Raul Walch
Agree to Disagree
12 June – 12 July 2025
Opening: Thursday, 12 June, 5 – 8pm
Raul Walch, Trailer for "Every Tale Has Its Shadow" 2025
Editing & Camera: Matthias Maercks, Miguel Buenrostro
Agree to Disagree
‘Don't get stressed by others’ (fortune cookie, 29 May 2025, Florence)
‘What else can you add to this city?‘ the artist Raul Walch asks me on the terrace of his studio at Villa Romana in Florence, the oldest German artists’ residency, which has been hosting artists just outside the cities gates for 120 years. Scraps of fabric are hanging on the table between us, fluttering in the wind. We are looking out over the valley. Walch started a dialogue with the heritage and entanglements of this renaissance city, engaging with the lines of conflict, the provocation, the gravity of it. From the artist's studio, the view through the cypresses appears idyllic: from the southern part of the city, the Oltrarno, the other side of the river, the tourist hustle and bustle no longer rings out to us. The villa is too far towards Siena, too far away from the Boboli Gardens, Palazzo Strozzi or the Uffizi. This was intentional: the Villa Romana arose from a conflict with the gravity of Roman classicism as the origin of Western art, the insurmountable Renaissance. It is the right place to look at this city as an artist and say: ‘I would prefer not to’.
This exhibition speaks to the traditions of Florence from a particular, situated position. Walch went past it, to Prato: 20km to the north-west, one of Europe's leading textile centres since the Middle Ages, a hub in the Tuscan valley, a place of pre-global interdependence. International companies produce their fabrics here with the label ‘Made in Italy’, even if the majority of textiles are now cheaply produced by Chinese workers. Mass production meets Haute Couture. Like the ubiquitous and disconcerting bamboo that grows in dense and tall forests through the gardens of Tuscany, such as along the via Senese on the east side of Villa Romana, the textile industry is a globalized mash-up with roots in the Renaissance and industrial modernity.
Bamboo, the ‘wood of the poor’, technically a grass, has had its biggest consumer demand in Europe for some time. Gucci wove it into the Italian textile and fashion industry with its Gucci Bamboo 1947 handbag in response to production bottlenecks in the leather industry after WWII. But bamboo has already been around since the early 19th century. In August 1917, Professor A. Fiori praised the promising future of these plants in the Bullettino della R. Società Toscana di Orticultura: functional yet ornamental. They were first mentioned in the registers of botanical gardens in Florence in 1806, in Rome in 1836 and in Venice in 1847.
Walch pulls another fortune cookie out of his pocket: ‘Be patient! Calming news is on its way.’ We laugh even though the world is crashing down on us. He confronts this fragile world reflected in his works, with cross-media scraps that look like a chain of quotations, but without inverted commas. Walch has been exploring textile as a medium since his studies, but the globalized hybridity of the material in Prato and Florence resituates his work. Dressing the Wind (Prato) is a commentary on Florence, Prato and the bamboo of Tuscany. Deeply anchored in the ground, flags wave in the wind on seven-metre-high bamboo poles. The patterns and fabrics have survived the heavy rain and wind of spring. On fabrics from various warehouses in Prato – densely printed, repeating floral and colourful patterns – he continues the symbols, colours, and lines of the prints with colour prints and paintings. In this way, he transfers the industrial reproduction of the patterns back into manual labour or craftsmanship and removes them from mass production. It is a further alienation of purpose after the alienation of the workers, the patterns thus have an afterlife and reproduce themselves. They no longer appear naked and alienated, as they did in Prato's storage or in piles in the artist's studio. The waving flags are a continuation of the fragmentation of globalized Tuscany and yet an empathetic transfer into a protected artistic space. The exploitation and extractivist trade in Prato finds peace and is exhibited at the same time. It is one of the many works in the garden of the Villa Romana that adds a further footnote to the title of this exhibition and speaks to the tradition of textile production and its capitalist interdependence: Let's Agree to Disagree.
My phone vibrates. Walch sends me a new snippet of words: ‘It's a Great Pressure to be Here’. While the cultural authorities in Germany, who also govern Villa Romana, change their functionaries, we both look out over the valley in the garden and talk about the political explosiveness of the present. ‘What's the point of an exhibition when the world is burning,’ says Walch. ‘Maybe it's precisely when things are so tense that we need to be able to suspend discourse.’ Political scientist Chantal Mouffe speaks of agonism, which can be bound within a democracy without exploding.
Agree to Disagree is a moment to catch your breath. Turn Yourself in the Directions of Your Dreams (2025) and the series Allow Yourself Something emerged from this moment of suspension. The wisdom of the fortune cookies is both absurd and poetic, like drunken polysemantic translations floating above the gravity of the mundane situation. Printed on Prato's products, Chinese craftsmanship from Italian Haute Couture workshops for the world's markets. A thicket of floral patterns that do not allow a clear view ahead. No longer seeing the wood for the trees. Slogans that don't encourage anything. They take the populist slogans of Europe's right-wing parties ad absurdum.
I am standing in front of the bamboo grove on the hill of the Certosa San Lorenzo di Galuzzo, a former Carthusian monastery from the 14th century, now located between petrol stations, a supermarket and the hills towards Siena. From the Certosa, you can almost see Villa Romana. Bamboo grows on a slope here too, with names cared in and expressions of love. Walch's carved slogans on the bamboo poles in the exhibition stand at the interface between the fragments of this world in which Agree to Disagree is situated: the inscription of tourists declaring their love; the fascination of the ornamental bamboo on the side wing of the medieval monastery; mass production and craftsmanship; a view into history from the present; discord.
Jonas Tinius
More works by Raul Walch under this Link:
Artist page