Annual Report 2007-8 - The British School at Rome

D I R E C T O R ’ S R E P O R Tterms of career stage and of artistic direction. What is themore impressive is that, despite all differences inbackground, the artists collaborate closely. As JacopoBenci shows in his report, the joint shows put onthroughout the year are not merely mixed bags ofunrelated works, but thought through togetherthematically, as in the show entitled The Director’sApartment, which took its impulse from the archivalphotographs of the director’s apartment in the days ofEugenie Strong and recreated within the Gallery anintense space in which art works jostled in closeproximity, including the remarkable doll’s house createdby Prisca Thielmann within the ‘director’s desk’. Thesense of close collaboration, not only between the artists,but between them and the Humanities scholars, was muchenhanced by two scholars whose projects involved others:Lindsay Seers, the Wingate Scholar, used her project onQueen Cristina of Sweden to involve others in a series ofvideos and performances; while Cian Donnelly’sremarkable choir, The Order of the Golden Ghost, drawn fromthe body of residents, in performing his owncompositions at each of the shows, provided a delightfulelement of shared experience.To the rich mix offered by the artists in residence, theprogramme of contemporary arts events curated byCristiana Perrella has long added an important element ofenrichment and outreach. A long-standing focus on videoreflects both the Curator’s expertise and an importantstream within contemporary art, and coincides with thepractice of several of our scholars, as well as of ourmodernist, David Forgacs. This year The Secret Publicshowcased the work of the decade from 1978 to 1988.The Viva Roma! project over the course of a decade hasbrought in selected artists to produce site-specific workin response to Rome: Chris Evans’s As Simple As YourLife Used To Be offered an unusual take by a British artiston four influential Italian politicians. The series ofcontemporary musical events, entitled Tracks, curated byDaniela Cascella, has brought us a figure as famous (andcharming) as Little Annie. It is difficult to look back onthe richness and variety of this programme withoutregret that the changed financial circumstances of nextyear will make it impossible to sustain the same level ofactivity. Cristiana Perrella deserves the institution’swarmest thanks for everything she has achieved over thelast decade.Over this successful programme, and over all the BSR’sactivities, there hangs a long shadow. Between September2007 and April 2008, sterling lost 14% of its value againstthe euro, a fall from which it has not recovered over theintervening months. Nor is there any reason to supposethat the days of the strong euro are past. The impact onthe institution’s finances is grave, since we receive virtuallyall our funding in sterling, but incur the majority of ourexpenditure in euros. With an income (excluding theHerculaneum project) of around two million pounds ayear, this is equivalent to a loss in spending power of aquarter of a million pounds. We do not know what thefuture holds for sterling, whether further fall or (as we allhope) recovery, but it is clear that we must re-dimensionthe ambition and scope of our activities. The loss in valueof sterling affects all aspects of our institution: the librarycan afford fewer books, the Camerone fewer computers;and as fuel costs and food prices press ineluctablyupwards, it will become ever more difficult to keep thebooks of the residential hostel in balance.Inescapably, we will be able to put on fewer events inour activities programme, though we attach importance tosustaining the disciplinary range of our activities and thebalance between Fine Arts and Humanities. The financialpressures only underline the importance to the institutionof the multiple sources of funding that sustain us. Ourcore grant comes from the British Academy, as part ofgovernment funding for the Academy’s programme ofresearch, including its cluster of overseas institutes andsocieties. The Academy, and specifically BASIS, the7