Umbria — group show at Kaffeemitte, Berlin Mitte

The artists

ILLUSTRATION

Marina Anken

„Truffles“ / 2026, Berlin

Marina Anken is from Switzerland and has been living in Berlin since 2020, where she studied social design. In her work, she uses the graphic novel format, with a thematic focus on fashion and clothing.

In 2022, she spent a holiday in Umbria. There, she stumbled upon an announcement for a textile exhibition, which introduced her to the „L’OFFICINA Imagination Lab“. This venue is dedicated to art and local traditions and contains an archive for exclusive textiles from Kashmir — an extensive fabric collection linked to questions of origin, craftsmanship, and history. L’OFFICINA hosts events, runs a library, and offers artist residencies.

For Marina, who was already thinking about the outlines for a graphic novel about the fashion industry at the time, many things clicked into place. She decided to apply for a residency and spent the month of November 2022 at L’OFFICINA in Monteleone d’Orvieto.

The stay marked the starting point for her current book project. Marina made sketches and notes of her observations: the hilly landscape of Umbria, cypress trees, winding roads, and the experience of slowly travelling through the region. Added to this was her intense engagement with the fashion industry and the appeal of handcrafted materials in an industrialised world. She is still working on this ambitious graphic novel today, and the excitement and expectations are growing.

For Marina, a special memory from this time is the omnipresent topic of truffles. She was asked again and again whether she had already tried the local truffles. Conversations revolved conspicuously often around food. For her, who was there to get some meaningful work done, this was somewhat irritating – as if the culinary aspect was the only priority in this land!?

However, she finally tried truffles on the last day of her stay, and the truffle lasagna she ate became a highlight of her time in Umbria. She realised the significance of this product: not as a luxury in the traditional sense, but as a part of everyday life. She recognised that a sensual way of life plays a central role in Umbria. Delicious food is a luxury that people treat themselves to every day. Similarly, clothing does not have to be purely functional; it can be beautiful without being considered wasteful or even a moral sin.

Marina has captured this insight in the print she is showing in the exhibition. It is a separate, short episode – a small reminder of her stay, told on a large-format page. A light-hearted story about Umbria, a land south of the Alps, where the concepts of indulgence and beauty are valued quite differently.

And so this page stands like a small appetiser, a greeting from the kitchen, announcing the arrival of the ‘big lasagna’ – Marina’s book.

officinaaps.org · @marina_anken

Umbria — Marion Dieterle, Acrylic painting

ACRYLIC PAINTING

Marion Dieterle

„HERE“ / 2023, Umbria · acrylic on canvas, 70×46 cm

„Winter, Sky“ / 2025, Umbria · acrylic on canvas, 70×50 cm

„Tissues“ / 2024, Umbria · tempera and acrylic on canvas, three parts 3×39×19 cm

Marion Dieterle has been living in Umbria since 2021. Before moving there, she worked in Cologne, having originally trained as a dancer. Her move to Italy also brought about a change in her artistic practice. Today, she focuses on painting, complemented by performative installations. Her work is the result of her everyday contact with the landscape and its natural rhythms. In 2024, Marion Dieterle founded an artist residency. So far, eleven artists from different disciplines have been guests, including musicians, visual artists and authors. This curatorial work has become an important part of her own artistic practice. The collaborative work and thinking on site expand her own work and shift the focus from individual production to an open, process-oriented understanding of art.

The large painting shows the view from Greppoleschietto towards Lago Trasimeno. It is based on a recurring visual impression: changing light moods and colours, distant horizon lines. The hilly landscape creates a pronounced sense of depth, reinforced by the shifting light and the play of shadows cast by the clouds. This continuous change – throughout the day as well as with the changing seasons – forms the basis of the painting.

The three smaller works focus on excerpts, details. Micro-views of the landscape. Marion Dieterle is painting what she perceives as a phenomenon specific to this place: a permanent glow in the landscape. Even in winter, the warmth of summer remains visible – in the light, in the colours, in the vegetation. Leaves, soils and surfaces continue to carry this stored heat.

dossier3-d-poetry.de

ORTHOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHY

Gregor Hutz

„Pantalla“ / 2025, Umbria & Berlin · digitally altered, high-res drone shots

Umbria was my home until I was eight years old. Since then, I have maintained a lifelong connection to the area. I have returned at least once a year — to visit my father, who lived near San Venanzo until 2015; today, I continue to return as a filmmaker, photographer and freestyle pomologist.

Pantalla does not look as picturesque as other towns in the Monti Martani or Monte Peglia, which rise along the slopes of the Tiber Valley. The valley itself, through which the Strada Statale runs, does not meet classic postcard standards. However, if we move beyond ‘beauty’ as a criterion for architecture and prefer the ‘interesting’ instead, buildings from the recent past take on a new light. When they show patina and a character of their own, they become wonderful additions to a multi-millennial history of civilization in the region.

gregor-hutz.de

ANALOG PHOTOGRAPHY

Linda Nau

„Nur zum Meer ist es ein wenig weit.“ / Greppolischieto, 2016

Linda Nau grew up in Umbria in a commune not far from Perugia. At the age of sixteen, she left the region to move to Germany — first to Munich, later to Cologne. She studied Communication Design at the University of the Arts, focusing on photography and mastering analogue techniques that would later define her artistic practice.

For her graduation project, Linda returned to her roots to photograph the commune and her parents’ nearby house. The work was produced using an analogue Pentax 67 medium-format camera. In total, she shot approximately 40 rolls of film, resulting in around 400 photographs – of which she published 45 in a book. The series is a reflection on the place she still calls home, yet one she felt compelled to leave early on.

Linda describes Umbria as a place of contrasts: idyllic yet rough, marked by a sparse landscape, cold winters and dry summers. Through the lens, she revisited her childhood — the slowness of rural life and the immense sense of freedom, set against feelings of loneliness and being cut off from the wider world. For a long time, she perceived these lands as rather unphotogenic. It was only through the process of photographing them that she began to recognize their aesthetic potential. The exhibition offers insight into this rediscovery: Linda’s engagement with the land of her childhood and memories between freedom and isolation, roughness and beauty.

lindanau.com

Umbria — Nadine Scherer, Graphite on paper

GRAPHITE ON PAPER

Nadine Scherer

„Umbrisches Tagebuch I–VIII“ / Greppolischieto, 2025

Nadine had already been to Italy before May 2025, but she didn’t know Umbria. The year before, she had been looking for an artist-in-residence programme so that she could concentrate on her work outside Berlin for a while. It was important to her that the location was rural and surrounded by nature.

A friend had found a flyer in a café and told Nadine about the Utopiaggia residency. The rural location, around 30 km from Perugia, and the residency’s connection to a commune that has existed nearby since the ‘80s, made her curious. Nadine is interested in alternative ways of living, community structures, and how artistic life in the countryside can be organised.

During her stay, the weather was rainy and cool; quite different from what she had expected. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of this, Nadine found the time to be particularly focused and work-intensive. She went hiking, made sketches, and worked them out later into paintings and illustrations. Her series in the current exhibition is also presented following this structure: from the outside, landscape and environment, moving step by step inward, to the house itself.

The eight pictures from the series are notes in her diary: impressions from two weeks in Umbria. They were created while exploring the woods around the village of Greppolischieto, the former school camp, and the commune.

Nadine plans to apply to Utopiaggia again in the future. For her next stay, she wants to focus her artistic attention on the community: on the networks surrounding the school and the commune, on how people live there, and how their everyday lives are embedded in the Umbrian landscape. She feels that there is still much for her to discover.

@utopiaggia · @xnadineschererx