Jessica Ekomane’s work as an electronic musician and sound artist explores the liminal spaces between disciplinary boundaries, cultural traditions, and modes of perception. Through her distinctive approach to rhythm, polyphony, and spatial sound, she investigates what she calls “the ineffable” — experiences and phenomena that resist linguistic description or categorical definition.

In Double Entendre, a conversation with Antonia Majaca traces how Ekomane’s early engagement with rhythm as a form of embodied knowledge has evolved into sophisticated investigations of alternative tuning systems, computational paradigms, and sonic architectures. The dialogue shows how her work challenges established binaries and naturalised hierarchies — whether between vernacular and canonical music production, European and diverse global mathematical traditions, or individual and collective modes of experience. Rather than treating contemporary technologies and traditional sonic tools as opposites, she explores how both can reveal “paths not taken” — alternative possibilities that unsettle dominant historical narratives.

Villa Romana series

The publication of the winners of the Villa Romana Prize takes the form of four distinct yet interrelated booklets, continuing the institution’s editorial tradition of offering a space for the dissemination and reverberation of the research and work of Villa Romana Fellows after their ten-month residency in Florence. Each year, four selected artists are invited to live and work in the same house that has been continuously inhabited by generations of artists since 1905. Each fellow has the opportunity to publish their work in a set of four separate books, within an open series that allows for a larger constellation of echoes across generations of Villa Romana Fellows.