Relevance & Reciprocity

Reflections on the inaugural Residenza Lago Scuro, a creative-residency hosted on an organic farm in northern Italy

Alex Todaro
Nov 6 · 17 min read
The inaugural cohort for Residenza Lago Scuro, 2019

“To live on a farm like Lago Scuro is to know where your life comes from.”

This quote is from an essay written by one of our residents, Spencer Scott, during his time at Residenza Lago Scuro this past August. In it he tells the story of what he observed during his ten-days on the farm: A dance between past, present, and future — in family, in ecology, in tradition — all supporting one another, all informing one another, conspiring to “enshroud this farm in a constant process of reciprocity.”.

The passage Spencer wrote above the front-entrance to Lago Scuro

We Are Dreaming of a Time When the Land Might Give Thanks for the People is the title of the essay, it’s a passage from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass. A provocative statement that asks us to imagine what might be possible when we respect this ask of reciprocity, and so it’s fitting that this title also now lives permanently above the entry-way to the Lago Scuro property. Scribed in big bold letters above the front gate, it poses the thought to anyone who now enters. Spencer’s words are the first of many meditations left on the farm from our residents exploring themselves, their work, and this graceful weaving of past, present, and future at Lago Scuro.

“What is the relevance of us being here?” was my first question to the eleven creatives coming from around the world for our inaugural residency. Poets, builders, painters, scientists, parents, and generalists sat together in the open cobble-stoned courtyard on the first morning. Their bellies full of espresso and croissants, still battling jet-lag, eager to explore the property and discover what Lago Scuro was all about.

The residents gathered together in the courtyard on the first morning while Luca introduces us to the farm

We had described this program as an interdisciplinary creative-residency — it was an open call to anyone who was interested in what it might look like to explore their work in the context of this farm. It wasn’t mandatory that any of the residents had anything explicitly to do with agriculture or food but we were interested in gathering a collection of people who could draw a line between their passions and work, and the values practiced on this property — things like sustainability, gastronomy, regenerative-agriculture, family, and alternative models for living a more locally-supported life. The intention was to create an environment of exchange between different minds and like-hearts, and we were excited to see what this crossover might be able to teach the residents, and the farm alike.

The grazing fields for Lago Scuro’s dairy cows

When I describe Lago Scuro to people I often describe it as a place that is truly living its values with the utmost integrity. Words don’t seem to be needed because actions do all the talking. The farm operates on a regular rhythm that is built around family, food, the land, the community, and experimentation. It’s less of a business than it is a circulatory system. But it can also be hard on some people. At first, it’s system can seem counter-intuitive. The farm changes before your eyes with seemingly little influence of control. Finding fluency in this language is really the trick — it’s an effort to understand what I call, “the mood”.

The mood is largely ineffable, it’s something you have to feel for yourself. We all understand it conceptually or have seen some representation of it. But it’s truly quite unique to be held within it for a concentrated amount of time. You could try to distill the mood into values like generosity, spirit, joy, nourishment, and slowing down but it lives just above all those in a quiet crescendo that you have to pay attention to.

The mood is a distant brother returning home for the first time in years to pick figs with the younger children at the very top of an old tree. It’s a table-top that is collectively set for lunch and dinner every day to respect the tradition of ‘buon appetito’. It’s an invitation to learn the art of biscotti and then returning the favor when you share the universal magic of chocolate chip cookies. It’s playing ping-pong with a chorus of smoking and screaming chefs in a church whose foundation dates back to the year 1000. It’s being given permission to claim space and then leave that space better than you found it.

The mood is the reciprocity Spencer described above but it is done so not in the spirit of obligation, but rather, abundance. It is the joy of supporting what supports you and making sure that you take the time to enjoy it. I think it’s something we all claim to desire but actually living within it requires a certain level of surrender and faith that we’re unaccustomed to in the modern western world.

I think the residents became aware of this idea when they first arrived, noticing the aesthetics of the mood in the restored estate from the 1800s, or as they walked through the gardens or kitchen and saw three-generations of family and their extended community all involved in different aspects of the daily dealings. But it wasn’t until the third or fourth day when they really started to feel it. It’s not a coincidence that this happened when they were invited into the work of the farm.

Cheesemaking starts at 7 am. Fabio, or Nonno, as he’s affectionately called, has already been up for a number of hours. He’s milked the cows and has fed the chickens. He prepares the caseificio wearing his tall rubber boots and a knitted cap. You walk into the tile-floored dairy and are met with a cloud of fragrant steam. Milk boils in the large steel vats with rennet, the enzymes required to make the curd. There’s water on the floor while Nonno is juggling between washing the rinds of aging cheese, preparing molds, and testing the boiling vats to make sure they’re at the perfect temperature. Suddenly family members, the chefs, and the gardener all arrive at the same time — today is mozzarella day and it will require the hands of everyone to be completed in the proper time and process.

Luca, Leonardo, and Nonno are stationed at the large wooden mixing bowl behind the boilers. They’re using a long paddle to stretch the cheese curd as it melts in boiling water. It’s a strong and gentle movement requiring the whole body to stretch a length of cheese out as far as possible to then let it fall back on itself with its own weight. It’s quick and rhythmic, swirling and stretching the cheese in an infinity pattern.

The rest of us stand across from a partner around a steel rectangular bath filled with ice-cold water. We’re waiting for the moment when Nonno will drop lengths of molten stretchy cheese into the bath so we can begin to shape it into mozzarella. It’s not dissimilar from breadmaking. Cheese, like dough, builds up a network of newly-formed bonds that you have to be careful not to overly disturb while shaping it, but while also being mindful to do it before the cheese loses its elasticity. One partner dunks the cheese and then pulls it up while pushing out a perfect shiny globe of mozzarella between their hands. In this movement they stretch a skin of mozzarella around itself to hold in all those gentle and delicious bonds while the other partner pinches the backside of the orb with both sets of thumbs and forefingers to snap the shaped mozzarella from the rest of the cheese, sealing off the skin.

Nonno teaching us the art of mozzarella making

Classical music plays in the background as we push ourselves to embody this method. Trying to create the same fluidity in our process that we observe in the mozzarella. English and Italian mixes into the bath as we take direction for the precise angle you should snap the mozzarella from. Orbs break, pieces fall to the ground, Nonno laughs and winks as he tears a small piece from the mixing bowl for us to taste.

Gentle and strong, precise and forgiving, open and grounded — we spend the morning in this part of the infinity pattern doing our part to respect what the cows have given us, what Nonno is teaching us. We clean up the caseificio and prepare for lunch, setting a large table underneath the canopy of fruiting grapevines at the front of the house. Leonardo, Matteo, and Tommaso bring out a large pan of pasta, some salad, and then following behind them is Nonno with a few bowls of Mozzarella. This is what the mood tastes like. Drizzled with olive oil and a dash of salt — our new network of bonds, gently cared for, now carrying us forward into the afternoon.

Brandon Polack painting a tire he found in the barn

As the residents made cheese, baked bread, harvested in the gardens, or processed tomatoes into velvety passata, bit-by-bit they began to sink further into the mood. In the same way milk became cheese, or flour, bread. The residents sought out other raw materials and spaces on the property that could be transformed into new creations. Old pallets and tires became canvases, hay-barns became recording studios, courtyards and backyards became portals to other realities… it was beginning to be understood that the farm was a place of raw potential granting full access for the residents to play with.

We often wait to be given permission, it’s a sign of respect. I think that for most of the residents this was probably one of the main things that took the most adjustment. Luca, the head of the farm and co-organizer of the residency, has a special way about him with respect to permission. In my experience, at least, it seems that no matter the person or the ask, permission is implicitly granted at Lago Scuro. In trying to discover where this came from one morning over breakfast I asked Luca how they came to be so generous. In Luca’s own casual way while he bounced his youngest daughter, Elena, on his knee he told me that it must come from his parents. “We realized early on that the farm can be very isolating. If we are not open, we won’t survive.” he then juts his chin out to punctuate his point, a common Italian deictic gesture that’s somewhere in between, “that’s it” and “I don’t know”. He then adds, “We hold onto the values of the farm, but we need people like you to come here so we can learn and grow.”

Before I can ask anything else, Luca is swooped up in another current — helping the contractors restoring the facade of the house, tasting the chef's latest creation, or just playing with his children. Luca, like everyone else on the farm, is constantly in motion. As the “head” of the farm, for him, it’s less about making the decisions, and more so about holding the values. This way-of-being is so embedded in him that it’s just a natural expectation he has for anyone he connects with. Generous but not accommodating, this too is part of the mood.

Luca organized a bouncy waterslide castle for his daughter’s fifth birthday which coincided with the residency.

There’s wisdom in this part of the farm that took me some time to understand. If you provide someone with every opportunity and they don’t take it, the possibilities, and most likely, the relationship will naturally come to a conclusion. However, if you create the space for every opportunity to arise, then the potential is actually quite unlimited.

“Un altro finale é possibile” was written on the back wall of the limonaia by resident, Milli Narayen. She did this after spending four days tirelessly cleaning out the old greenhouse and organizing the leftover materials. When she began, she told me she wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do, “I just had to be in this space.” she tells me. The statement sits on the wall just above head height so that anyone walking by can see it lingering above the gardener as he waters new seedlings. The cycle of life and death begins in this room throughout the season at Lago Scuro. Each seed is a choice for the future they’re building, an investment in each crop that is traded-on all summer to then be collected, saved, and re-invested the following year. The contrast of this big statement with such discrete work invites the viewer into this space to consider just how courageous these small, repetitive actions can be over time. Change isn’t always a matter of big gestures, it’s more often the sum of small intentional, and perhaps even invisible, actions. The sun pours through the tall, recently washed bay-windows illuminating the limonaia in a golden haze. Mili’s strong cursive letters draw a thread for us to see how Another ending is possible.

Milli Narayen in the Limonaia

When Milli arrived her original intention was to create a cookbook to document the history and traditions of Lago Scuro. But when she gave herself permission to explore the space and really sink into it, she found a different story to tell — her own.

Witnessing this transition in all the residents was an incredibly special thing to watch from the outside. Bonnie began by cleaning the workshop attached to the barn, creating gravity in a new functional space on the farm, Kyle scanned the property with a microphone in-hand capturing vignettes of the daily work, Brandon immersed himself in every process and material he could find to facilitate and document special moments for all the residents, Andi wove creativity, humor, and philosophy together during daily salons in the courtyard, Roberta harvested the man-made and organic surroundings to express the overlapping cycles of growth and decay, Rachel, Steven, and their daughter Cypress looked towards the moon and captured stories of maternity and transformation, and Nick re-immersed himself in an environment that he called home for many years before, leaving behind a new playful and personal mural on the caseificio.

As the residents became more personally invested in the space, the more their work became a dialogue with what they were finding there. The works didn’t serve solely as pieces of expression, instead, they were treated as gifts to the farm and the experience they were having. How often do we get to give a gift so personal, and so lasting? How often do we get to create a mark for a shared philosophy? That’s what these gifts were, interpretations of the energy and model of the farm described in the author's hand. Equal parts processing, equal parts offering. How special to be in a position where the place that inspires you, equally desires to be inspired by you.

On our last day, the residents hurried to put the final touches on their work before our open-house. A local journalist had come the day before to write an article about what we’d done here and to invite the people of Cremona to share in the conclusion of our experience. When speaking to each of the residents he continued to ask, why? “Why are you here?”, “Why Cremona?”, “Why this farm?” He couldn’t understand what the draw was for this combination of people to this type of space. After much reiteration, and with Nick’s patient translation skills, the two-page spread in the newspaper the next day opened like this,

“The work is an opportunity to change our lifestyle, to hypothesize a sustainable world from an economic, environmental, and why not, also a cultural point of view, This is the common thread shared by the eleven artists at Residenza Lago Scuro.”

An article about the residency in La Provincia, the local Cremona newspaper

As guests from the town arrived on our last day, they seemed to agree. Groups of different ages and backgrounds came to the farm, some for the first time, to learn more about this dialogue we were having.

Kyle Lawson in the church testing his sound installation

An elderly couple sat piously in the church nodding affirmatively as they listened to Kyle’s sound installation — a Wendell Berry passage translated into Italian and spoken by our residency co-facilitator Stefania. Throughout the reading Kyle overlays the different sounds of the farm that he has been recording, resulting in a visceral soundscape that has us consider the cost we pay when we lose the means of producing our own food and support structures, or conversely, the exponential value we are granted when we hold on to them.

A family walked around the backyard using a tablet to enter the augmented reality world created by Steven, Rachel, and their daughter Cypress. Twelve zodiac signs taken from the famous torazzo of Cremona, the third-largest brick clock tower in the world, circled around a central figure that transformed between images of the moon and a rendering of Fraglina, a sculpture originally made by Italian artist Attilio Piccirilli. As the family moved between each zodiac sign they were able to hear songs, stories, and lullabies recorded by the Fragale family. The work took us on a journey to consider ancestry, space, and time, with the moon as our ‘night light’ to guide us home.

We gathered outside the stables for an aperitif, supported by a collection of works’ Brandon had been making all week. Colorfully painted wood blocks with fun Italian phrases, an exhibition of photos he had taken to document the residency and a beautiful poem written with paint on a large glass window. He reminds us that “when the food is served, we are given the opportunity to see that food is love.“

In the evening Spencer read his essay aloud for the first time to the residents, the Lago Scuro family, and members of the Cremona community. There were few dry eyes. His words wrapped us in communion, tying our experience at Lago Scuro to a bigger purpose that transcends any one border or culture.

Spencer reading his essay to the residents, and family and friends of Lago Scuro

So what was the relevance of us being here together at Lago Scuro?

For the farm, I think us being there served as a mirror of what was possible. We closed our final night with a toast from Luca where he thanked us on behalf of the entire staff and family for reminding them of the potential of this space, and to never take it for granted.

But for me personally, the residency taught me just how important it is to have meeting spaces for this community who is thinking about ‘new ways of being’ — a creative generation that is looking for sustainable meaning in a polarized, and not always so optimistic world. Gathering in Lago Scuro was more than ten days of making art. It was a concentrated cross-pollination of passionate individuals who were all scratching at the same itch, “how might we find a better way to do this, that truly expresses and represents all the abundance, care, and love we expect from the world?”.

Lago Scuro is just one example of a different way, it lives in its own context and history, and I’m more interested in us learning from it rather than trying to replicate it anywhere. I believe that seeing this model first-hand allowed us all to connect with our own roots and traditions from past and present in a different way so that we could then thoughtfully bring them forward to consider new possibilities of sustainable futures. Mixing our personal selves, our work, and the experiences at Lago Scuro made sure that we could consider these futures in a way that is relevant to our own times and needs, and inclusive of all our skill sets and disciplines.

It was lightly raining on our last morning. In a careful and quiet procession, four of us carried the old church bell to the front of the house using lengths of rebar threaded through rings cast atop this emblematic artefact from the 1600s. Kyle had found it earlier in the week in the back of the church under some boxes and debris, and we found out that it had been taken down from the tower because of structural degradation in the swinging mechanism. The children of Lago Scuro were dancing around us in excited anticipation for us to hang the bell in its new home — a thoughtfully welded a-frame made from found pieces of tractor parts, and discarded metal that Bonnie had discovered while cleaning and organizing the new workshop in the old barn, a space that before this residency was just being used for storage.

“It’s a horcrux.” she says while laughing and smiling to herself. “A part of me will live forever now because Lago Scuro is an enchanting eternal place.”. We raised the bell into the a-frame while Bonnie, in her signature grey grease-stained jumpsuit ornamented with a sewn-in doily on the breast pocket, fitted in the final pieces to her creation. Then, running a length of rope from the pendulum, she stood back as we gathered around to hear the heartbeat of the farm for the first time in over a decade. The children were mesmerized as a soft round tone joined the rain and fell over the farm. To the side, you could see Nonno and Nonna nostalgically smiling with one another.

The A-frame in “L’officina di Bonnie”, and the hanging of the bell on the last day of the residency

There’s a comforting sense of pragmatism, and almost selfishness, that I think is the key to the magic of a place like Lago Scuro. For me, it’s always been refreshing to see a model like this not born from an overtly political agenda, or dogmatic vision, but rather faith in the actions themselves. Here on this farm sweeping the floors, cleaning the windows, making the cheese, and setting the table speak their own volumes. Like Bonnie’s horcrux, generations of family come alive in the tomato, or perhaps even the espresso machine, so it’s important to keep these actions, materials, and spaces, simple and honest. In this way, the Lago Scuro family practices reciprocity for their continued nourishment and joy; and for ten days our eleven residents were able to share in this mood. Discovering their own relationship to this place, this philosophy, and these practices. Leaving behind their own unique gifts so that they will always know where this new part of their life comes from.


Grazie mille to our residents Spencer, Bonnie, Kyle, Andi, Milli, Roberta, Steven, Rachel, Cypress, Nicholas, and Brandon. As well as to the entire family and community of Lago Scuro.

Follow @residenzalagoscuro on Instagram and visit residenzalagoscuro.com for updates about future programs.

You can find Alex on Instagram @alextodaro

Alex Todaro

Written by

Experience designer and exquisite generalist focused on bringing new relevance to agriculture and sustainability through art & design.

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