Villa Aurora Events Archive
November 2025
Intersection with Rebecca Racine Ramershoven
18th Street Arts Center (1639 18th Street. Santa Monica, CA 90404)
Info
Intersection with Rebecca Racine Ramershoven
Tuesday, November 4th | 5PM – 7PM
18th Street Arts Center
1639 18th Street. Santa Monica, CA 90404
Free + Open to the Public
These gatherings are dedicated to gathering our community around good food, conversation, and art. Please stop by for a bite and chat with our community and spotlight artist Rebecca Racine Ramershoven.
Participants
Rebecca Racine Ramershoven lives and works in Cologne (Germany) and Thessaloniki (Greece). As a Black German visual artist, Racine uses photography, video, and objects in her work to explore issues of race-related representation, the meaning and power of community, and sociocultural questions and possibilities. The examination and integration of political and historical contexts play an immense role in her conceptual approaches. In 2024, Racine received the Villa Aurora Residency Fellowship from Kunstsalon Köln and will be able to start her residency this year thanks to the cooperation of 18th Street Art Center and Villa Aurora.
Partner
This event is a cooperation with 18th Street Arts Center
Weimar Under the Palms. Pacific Palisades, German Exiles, and the Invention of Hollywood
Thomas Mann House (1550 N San Remo Drive, CA 90272)
Info
In the early twentieth century, Pacific Palisades was home to America’s most modern film studio of the time as well as the proposed site of the world’s largest Christian center. But by the end of the 1920s, the Los Angeles neighborhood had become the refuge of the rich and beautiful as German and Austrian filmmakers, among them Salka and Berthold Viertel, settled there. They were soon followed by cultural and intellectual giants of the Weimar Republic who were fleeing Europe, such as Max Reinhardt, Hanns Eisler, or Max Horkheimer. These great minds turned Pacific Palisades into a “Weimar under the palm trees.” Though many were successful in exile—including Vicki Baum, Thomas Mann, and Lion Feuchtwanger—others felt as if they were in a “sun prison” far from home.
Recounting a story of glamor and great minds, Thomas Blubacher tells of the history of German-speaking exiles that is still alive there today, going on a foray through the film industry, taking us on a journey to this special place which was so recently devastated by fire. Many of the homes in this book have now gone, but Marta Feuchtwanger’s Villa Aurora and the Thomas Mann house still stand as a testament to luck, resilience, and history.
Thomas Blubacher will read from the English translation by Elisabeth Lauffer, followed by a Q&A moderated by Claudia Gordon, Director of Villa Aurora.
Participants
Thomas Blubacher has written over thirty books and has worked as a theater director in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. A specialist on theater and film of the 1930s, his books include biographies of the siblings Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn, Gustaf Gründgens, Oscar Wälterlin, Ruth Landshoff-Yorck, and Ruth Hellberg. He has also written essays and travel features, and has published a bestselling book on cruises and several historical crime novels.
Partner
This event is a cooperation with Brandeis University Press
Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims
Now Instant Image Hall (939 Chung King Rd, Los Angeles, CA 90012)
Film Information
Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims is a film and research project by artist, filmmaker, and writer Arjuna Neuman and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva. Since 2016, the duo collaborates on a series of films, that each follow a classical element (water, earth, wind, fire) to help us reimagine the world speculatively and reparatively. Their ‘elemental cinema’ merges poetics and critical theory, to propose a poignant and emotional take on the ethical-political challenges of the global present, through human and non-human perspectives. Part documentary and part personal essay, their films transform our ways of seeing, knowing and being. The third film in their series, Ancestral clouds Ancestral claims follows the wind and what it carries -from dust to clouds, ideas, stories and voices- as a guide and an analytical framework.
Filmed in Chile, in the Atacama desert it explores the entanglements and overlaps of historical events, past present and future, in this site.
Taking us on a visual journey through the ALMA large array facility, an international astronomical observatory, and the lithium mines of the Atacama, the film shows how material trajectories are deeply entwined with the pursuit of foundational ideas from the enlightenment, their mutation into aspects of modern neoliberal authoritarianism and their dissemination.
Timeless, plural, and untamable, the wind in virtue of the memories, particles, and ancestral claims it carries, acts as a prism that reveals that which is hidden in plain sight: the pillars of Western thought that sustain colonial legacies of inequality, racial exclusion and human extractivism.
Co-produced by Kunsthalle Wien.
Participants
Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures, New York University. Her artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of Unpayable Debt (2022), Dívida Impagável (2019), and Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007). Her articles have been published in journals such as Social Text; Theory, Culture & Society; philoSOPHIA; Griffith Law Review; Theory & Event and The Black Scholar, among others. Her artworks include the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy (2018) and Soot Breath /Corpus Infinitum (2020), with Arjuna Neuman and Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, with Valentina Desideri. She has taught at UC San Diego, University of British Columbia, and Queen Mary-University of London and visited Birkbeck-University of London, University of São Paulo, Université de Paris VIII and is currently an Adjunct Professor at Monash University Architecture, Design, and Art and a faculty at the European Graduate School.
Arjuna Neuman is an artist and writer. He has presented solo mid-career surveys at MACBA in Barcelona, Munch Museum in Oslo, and Belkin Gallery in Vancouver and forthcoming at Kunsthalle Bern. He has presented solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Vienna; CCA Glasgow; Showroom Gallery, London; TPW Gallery, Toronto; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Istanbul Modern, Turkey; MAAT, Portugal amongst many others. He has participated in the Berlin Biennial, Sharjah Biennial, Bergen Assembly, the 56th Venice Biennial, Qalandia Biennial, Ural Industrial Biennial, Hacer Noche in Mexico and many other large group exhibitions. He has been included in film festivals such as Berlinale, Images Festival, Docsliboa, Third Horizon. In 2024 he won the Artist Moving Image prize at Les Rencontre International Festival; in 2024 he was a fellow at Villa Aurora and in 2022 a fellow at the Flaherty Seminar. His work is kept in the Belkin Collection, Kunsthalle Bern Collectors Circle; IAC Lyon and Platform UK. He has a forthcoming monograph published with Archive Books. As a writer, he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings and e-flux. He is the founder of Archive of Belonging, a platform and resource list supporting migrants and refugees.
He was a fellow at Villa Aurora in 2024.
Anuradha Vikram is a writer, curator, and educator born in New York and based in Los Angeles. Their novel Use Me At Your Own Risk: Visions from the Darkest Timeline (X Artists’ Books, 2023) uses speculative fiction to address current and future social conditions from a techno-critical point of view. Current curatorial projects include The Sky Is Always Falling: HIV/AIDS Activists Unleashing Power in Los Angeles Then and Now for the 2025 ONE Institute Circa Queer Histories Festival. They are a consulting curator for the Metabolic Studio and a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of Art at UCLA.
In 2024 they co-curated the Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial and the Getty PST Art exhibition Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption(2024–25) at UCLA Art Sci Center. Recent curatorial projects include Jaishri Abichandani: Flower-Headed Children at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2022), Swept Away: Love Letter to a Surrogate with Warren Neidich, Renée Petropoulos, and Christina Strassfield at Guild Hall, East Hampton Main Beach, New York (2022) and 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica State Beach, California (2023), and eX-aMEN-ing Masculinities with LA Freewaves at Los Angeles State Historic Park in 2022.
Vikram’s book Decolonizing Culture(Sming Sming Books, 2017) helped initiate a global movement to decolonize arts institutions and monuments. They are a contributor to art periodicals including Artforum, Art in America, Artillery, X-TRA, and publications from Paper Monument, Archive Books, Heyday Press, Routledge, Wiley, and Oxford University Press. They hold an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BS in Studio Art from NYU.
More Information
Tickets cost $15 and can be purchased here.
Doors open at 6:30 pm and the film screening begins at 7:00 pm with a runtime of 49 minutes. A conversation with Arjuna Neuman and Anuradha Vikram will follow the film.
Please note: seating is limited. Box Office opens thirty minutes prior to the listed showtime. Online ticket sales will be honored up until 15 minutes after the scheduled showtime. In-store ticket purchases are subject to availability, first-come, first-served. All Sales Final.
Partner
This event is a cooperation with Now Instant Image Hall.
Villa Aurora X Lookout FM Radio - Episode 11 of "if the house could speak"
Radio LOOKOUT FM
In January of 2025 the Palisades Fire came within feet of Villa Aurora. Miraculously, the house survived, and with it the radio transmitter that broadcasts from there throughout the Santa Monica Mountains and the beaches below.
This series explores the voices, past and present, that reverberate at Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger’s former home. For the past 30 years, Villa Aurora has been an artist residence, a place where exile and expression meet, where history and contemporary events converge.
During the process of rebuilding and awaiting our artists’ return, we will be broadcasting newly produced, archival and historical footage for you to listen to and maybe wonder: Is this really only a house or, like Carl Jung suggests, can the composition of a room induce the realization of new truths?
Each episode of if the house could speak will be broadcast on a loop for 24 hours with no interruption starting at 12 PM Pacific Daylight Time. For our listeners across the world, that corresponds to 7 PM Coordinated Universal Time and 9 PM Middle European Time.
Episode 11
Weimar Under the Palms. Pacific Palisades, German Exiles, and the Invention of Hollywood
Recounting a story of glamor and great minds, Thomas Blubacher tells of the history of German-speaking exiles that is still alive today, going on a foray through the film industry, taking us on a journey to this special place which was so recently devastated by fire. Many of the homes in this book have now gone, but Marta Feuchtwanger’s Villa Aurora and the Thomas Mann house still stand as a testament to luck, resilience, and history.
Thomas Blubacher reads from the English translation by Elisabeth Lauffer, followed by a Q&A moderated by Claudia Gordon, Director of Villa Aurora.
About LOOKOUT FM
LOOKOUT FM is a West Coast terrestrial radio home for the broadcast of "transmission art:" experimental audio composition, modern serials, data sonification, radio plays, multi-day compositions, and radio-centric performances. Their licensed stations in Burbank, Hollywood, and Pacific Palisades function as FM exhibition spaces where radio art is presented without regard to constraints of time, structure, or commercial consideration.
