A LETTER FROM LENA: WELCOMING 2026
Dear Villa Lena Readers,
As we welcome 2026, I personally wanted to look back at my time in 2025 at Villa Lena. Every year is different at our estate—so much so that sometimes it feels like ten lifetimes have passed, and I have been ten different people. Time is a funny concept; sometimes it slows down when I am arranging flowers, and sometimes it speeds by like a bullet train on a work-filled day.
The flowers are my form of meditation – working with them allow me to observe the details, and with every passing minute, I notice more and more. Every flower from our garden has its own character and its own soul—a strange arc of the stem here, a mongrel patch of colour there. This is the luxury of garden-grown flowers – when they develop and bloom according their own internal rhythm, and not the schedule dictated by the industrial canon.
Light streams through the windows in the flower room of our 19th century villa. Whether it is rain or shine, the light at Villa Lena seems to be doubly illuminated, as if it has a shine on the inside, gracing every object with a trembling halo. There is always a softness to it, amplified in the mornings and the evenings, enveloping me like a hot milky bath. As I sift through the flowers and let thoughts and memories run through me.
My husband’s cousin celebrated her birthday at Villa Lena this May. Although we are distant relatives now, our families were bonded by a promise the grandfathers made to each other at the end of the Second World War: that no matter what, our families would always stay close. It was a sizeable gathering, travelling to Villa Lena from all the world, all united at one large shared table—the bonds of a promise proving stronger than the erosion of time.
Time is a concept on everybody’s mind today. We are bombarded with life hacks to manage it better, ironically, taking more of our time. Time was a subject of inquiry for a few artists in residence in 2025, and I recall the echoes of my conversations with them. For Jacob Blomberg, a poet and a philosopher of incredible depth, time was an investigation into value. He found depth in the mundane, asking if the minutes lost to daily maintenance—like the simple act of flossing—are a sacrifice or an investment. Do the minutes sacrificed today represent good value for the time added to your lifespan? Jacob wrote beautiful poetry during his stay at Villa Lena, with his musings on time and value being much more profound than just flossing.
Natasha Malik, a miniaturist painter from Pakistan, reminded me of time through her craft. Time is one of the essentials for her to construct her intricate and surrealist paintings. Nothing is done quickly or easily, including using different kinds of shells as vessels for her paint—an instrument as old as the world itself. As she carefully constructs imagery with brushstrokes so small they dissolve into a sea of colour, time flows around her like an endless spring river. When looking at her paintings, the time spent on them is not only linear but voluminous.
It is fitting to write about time as one year shifts into another. In the end, what defines our life: the number on our calendar, or the moments that create the time? As we gear up to announce our incredible 2026 resident artists and our program at large, I am looking forward to more moments at Villa Lena that create my sense of time and timelessness.
Yours,
Lena
