Peanut Fields Near Friendship: Venice Program Explores Friendship as Practice

A public program titled Peanut Fields Near Friendship, presented at Scuola Piccola Zattere in Venice, examines friendship as the "invisible infrastructure" of artistic and intellectual practice. The series is organized by Piersandra Di Matteo, Edoardo Lazzari and Annalisa Sacchi, who structure each event around a pair of friends who have made something together. Its title derives from a William Eggleston photograph, Peanut Fields near Friendship, Georgia, 1976, held by The Museum of Modern Art, and from a personal anecdote of Sacchi's. The first encounter pairs Daria Deflorian and Azzurra D'Agostino, who use objects as keepsakes and navigational markers to narrate their relationship. A second event features Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli and Francesco Fiorentino discussing the literary bond between Robert Walser and Carl Seelig, framed as friendship that preserves memory and administers a legacy. Di Matteo cites Fred Moten's notion of "common disorder," and the word "tangle" recurs for the difficulty of locating where one friend ends and the other begins. Upcoming sessions include Giuseppe Allegri and Bruno Montesano on October 26 and Michele Bertolino and Lina Pallotta on November 25. The essay accompanying the program is published by NERO Editions.