TERRENO. Tracce del disponibile quotidiano is a multidisciplinary exhibition that relates materiality and memory, bringing together cultural traditions, historical documents and everyday artistic practices, generating new collective imaginaries. The volume brings together a range of images, essays and reprints, offering a unique dialogue between artistic, scientific, and social disciplines. Inspired by Gianni Celati “accessible everyday”, the exhibition takes the visitor on a journey dedicated to the scenes, landscapes, and gestures from the everyday world that often go unnoticed and are rediscovered, grasping their value and revealing new and possible meanings. The rooms of the museum are filled with works of art from the MAXXI Collections, artefacts and photographic documents from the Museum of Civilisations in Rome, editorial materials, design and architectural projects, and a new sound production. This is how fluid and changeable stories and tales are born, joining ordinariness and tradition, historical documentation and invention, in a strong bond with the territory and its artistic and creative community. With: Arjun Appadurai, Franco Assetto, Amedeo Aureli, Yto Barrada, Gianfranco Baruchello and Henry Martin, David Blamey, Diego Carpitella, Luciano Caruso and Giuliano Longone, Cavart, Giorgio Ceretti, Pietro Derossi e Riccardo Rosso, Continuum, Mario Cresci, Enrico Crispolti, Clémentine Deliss, Georges Didi-Huberman, Claudia Durastanti, Francesco De Melis, Formafantasma, Francesco Garnier Valletti, Luigi Ghirri, Ezio Gribaudo, Illustrazione Abruzzese, Tim Ingold, Enzo Mari, Ana Mendieta, Bruno Munari, Ramona Ponzini, Quarto di Santa Giusta Centro Multimediale, Moira Ricci, Annabella Rossi, Bernard Rudofsky, Marco Schiavone, Shimabuku, Alessandra Spranzi, Susan Sontag, Superstudio, Luca Trevisani, Nico Vascellari, Andrea Viliani, Luca Vitone and all the creators of artefacts belonging to the Collections of Popular Arts and Traditions of the Museum of Civilisations. 

HE FAILED TO SAVE THE ONE HE LOVED MOST is not just the title of an exhibition that opened in the spring of 2021 at the Albumarte space in Rome. Rather, it adds another dimension, bringing greater depth to the original idea of the exhibition itself and Iulia Ghiță's artistic journey as a whole. Through the artist's works and the valuable contributions of the authors invited to write, the publication becomes a reflection on complex themes and archetypal concepts such as sacrifice, humiliation and death, exploring their ambiguous nature and creating a reflection on contrasting aspects of the human experience.

Human life on Earth depends on biodiversity and its health. However, this pre-cious variety of life forms has been endangered for too long and is disappearing at an alarming rate. This awareness has gradually prompted me to reconsid. er the use of materials in my artistic practice, opting for natural, plant-based materials. This publication reflects on materiality, awareness of gesture and a sense of care in my artistic pratice. Through an exploration of the organic, of the intelligence contained in craftsmanship, I propose a collaborative and conscious art practice that seeks to connect with the natural world in a respectful and sustainable manner. Inside this publication there are the contributions by Cecilia Canziani, Ana Gonçalves Magalhães and Paola Anziché.

BARRIERA UNINSTITUTE is the aftershow, a critical inventory of materials documenting the seventeen years of activity at BARRIERA, a contemporary art space founded in 2007 in Turin. This publication seeks to engage with the broader debate surrounding the creation of 'institutional' archives within the fluid practices of contemporary art. How can we envision the future by reflecting on the past? And what role do the archive and the act of archiving play for an institution in this process?
The prefix UN in BARRIERA UNINSTITUTE signifies a re-examination of the status of an entity and a space, evoking the concept of a 'para-institution,' 'quasi-institution,' or 'non-institution.' Its purpose is to encourage the organization to continually recalibrate itself around new projects and programming choices, always moving toward more experimental and dialogical forms.
Rather than emphasizing the artwork, the exhibition as a product, or the collection as heritage, the book focuses on so-called 'printed matter'-ephem-eral, carefully crafted materials that have promoted and supported both exhibition and workshop projects. These include exhibition catalogs, invitations, gallery texts, postcards, leaflets, and booklets. Following this predominantly visual, asynchronous, and 'eccentric' documentary section, the book organizes an index with the events, exhibitions, catalogues, and artists who have passed through BARRIERA's space.

For visual poetry, the street represents the natural setting for continuing a guerrilla effort aimed at appropriating the messages of mass communication, modifying them, and returning them to the sender with the goal of dismantling the mechanisms of rapid information consumption that rely on the observer’s passivity. Today’s street has lost its function as a public space, becoming instead an infrastructure for transit and support. In addition to the themes of fast and inattentive consumption, there is also the issue of inaccessibility, both physical and symbolic. The installation Stele Flaminia, created by Lamberto Pignotti and curated by Jonathan Pierini with SS16 Studio for Pesaro Italian Capital of Culture 2024, attempts to generate a moment of surprise, challenging our ability to decode urban, personal, and imaginative languages. Composed of scaffolding pipes and TNT clothes, and positioned in a roundabout—an antithesis to the post station that once served as a space for social and political interaction—it stands as a contemporary stele, at once exceptional and ephemeral, contradictory and ironic.The publication includes three graphic works and a series of critical texts.

Inizio fine. Rotondo. Tutte le cose del mondo (Beginning, End. Round. All Things of the World) is the exhibition that artist Chiara Camoni conceived for the Piano Nobile of Palazzo Collicola on the occasion of the 67th Festival dei Due Mondi. The title, similar to a lullaby or nursey rhyme, anticipates the course of the exhibition, based on circularity, accumulation and reiteration, with the works accompanying the visitor through the rooms in a dreamy and ancestral atmosphere, populated by spirits, divinities, souls, and animals. References to the natural and plant world-a fixed presence in Camoni’s production-meet with the splendour of the rooms of Palazzo Collicola, in an unprecedented dialogue that also features a conspicuous body of works made especially for the exhibition. The Piano Nobile and the artist’s works thus form a special alliance: the relationship with the architectural space is underlined by a long snake made of different materials and media which, ‘crawling’ in all the rooms, marks the path of the exhibition.

This volume on the publications of Ugo La Pietra begins with a long correspondence between the artist and his associates - (Vico Magistretti, Adolfo Natalini, Franco Vaccari, Enzo Mari...) - and aims at making ideas and thoughts circulate by sharing his books. This collection of books constitutes an infinite shelf that goes from 1965 to the present day. From the catan logues of the early radical exhibitions to the 1970s art and design research and experimentation into 'degrees of freedom', 'design reconversions', 'Interior/Exterior' to which we can add 'Tissural Structures'; physical and telematic journeys into the new territories of living. Then there are the volumes that delve into various themes by gathering experiences as well as specific works based on inhabiting places by using random and disruptive actions. A book is in fact not only the best medium for transcribing design and meta-project proposals, but also the starting point for Ugo La Pietra's radical theories and artistic research. The book concludes with his involvement in magazines, perhaps the most experimental and radical aspect of his work that allowed for the development of collaborations, co-designs and the diffusive distribution of counter-projectual and political thought.

Concerto, Roberto Fassone's first solo exhibi-tion in a public museum was created with the idea of retracing the artist's first fifteen years of activity. The exhibition hosts a selection of works-one per room-representative of his singular artistic practice. Like songs that follow one after the other during a concert, the works of Concerto traverse Fassone's entire artistic production, outlining the salient features - as well as the uniqueness-of his poetics, inviting visitors to embrace his ironic, surreal, psychedelic universe.

Popoli di Vetro is an artist's book in the form of a fantastical novella. Here, the writing generates an imaginative world in which glass is the pervasive element the protagonist must deal with.
Tan – also known as Metastasio – moves freely in an abyssal setting, searching for springs and fountains he collects as if they were treasures to be kept. His relationship with water becomes irresistible since, as a child, he accidentally swallowed glass.
In a succession of phantasmagoric visions, changes in material state, blinding mirages, and intermittent darkness, Tan encounters hybrid entities—animals/women/men/animated objects—that form the peoples of glass.
In this book, Cavaliere consolidates his writing practice as an artistic sign. The text is offered as an object for decoding both word and vision; the realm of literature overlaps with that of art, and reading becomes an act of imagination.

The editorial project Master in Photography / Viaggio in Italia–composed of four photographic zines and two posters–gathers the outcomes of the 2021, 2022, and 2023 activities of the Master in Photography at the IUAV University in Venice. Presented in its itinerant and experimental form, the project involved a series of residencies across Italy dedicated to photography, designed and structured in collaboration with guest lecturers to strengthen the relationship with the context and with Italy's social and natural landscape. The Master in Photography proposed a geographical exploration that also became metaphorical, crossing different grounds and distant territories. The group, composed of participants, lecturers and the people they met along the way, forms a context of permanent discussion and growth. The editorial project is a co-edition by Viaindustriae, ICCD, a+mbookstore, lUAV University in Venezia and Master in Photography cultural association. Over the past five years, the ICCD has become a valuable partner for all those involved, by offering access to its photographic archive and, through these publications, identifying a form of permanence – conceptual and concrete – of the experiences. The four published issues are dedicated to four different workshops; in each residency, the instructors presented an initial research theme from which the students developed a personal project. All of the residencies took place through a multi-vocal conversation in collaboration with institutions and realities spread throughout the territory. The four published issues are dedicated to four different workshops; in each residency, the instructors presented an initial research theme from which the students developed a personal project. All of the residencies took place through a multi-vocal conversation in collaboration with institutions and realities spread throughout the territory .Stefano Graziani and Emanuele De Donno curated the residency Roma subalterna, with the aim of investigating the utopia of drafting a guide to the city, drawing on unpublished bibliographies, exo-editorial models, neighbourhood guides of the capital, and adventure diaries. Spettri, the publication dedicated to Villa Manin, with Jacopo Benassi and curated by Saul Marcadent, envisaged a polyphonic collective journey where photography is to be understood as a permeable language in dialogue with performance, sound, and publishing. Filippo Romano’s Paradigma naturale places nature at the centre of the narrative, articulating a taxonomy of stories in images, collected in the freest manner. In the same issue, José Pedro Cortes’ workshop A Future Ruin perhaps most explicitly presents a reflection on time: everything in the images immediately becomes a ruin, a (non-decisive) instant to which one never returns. Senza preavviso, the fanzine dedicated to Gibellina hosts the visual research of Alessandra Spranzi, who has paused to observe, with her delicate gaze, some ordinary aspects of life in an attempt to find her own possible point of observation.

SUPERIMPOSITION is an artistic project by Polisonum that investigates the theme of listening and sonic control. The project is realised through the encounter of multiple disciplinary fields including sound, data analysis, fashion, and visual arts.

SUPERIMPOSITION explores the concept of earworms – those sonic agents that coercively graft themselves onto the brain until they become parasites and provoke mechanisms of cognitive control. Already known at the end of the 19th century, the phenomena were later defined as brainworms by Oliver Sacks. Sound worms are linked to mass culture such as pop music, advertisements, video games and TV theme songs. They also inhabit airports, bars, shops, gyms and shopping centres, and are characterised by sequences of redundant melodies that are difficult to escape. Recognising these mechanisms is complex, due to a weak, if not absent, general education in listening. Based on this research, SUPERIMPOSITION launched a data analysis of more than 10.000 music tracks featured in the popular international charts from 2000 to 2022. This analysis - which is based on the quantity and repetitiveness of the music – has been automated with a specially developed software. Algorithms and data analysis techniques were used to select the most characteristic lyrics. Their mathematically generated superimposition composes the work

SUPERIMPOSITION - a composition in which no melody is recognisable. The work is conceived as a performative act, a fashion show that recalls ancient rituals in which the performers and the audience become a single body on stage. The garments made of sound-absorbing fabrics, which look like sculptural dresses, have been presented in a fashion-show-like choreography. The textile materials, identified with the technical-scientific support of the Politecnico di Torino, are capable of refracting and absorbing sound pressure. These armour suits are designed as empirical protections for the ear and the body. The fashion design of the garments has been developed with the MARIOS brand through shared experimentation and a creative contamination that intends to look from the avant-garde supremacist models to the oriental tradition. The scenic and sound dramaturgy of the performance, which was presented in the Great Hall of the historic Cercle Cit in Luxembourg at the end of April, has also been interpreted in the video work realised through is multi-point direction.

Ring! is an artist album by Francesco Cavaliere and Dick El Demasiado created during A Week From Monday 2023, an artistic residency organized in Umbria by Viaindustriae Publishing and Holydays Festival. The residency involves a week-long research and production phase, in which the artists divide their time between Foligno's industrial zone and the mountain village of Scopoli with the intent of exploring possible points of contact between visual and sonic artistic languages. Ring! is the result of an immersive listening experience, involving the manipulation of field recordings taken during a historically inspired jousting tournament. The artists shared the experience of listening and recording, while further manipulation and production of the tracks was carried out individually.

Francesco Cavaliere opens Il fuso del cavallo infilato nell'anello (20' 5") with a vocal reinterpretation of the Bando di Giostra—a text traditionally read aloud to announce the horse race, typically recited into a microphone by a designated actor on the day of the event, in the complete silence of a crowded stadium. He then focuses on the stark solemnity of the race itself, during which a certain kind of restless silence takes center stage, as the ear tunes in to the essential sounds of the stadium: the horse's gallop, the lances striking or missing the rings. This creates a long sequence of speaking silenceswhere, from time to time, the chatter of the crowd suddenly breaks through.

In Never Be The Saddle (15' 50"), Dick El Demasiado works with editing, repetition, layering, and delay as subtle yet decisive gestures, creating a vaguely unsettling and out-of-the-ordinary sound experience. His interventions are so discreet that one may not immediately notice them—or possibly never notice them at all. Here, the main elements are saturated sounds, such as the amplified voice of the race announcer, the cheers, drums, and trumpets, which are occasionally interrupted by the same speaking silence that we hear in Cavaliere's piece, a defining sonic element of the experience.

It's spelled 'San Sisto', but pronounced 'Sansisto', with its original name being 'Sansoste'. This serves as the acoustic title for a book-diary that collects 'living documents' gathered during research that began by observing the neighbourhood's soundscape, which then expanded into a broader investigation of the area-mapping the local human geography through thirty video interviews with citizens. The outcome is both a documentary film and this publication, where the voices and memories of the residents alternate with texts ranging from fieldwork methodology, to urban identity of public spaces, including the history of the social community, and their sound impressions. Despite its complex challenges, San Sisto feels more like a city within a city, thanks to its library and theatre. However, the neighbourhood aspires to design a new central square, a place where people can gather and move forward together. Given this context, what is the future for a working-class neighbourhood that no longer sees itself as merely a periphery, but envisions itself as a 'neovillage'?

For two hours, the public and passersby are invited to freely join the singing improvisations directed by three choir leaders: Liévine Hubert, Tom Mannaerts and Baptiste Vaes.
In this moment of collective singing, people who do not know each other will share the same tune, creating spontaneous complicity through rehearsals. 
Circles of Songs is a performance by Raffaella Crispino, commissioned by BOZAR Center for Fine Arts Brussels, performed on the 21st of December 2022, as part of Rebirth/Third Paradise by Michelangelo Pistoletto, curated by Alberta Sessa.

This book gather Dino Ignani's Dark Portraits collection, a selection of approximately 200 photographs that are part of a much larger series of shots, mostly portraits, taken over the course of five years, and effectively evoke the spirit of the 1989s in the dynamic city of Rome. Ignani's research is a window on the look of the young adults who animated the clubs of the so-called Dark scene in Rome, a scene that was in fact diverse and multifaceted, presenting a range of unprecedented aesthetic and individual declinations that flowed into other moods and styles of the time.

In late 2022, Helena Hladilová was invited to a research-based residency promoted by Pinacoteca G.A. Lev is and curated by ARTECO and CRIPTA 747, to realise a project that dialogues with the territory of the Susa Valley. Interested in the world of handicrafts, from weaving techniques to stone cutting, Hladilová has approached the traditions of popular folklore and the intangible narratives - through history - hand down legends and mythologies.

Hesitation is a central concept in Bertolo’s work. L'hésitation (15 June – 8 September 2024) is an anthology exhibition of the work of one of the most influential painters of his generation in Italy in two venues, Atelier Maisenthal and CEAAC di Strasbuourg. The exhibition gives an overview of Bertolo's practice through a vast corpus of works from his main series of paintings of the past two decades. The catalogue, with the same title, includes a number of exhibition views, contains an interview and two essays that shed valuable light on the artist's approach to art and on a major work.
On display at CEAAC Strasbuourg and Atelier Meisenthal, the exhibiton has been concieved by GAM Torno and curated by Elena Volpato and Alice Motarduna, director of CEAAC. The project is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (12th edition, 2023).

Quasi-Book is an artist's book by Kolxoz Collective, the last part of the residency project of the same title curated by Mahler & LeWitt Studios and Viaindustriae in 2021. The residency took place in the spaces of Sol LeWitt's studio in Spoleto and was intended as a platform for the dissemination and contextualisation of artistic publishing practices. After iterating as an open studio, a temporary bookshop, a platform for sharing and discussing book-making practices, and a space for convivial moments, the Quasi-Book project has now become an ‘actual’ quasi-book. Its chapters are quasi-chapters, collecting materials according to the predominant characteristics and techniques employed by Kolxoz Collective. For example, their promotion of a communal ‘inter-language’ as a way to facilitate new ways of communication and collective identification (Glossary); the use of the postal service to deliver materials, artworks and drawings to collaborators (Post Bridge); the thermal printing technique used by Kolxoz as a transportable publishing desk (Other Books); and drawing-statements which merge short texts and visual information (Diagrams). These materials are accompanied by an extract from a conversation – posited as a ‘live dictionary’ – between Kolxoz Collective, Viaindustriae, and the Mahler & LeWitt Studios.

Jonathan Monk's first show with Yvon Lambert’s Paris gallery was in 1997 and the artist continued working with him until he closed in 2014. At some point in the early 2000’s Yvon gave Monk a ruler, stamped into the top are the initials SL and he was told that twenty years earlier Sol LeWitt left it behind after installing a show. This 30cm ruler was the starting point for the publication and the edition of 100 ceramic rulers it documents. Jonathan Monk’s rulers aren’t straight, they don’t have any numbers nor lines on them and each one is slightly different to the next. The process used is the one of extrusion, pushing manually the clay through a metal profile made exactly as the original ruler given to the art­ist by Yvon Lambert. Sol LeWitt Rules was produced at the historical ceramic workshop La Gioconda in Deruta, which in the 1980s worked closely with Sol LeWitt for his production of ceramic plates and tiles. This book includes 100 photographs of the 100 rulers made on the occasion of Jonathan Monk’s exhibition SL at the Torre Bonomo in Spoleto. The quicker you flick through it, the faster it moves. 

You can now purchase the Sol LeWitt Rules project bundle, which includes the artist's edition and Jonathan Monk's artist's book.

A new series of sculptures by Jonathan Monk titled Sol LeWitt Rules (ceramic, approx. 30 x 3 x 1.5 cm, 2024), produced by Fabio Veschini at the ceramic workshop La Gioconda in Deruta which worked closely with Sol LeWitt on the production of ceramic plates and tiles. Monk created the edition as part of his residency at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios and subsequent exhibition ‘SL’ in the Torre Bonomo for the Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi 67, curated by Vittoria Bonifati. The exhibition explored the direct and indirect connections between the work of Monk and LeWitt (see installation photographs of the rulers in ‘SL’ below and the related exhibition page here).

Together with the rulers' edition, the artist has produced an artist's book of the same title, published by Viaindustriae, which can also be purchased individually at the following link: https://viaindustriae.it/books/sol-lewitt-rules

If interested in the artist's edition only, please contact: info@mahler-lewitt.org. Sol LeWitt Rules is an edition of 100 and has been generously donated to the Mahler & LeWitt Studios by the artist. All proceeds support our programs. Each ruler is available for a donation of 120euros, plus postage and packaging. To donate and receive an edition, please email info@mahler-lewitt.org with your postal address and you will be sent a unique donation link.

We tend to consider childhood as a golden age, a period of life that we should look back on with nostalgia, as a carefree and joyful time. Infinita infanzia (Infinite childhood) offers a reading that goes beyond this cliché. underlining the complexity of childhood, and its confusion of discovery and trauma, play and disobedience, lightness of heart and anxiety. Through a succession of rooms, the works of twenty-three artists address some of the key aspects of childhood: these different voices are held together by a theme that does not refer to any historical time, but that crosses all eras and sensitivities.

Back in 2017, the research team composed of Luca Trevisani, Mario Ciaramitaro and Giulia Morucchio exposed themselves to hundreds of artworks in search of examples of works capable of creating tension, a centrifugal force for anyone who might encounter them without any introduction or notice. Works that reach out to someone, seek attention, set a trap for someone. This approach, conceived by Luca Trevisani, became a collective studio practice of learning and teaching, open to wild and unexpected suggestions and ideas revolving around the possibility of finding these tensions, this gravitational field. Luca Trevisani and Mario Ciaramitaro printed, composed, and photographed this illustrated itinerary on the wall, unfolding the cartography of these remote and powerful encounters on the perimeter of our Iuav classrooms. All that remained was to photograph this map, reprint it, lay it out, and then offer this flow of lively and rebellious images. The process originated from the images that have been collectively sought for several months. While Mario and the students engaged in their role-playing as iconauts, with Giulia Morucchio, persisted in collecting and reworking texts, captions, and overheard legends, always mindful that every beautiful story holds an element of truth. What you read below are the traces, the details, and some of the clues that comprise our collection of fresh fossils and the salad we crafted from them.

Caretto/Spagna are precursors of ecologically engaged artistic practices. They see art as a radical experience of openness, undisciplinated research and involvement with the “things” of the world: the earth, seeds, people, stones, the museum, the river, the quarry, the tree, micro-organisms. Bright Ecologies traces and documents twenty years of their work, structured in research involving care, the transformation of matter, and experiments with form, through practices based on encounter, process, parcticipation and co-authorship.