looking apartment block.
Along with making digital drawings of Rome locations and the writing of three songs. I also formed a band called ‘The Fellowships’, which performed at December’s BSR Fine Arts Winter Open Studios. At first, I just wanted to get a band together as part of my stay and I tried to persuade as many people as possible to join by asking whether they could sing or play a musical instrument. A lot of people said no, surprisingly some people did say yes (!!), and were happy to collaborate. The final line up of the BSR based band included myself, Danny Leyland, Juan Boliver, Valeria Tettamanti, and Michele Sganga. Michele Sganga is a local professional musician and composer that I met by chance at the Halloween party at the American Institute.
My work in Rome explores chance encounters such as these which I would not have experienced if I was in London and can only experience by being here. I now hope to develop these encounters, collaborations and ideas by writing a musical which could take the form of either an animation or live site-specific performance, which I see as an extension and similar also to working with the band. I am hoping to get volunteers and meet more collaborators. The musical’s storyline is still in its early stages, but I think it’s going to take place around certain specific locations; for example, whilst in Rome I went to two AS Roma football games. Roma won one and lost the other – unfortunately.
Basically, that’s sport for you, a bit like life.
So, I will continue to talk about these everyday experiences which hopefully will find their way into the musical as well.
