An evening of words, in all kinds of forms blending art writing, poetry, performance, insults, and sweet nothings. The event takes the title of a new artwork ‘Insults To Rome’ by artist, Sam Hasler, as a starting point and a permission, to view the city with sly humour, impoliteness, strange satire, and mischief.
Our intention for the event is to take a friendly, welcoming, trusting, positive, curious, and forgiving approach. It would be really nice, if you attend, that you also arrive with a friendly, welcoming, trusting, positive, curious, and forgiving approach.
With a strong background in writing for cinema and television, Giulia Sara Arcovito makes her debut on the Roman spoken word scene in 2019, in the search for a totally free and independent form of expression. In just a few months she’s among the 21 national finalists in the Italian poetry slam championship, and since then has never stopped writing and performing all over Italy, and -being half British- also on the London poetry scene. A member of the Roman poetry collective Wow – Incendi Spontanei, in 2024 she started touring with her first spoken word monologue Father, Daughter and Critical Spirit. She loves using the art of spoken word as a means to establish direct contact with the audience, inviting them to shift their perspectives, challenge ingrained beliefs and explore new points of view.
Cian Donnelly (b. Dublin, 1974) is an Irish artist based in Rome. His practice explores memory as magic, using performance, storytelling, and song to stage the self as hallucinatory cabaret. Donnelly is a previous BSR fellow (2008).
Samuel Hasler is an artist and writer based in Wales. He held a Creative Wales Fellowship at the British School at Rome in 2019. His work makes use of the awkward and uncomfortable energy of low brow forms film and writing. Within this landscape of genre tropes, he attempts to sneak experimental use of words and writing into enjoyable strange tales, contemporary myths, and fantasy auto-fiction. His previous novel length work O was published by Book Works (London) with inspirations from Giallo and Noir, film and fiction.
Manuela Pacella (Rome, 1977)is an art historian and critic. As a freelance curator, she focuses on cultural exchange between Italy and several countries in Central and Northern Europe. In particular, she is an expert on the art scene in Northern Ireland, where she has organized projects and exhibitions at venues such as the Golden Thread Gallery (2012), the MAC in Belfast (2017), and the Void Art Centre in Derry (2022). She has also participated in intensive courses and residencies at Flax Art Studios in Belfast and the CCA in Derry, in collaboration with ICI–Independent Curators International, New York.
She regularly writes for exhibition catalogues and books, as well as for art magazines and newspapers. Her publications include Inner Homeland (NERO, 2012), Bertille Bak. La fiaba del reale (Postmedia Books, 2018), and Tell me stories! (Politi Seganfreddo edizioni, 2024), a book based on the column of the same name published in “Flash Art Italia” from 2020 to 2024.
She recently started a new column, Cicala (Cigada), for the relaunched print edition of “Flash Art Italia,” presented at Artissima in Turin in 2025. Every two months, she portrays Rome and contemporary art in the city with a personal, derivative, and fragmented perspective and style.
She currently focuses on writing and publishing, working on online and print projects through her platform RUTH (ruth.onl), and teaches in Rome at the American University of Rome (BA in Art History) and NABA (MA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies).
Le Fratelle della Perpetua Indecenza is a queer art collective that emerged from anti-fascist grassroots movements in Rome. We use live performance, film and multimedia artworks as a form of cultural activism to subvert patriarchal constructs of gender and sexuality. Founded in the year of the Catholic Jubilee and taking inspiration from the iconic Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the group combines Drag King culture, pole dancing, DIY production and queer philosophies to create alternative narratives.
Insults to Rome has been generously supported by Arts Council Wales in its research and development stages.
