Metamorphoses
The first Send00ks residency, and a call to writers
I want to speak of bodies changed into new forms.
Rising from a rock spur above the Turano Valley, the castle of Rocca Sinibalda, formed like a scorpion or an eagle, depending on who is looking, begins a new transformation. Over two weeks this June, six artists are invited to reinterpret Ovid’s Metamorphoses as Sendb00ks hosts its first residency.
Written in 8 AD and never fully finished, Ovid was exiled by Augustus before he could revise Metamorphoses. Legend holds that he threw the manuscript into the fire in despair, copies surviving only because readers had already memorised it. The Metamorphoses remains one of the most widely discussed, interrogated, and translated poems in history. It is a cacophony of myths from the ancient world, each running like a heavy current into the next, more than two hundred and fifty stories tumbling across fifteen books without pause or resolution. Its influence is everywhere: in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, in Titian’s mythological paintings, in Rilke, in Ted Hughes, in the leaky black ink of Marlene Dumas’ open-mouthed Daphne, her body becoming bark and branch.
Ana Mendieta ‘Birth’, 1981, Copyright The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC Courtesy The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, Galerie Lelong, New York and Alison Jacques Gallery, London
Marlene Dumas, Venus & Adonis drawings (2015-16)
It’s incredible scope opens with the chaos of the cosmos creation and ends in Ovid’s own Rome also covers the microcosm of human psychology and desire. The eros of the ancient world is, as Anne Carson interrogates in so much of her writing, brutal. Nothing about it is safe of fixed. Violence strikes from the riverbank where Daphne wanders, Apollo’s pursuit ends as Daphne’s feet begin to sumberge into mud, her last words swallowed as bark crawls up her neck, Apollo feels her heart beating within the tree and threatens to love her still, the nympth Io tries to speak but her voice is no longer human, only an animal heaving; she traces her name in the dust with a hoof. The Heliades mourn their dead brother Phaethon so long and so completely that they take root, their tears crystallising into amber as they drip into the river Eridanus, their bodies becoming poplar trees. All things are transformed and broken by the gods, the great ruler! Everything is in perpetual motion, and nothing is ever quite as it seems.
We are, as Anne Carson argues in Putting Her in Her Place: Women, Dirt, and Desire, condemned and compelled to read these texts for what they are aware of their violence played out on the bodies of women, knowing the culture they have shaped, because it is precisely by knowing the foundations of that culture that we can critique them.
It is also, perhaps, this shapeshifting that allows the tales to sing and shock across centuries, each myth remaking itself in its reader. The castle of Rocca Sinibalda is a site for transformation in its essence. The only zoomorphic castle in Europe, it takes the form of a scorpion for some and an eagle for others; seen from the air, the building traces the outline of a creature mid-motion, permanent and restless at once. Originally built in 1062 and redesigned in 1532–1536 by the leading Renaissance architect Baldassarre Peruzzi, it was restored between 2006 and 2014 under the direction of Claudio Silvestrin, the minimalist architect whose practice has shaped spaces for Armani, Calvin Klein, and Anish Kapoor, under a guiding principle he calls the minimalness of the ‘I’: an invisible intervention, the castle appearing at first glance entirely untouched, yet every space reimagined with radical intention.
The frescoes of the piano nobile, attributed to Girolamo Muziano, draw directly from the Metamorphoses: Narcissus transfixed beside a pool, Persephone drawn into darkness, Perseus mid-flight through legend.
In the 1950s, the castle became home to Caresse Crosby, inventor of the modern bra, co-founder of the Black Sun Press, and one of the most remarkable literary patrons of the twentieth century. With her husband Harry Crosby she founded the press in Paris in 1927, initially as an act of romance: a vehicle for publishing their poetry to each other. The Black Sun Press published D.H. Lawrence when he was considered obscene, James Joyce with illustrations by Brâncuși, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Kay Boyle. The books were made and shared as objects as much as texts, limited, numbered editions produced with obsessive attention to paper, typeface, and form, built on the belief that the physical shape of a book is inseparable from its meaning. When Harry was found dead in a New York hotel room in 1929, Caresse expanded the press, adding Hemingway, Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, and made the then-radical decision to move into paperbacks, a format then considered a degraded form. She had designed a pool-gazing Narcissus for the title page of her very first imprint. Years later, she found herself standing in the Hall of Metamorphoses at Rocca Sinibalda, looking at Narcissus painted beside a pool. Whether by chance or fate, the stories keep finding each other.
Ovid’s popularity has always surged at thresholds and crossings. During the summer solstice of 2026, the longest day and turning point of the year, Sendb00ks invites six artists to live and work inside the castle: to respond to the Metamorphoses through their own practices, and to produce new works as detachable book sleeves. Tali Lennox, Anousha Payne, Okiki Akinfe, Mathilde Albouy, Ines di Folco Jemni, and Jan Melka will inhabit the castle, and the story will unfold anew.
Beyond the six commissioned book sleeves, we are accepting proposals from writers, photographers, and artists who wish to make work in response to Metamorphoses, whether from a distance or in situ during the residency period.
As this is the first in our series of residencys we are writing the blueprint for how this will work in the years to come.
Please send your submissions to the prompt of Metamorphosis to residency@sendb00ks.com and become a paid subscriber so that we can invite you to the video calls during the residency.
More soon,
Sendb00ks