LEMBI’s Student Programme is conceived as an open call for art students that combines the development of an exhibition project with structured mentoring sessions, creating a shared space for research, dialogue, and experimentation.
Rather than focusing solely on the realisation of a final exhibition at LEMBI, the programme is conceived as an ongoing process of research and experimentation.Through individual and collective exchanges, participants are encouraged to develop their artistic practice in an environment grounded in listening and horizontal openness. A series of mentoring sessions will accompany participants through the different stages of their work, providing a space for discussion, reflection, and exchange, while allowing their projects to evolve and mature over time.
(Saturnya Piri by Arianna Pompeo, BA student- group show ‘While You Weren’t Looking’ )
(Everything Here is Learning to Melt by Michelle Ronaly. Solo show. Edible sweets, fishing wire, toothpicks)
(La tenerezza nel collasso by Mattia Pio Mazza, performance- group show ‘While You Weren’t Looking’)
The Role of Mentoring within Artistic Practice
We see dialogue with a mentor as a process through which artistic research can take concrete form and be continuously reshaped. Therefore, we envision the student programme not only as a workspace to develop an exhibition, but also as a pathway that we build together through mentoring sessions. Tutoring sessions are spaces for dialogue and feedback that develop around informal presentations of the project and research. Conceived as a series of 30-minute individual sessions, the meetings explore the structure of the research, approaches and methodologies to develop the work for the show. These sessions also represent an important opportunity to hold space for feedback, exchange visual and theoretical references with professionals in the arts sector — artists, curators, writers and critics — to help students to develop greater awareness of their own artistic practice.
Offering students a free exhibition space in San Lorenzo district provides them with an opportunity to engage with a real-world context, outside the academic environment. The exhibition experience thus becomes not only a moment of presentation, but also a turning point in the professional growth of each student. Mentoring provides participants with guidance while helping build a lasting network of support across disciplines and experiences. For emerging artists, having people to turn to for advice, exchange, and collaboration is vital, particularly when professional networks and points of reference are often lacking. The programme aims to foster relationships that continue beyond its duration.
Unfolding Edition #1 in collaboration with RUFA - Rome University of Fine Arts
The first edition, in collaboration with RUFA – Rome University of Fine Arts, took place between March and July 2026. The collaboration with RUFA enabled students to engage with their work in a new and conscious way, bridging the gap between education and practice. The project aimed to foster personal and professional growth through a series of opportunities for exchange and dialogue, culminating in a final exhibition at a venue in the San Lorenzo district, with potential opportunities at an international level. Promoting exchange and mutual growth was at the heart of the initiative. The collaboration with RUFA, located just a short walk from LEMBI, further strengthened the project by creating a direct and tangible connection with the local area. This proximity facilitated exchanges, encouraged students’ active participation and helped to build an ongoing relationship between the educational space and the exhibition space. For Edition #1, students were encouraged and supported to experiment with new materials, processes and approaches looking at spores as a material or metaphorical condition. We explored spores as agents of dispersion and transformation, capable of crossing boundaries and generating new forms of life in unpredictable contexts. All students were also invited to take risks, using new materials and approaches for the first time while exploring the frictions and potentialities of spatial limits, understood as thresholds for negotiation, crossing and redefinition. The application process required applicants to submit a project proposal, along with a portfolio and a motivation letter.
(Latent Bodies / Blue Growths by Mimmi Feuer, part of the group show ‘ While You Weren’t Looking’ - Cynotype on fabric, latex, scoby)
(Saturnya Piriby Arianna Pompeo, BA student- group show ‘While You Weren’t Looking’. Bronze, wax )
2026/2027
Edition #2 Open Call (ONGOING)
Edition #2 addresses ecological practices from a broad perspective, exploring the concepts of flows, rhythms, desire paths and coexistence. Desire paths, routes created by repeated movement rather than predetermined design, become a way of thinking about alternative paths and the possibility of creating, individually and collectively, new routes beyond those already established. They represent ephemeral traces of human and other-than-human movement, silent and collective expressions of needs, preferences and ways of inhabiting space. Flows are understood as movements that find space where there is none, driven by an internal impulse towards a destination or transformation.
This opens up spaces of exploration, transition and uncertainty, asking what can be found when we stray from well-trodden paths and what kinds of worlds become possible when we move beyond the rhythms and structures that organise our lives. In a context of global crisis, the project also explores coexistence and mutualism, considering learning as a multi-species process and the symbiotic ecosystem as a space in which to rethink relationships between bodies, species and environments.
How do different temporalities coexist, collide, interrupt or reshape one another? What happens when bodies, borders and flows are understood through the possibility of living with uncertainty?