Tiepido Cool collects Davide D’Elia’s artistic research of the last fifteen years through images that follows the poetic criterion introduced by the title. The two words, Tiepido, Italian, and Cool, English, guide the succession of works in a path that privileges perceptual rather than chronological-biographical experience. Perceived by the artist as antithetical, London and Rome become the two ends of a discourse that converges at a point of balance, highlighting the duality on which his work hinges, both belonging to art and communication. Trained as a visual designer and moved to London in the early 2000s as a creative, here D’Elia began to focus on the themes of an aesthetic investigation that, upon his return to Rome in 2011, became fully conscious. The artist’s two souls complement each other by permeating “warm” works of an organic nature and “cold” works dominated by the use of iris blue antifouling paint; between the two extremes a cycle of “cool” works in which the lexicon of the buoy translates this necessary coexistence between dichotomies.
Two texts, by Elisa Del Prete and Mike Watson, antithetical in latitude, training and style, trace the guidelines for a never exhaustive reading of D’Elia’s work.

Tiepido Cool  is supported by Italian Council (X edizione, 2021), project of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture for the production, knowledge and dissemination of creation contemporary Italian in the field of visual arts; coordinated and produced by Nosadella.due, curated by Elisa Del Prete and Silvia Litardi (NOS Visual Arts Production), in collaboration with Viaindustriae publishing and <rotor> Center for Contemporary Art (Graz), cultural partners: Musei Civici d’Arte Antica | Settore Musei Civici Bologna (Museo Davia Bargellini, Bologna); MAXXI, Museo delle Arti del XXI Secolo (Roma); Myymälä2 Gallery (Helsinki); Centre for Poetic Innovation, Universities of Dundee and St Andrews (St Andrews); Cultural Center GRAD (Belgrado).

I maestri serie oro è un’opera di Flavio Favelli composta dai 278 fascicoli monografici della serie “I Maestri del Colore” della Fratelli Fabbri Editori, uscita in edicola tra il 1963 e il 1967, fenomeno culturale di prima grandezza che rivoluzionò il mercato editoriale negli anni del boom economico. Favelli ha lavorato su ciascuna delle iconiche copertine, interagendo con la loro eleganza formale, con il loro equilibrio tra grafica e taglio fotografico dei particolari pittorici. Ha utilizzato una o più cartine dorate dei Ferrero Rocher per occultare i volti dei ritratti, le scene aneddotiche, le porzioni di quadri, affreschi e mosaici dove campeggia la figura umana. Favelli riporta le riproduzioni delle grandi opere d’arte ad uno stato di impenetrabilità, quasi di chiusa sacralità: è un gesto che mescola la cura all’iconoclastia, quasi fosse necessaria una nuova ricarica del senso per delle immagini forse troppo note, persino troppo ammiccanti nella loro conquistata emblematicità. Il libro è il catalogo della mostra dal medesimo titolo presso la GAM di Torino nel 2022. L’opera è vincitrice del dell’avviso pubblico PAC2020, promosso dalla DGCC del Minsitero della Cultura.

1 is an artist’s manual by Mattia Pajè containing a series of instructions for the use of paranormal techniques, related to healing and personal development – experienced by Pajè in the course of his research – which in the book are blended with notes and poetic compositions. These are accompanied by illustrations and graphic  sketches that reinterpret the contents of pseudoscientific manuals and independent blogs. The book collects six texts by different authors writing about the idea of truth, addressing the topic from the different angles. Texts by Flavia Monceri, political philosopher; Stella Succi, art historian; Giovanni Rendina, art curator; Bruno Paura, plant ecologist; Mariagrazie Ciaccia, counsellor and Hatha Yoga teacher; Simone Romagnoli, pedagogist and computer scientist; Settimo Catalano, psychotherapist. Editorial project made with the support of Fondazione del Monte, in collaboration with Art City Bologna, MamBo, Arte Fiera, Associazione BOCA e Gelateria sogni di ghiaccio. Book curated and coordinated by Giovanni Rendina. Graphic design by Marco Casella. 

“Oggi l’evidenza è tutto ciò che non siamo più in grado di osservare. È tutto ciò che è minimo, silenzioso, discreto. Tale è questo diario per immagini, un lavoro incessante di perlustrazione, un segno, una frase, una traccia, un momento di ordinaria quotidianità, una strada anonima, un paesaggio desolato, un volto, un punto, una riflessione, forme che ricordano altro, che ricostruiscono altro. […] Creare un museo immaginario di ciò che è evidente vuol dire proprio il contrario, ossia valorizzare ciò che non lo è. Uno strumento musicale che non suona: un ciclo di sculture di alcuni anni fa di Lacchini ci ha fatto comprendere la sua propensione a una dimensione altra, in cui la forma deve muoversi con disinvolta complicità con l’intuizione e, soprattutto, con la riflessione. La sua produzione editoriale, sempre più curata e intensa, è piena di sguardi verso un altrove che nel museo dell’evidenza ritroveremo tutti: sarà un luogo immaginario in cui finalmente fermarci a guardare, dando spazio a ciò che abbiamo sempre ignorato, confrontandoci su ciò che è poco visibile, rispettando tutto quel che è solo apparantemente irrilevante” Lorenzo Madaro

Substance with a mysterious fascination, which seems to belong to an eternal time, snow has always been a lure for explorers, scientists, and artists; an everchanging matter and at the same time solid memory of the world. Drawing on the magnetism that this element exercises on the humansoul, the artist Laura Pugno with the video installation Over Time explores the tensions and the reasons for this natural connection; the need to live, study and create snow in the time of climate emergencies.

A tree, specifically a plane tree, is the subject portrayed by the artist careless of repetition and, at the same time, of the variety used to transform it in a pictorial surface. This tree is the anonymous protagonist: that’s why “untitled2. In fact, the plane trees are horizon friends that Eusepi used to observe and study from the window of his “house-atelier” in his everyday life in Anzio. Those trees have been a constant, monotonous presence and passive interlocutors for a pictorial pretext. Eusepi considers reality and natural subjects as pictorial occasions, visual pretexts to test the grip of color on the canvas as if it were “skin”.

Exercises on Ezra is an artist’s book by Enzo Cucchi conceived around a series of portraits of Ezra Pound made by the artist, and around the diptych senza titolo (Pound), an anti-memoir work on the poet which is the main piece of the exhibition Antifragile at Colli Independent Art Gallery, Rome. The book is a collection of drawings, fragments, and annotations around Pound’s portraits, also entering into relation with the text Il Grano, written by Giuseppe Cucchi and Brunella Antomarini. The text unfolds fragmentarily, reconstituting itself at the end of the volume offering the possibility of an organic reading full of references to the individual pages, in a continuous relationship with the visual elements.

Ubi Consistam is a project by Laura Agnusdei composed of five acousmatic pieces resulting from the auditory exploration of five locations in Bologna. Each piece is devised to be listened to with headphones in the place where its sound material has been recorded. This idea was born in the winter of 2020, when due to the closure of music venues, as musicians we were forced to reimagine ourselves in new contexts, enacting new listening dynamics. I decided then to explore Bologna, my city, searching for special sound landscapes and / or particular architectures and to enact them using sometimes my saxophone and sometimes inviting other musicians to take part in my experiment: Stefano Pilia on the double bass, Enrico Malatesta on percussions, Flavio Zanuttini on the trumpet and Giacomo Bertocchi on the clarinet.

La discoteca is a project by Jacopo Miliani comprising of a movie, a neon-light sculpture and a publication. Through an aesthetic marked by numerous cultural references and surreal visions, the artist proposes an open narrative in constant dialogue with the viewer on topics such as the construction of identity, the sphere of sexuality, queerness, gender fluidity and the relationship between personal choices and those imposed by society.  The aim of the publishing project is to share a collection of fragments that make up the personal research conducted by Jacopo Miliani in parallel with the shooting of the film. The book is split into various sections, aiming to highlight how discos can be interpreted as contexts of contamination, transformationism, love relationships as well as gestures with strong political and social potential, capable of providing an interpretation of the present and a perspective on the future. Contributions by Jacopo Miliani (artist); Elisa Del Prete (curator of NOS); Mariuccia Casadio, (Art Consultant for Vogue Italia and expert in issues concerning culture and style); Luca Locati Luciani (essayist), and an original conversation with Eva Robin’s. La discoteca is the winning project of the eighth edition of Italian Council, the programme to promote contemporary Italian art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture (MiC). Coordinated and produced by the cultural association Nosadella.due with the curation of Elisa Del Prete and Silvia Litardi of the curatorial partnership NOS Visual Arts Production, the project originates in collaboration with APS Arcigay Il Cassero / Gender Bender Festival; Bottega Bologna; If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution; Run by a group / Openspace, and will become part of the museum collection of the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato.

A Week from Monday is a publication with a CD that gathers together the sonic and visual results of the residency – with the same title – organized by Viaindustriae and Holydays in Scopoli (Italy, PG) in September 2020. It is a diary of the seven days spent with visual artists Giacomo Infantino and Francesca Ruberto and musicians Laura Agnusdei, Matteo Pennesi, Luca Sguera between sound investigation, visual research, and exploration of the landscape. The seven days of the residency are mirrored in the seven tracks on the CD, as well as the seven ‘chapters’ of the diary. But this cadence of seven should not be taken too literally; indeed the contents are composed of texts fragments which should serve to evoke rather than describe, combined with photos, scans from documentation produced during the residency (technical notes, shopping lists, menus) in a collage intended to suggest and create connections not evident at first glance.

Ab ovo is the trace of a research on decorative patterns that artist Adelaide Cioni have been conducting for over a year. The images are scans of large drawings on cotton gauze which she made during a residency at the Mahler & Lewitt studios in Spoleto, and they refer to some patterns found on prehistoric vases. These excerpts of gauze, here reconfigured as fragments, hint at the potential infinity which is the implicit dimension of every decorative pattern. With the support of Mahler & Lewitt studios, Spoleto and P420, Bologna. 

Helicotrema is a non-profit festival curated by Blauer Hase and Giulia Morucchio. Started in 2012, it presents a program of recorded audio pieces, with the aim of investigating the possibilities of an environment and a form of collective listening, as happened in the first decades of radio broadcasting. The festival is structured in a series of listening sessions, in which the audience is invited to immerse themselves in listening to compositions by international authors. Over the years the festival has been hosted in very different places, always investigating how audio works, space and audience can merge together. The book is designed as a retrospective manual/manifesto, an extended reading of playing with sound, narratives, authors, spaces, public, and listening dramaturgy. Helicotrema commissioned Marcos Lutyens a new sound work to be featured in a Flexi disc as part of the publication.

La Lince D’Ombra è un racconto di ispirazione mitologica e cavalleresca, con elementi contemporanei e surreali, tipici dei racconti di Vallo di Nera, le cosiddette villanate. Una favola che si ancora alle credenze e alle passioni del territorio, le sue conformazioni geologiche e religiose. Libro d’artista di Francesco Cavaliere, stampato in 100 copie, realizzato in occasione della seconda edizione di Una Boccata d’Arte, curato da Threes productions. Una Boccata d’Arta è un progetto promosso da Fondazione Elpis, in collaborazione con Galleria Continua e con la partecipazione di Threes Productions.

Libro d’artista dove si alterna l’uso di fotografia e disegno. “L’idea è appunto quella di una ricerca di avvicinamento al senso profondo che si svela nella pratica del disegno e della fotografia, nel suo rapporto con l’inconscio, diciamo con la ricerca di sé e del Sé. Lacchini non usa solo il disegno e la fotografia, usa anche molti altri media, la scultur ae la musica all’occasione, ma il disegno e la fotografia sono la parte di questa ricerca più vicina al sé. Lacchini li pratica in senso diaristico proprio per mettere in gioco tale vicinanza: dentro di essi ci sono le tracce della sua vita, di nuovo non in senso documentario ma in quello della ripresa e rielaborazione.” Elio Grazioli

What is an artist’s book made of a series of affirmations and negations that incessantly alternate in a repetitive and estranged rhythm. The book questions the nature of books as a physical object, as a vehicle of communication between who writes and who reads, as an instrument for investigating the mechanisms of thought and reality. What is the ghost which is left when the idea of truth itself comes into question. 

Abitata pietra è il progetto editoriale di Antonio Cammareri, Stefania D’Amato e Luogo Comune nell’ambito della residenza itinerante Un atlante del paesaggio rupestre svoltasi tra Matera, Montescaglioso e Mottola. Il libro è frutto di un’intensa ricerca visuale e di sperimentazione narrativa realizzata collettivamente dagli artisti e che ospita contributi
fotografici di cinque autori; una riflessione sul paesaggio raccontata attraverso le immagini. Un insieme di stratificazioni visive e di senso sull’abitare, sul rupestre e sulle comunità.

The book shows the Lombard landscape through the gaze of the saints in votive niches, with a selection of about 1000 images collected on the occasion of the photography project Between heaven and earth by artist Claudio Beorchia for the Museum of Contemporary Photography of Cinisello Balsamo. The publication takes inspiration from classic editions such as the missal, Italian Touring Club guide, the dictionary, collecting in 700 pages thousands of images including full-color printed photographs and black and white miniatures, as well as a general index that shows the data of the 2911 niches photographed. The first section of the book collects more than 200 photographs and shows what the saints see from their positions in a subjective way, thanks to the shape of the image traced exactly on the shape of the niche from which the figure is protruding towards the surrounding environment. A selection of about 800 black and white miniatures, which directly relate the images of the saints and their gaze, is ordered through ten taxonomies. Texts by: Giovanna Calvenzi, Claudio Beorchia, Matteo Balduzzi, Don Umberto Bordoni, Paolo Bossi.

Alla ricerca del tempo perso is the firth Imagonirmia Notebook. It is a book-game which guides the reader through Astrusis’ fantastic world. Astrusis is an artisan-researcher from Melandra Sud who, in her short but intense career, reached incredible goals as well as incredible failures. Grazie (perdere tempo) is a journey through time and space. It is a journey through a book. It is an urban tour. It is a stretching of the senses and of the mind which only occasionally encounters directions to indicate a landing place, which can be continuously reached and lost again. It is – above all – an invitation to waste our time and to walk in circles.

Artist’s book by Pesce Khete which is also the catalogue of his exhibition Sinossi (bon voyage) at Colli Independent, Rome. Looking at art catalogues and painting catlogues to identify how to catalogue paintings. This book is a descriptive tool of the matter of painting, where “data sheets” support images, using codes. This book is concieved to investigate the work of an artist through poetic-technical parameters, partly inspired to artistic historiography.

The book collects texts that transversally narrates the work of artist Paola Anziché – dealing with themes, techniques, materials – and images. The waving, the natural fibers, the act of weaving, the raw materials, the entanglements are main characters of her work. “In my artistic practice I make soft, tactile sculptures starting from a process of research in which I investigate the possibility of art to establish relationships with different cultural spheres, such as folklore, ancient rituals, bio-architecture, or the most advanced science. My curiosity leads me to travel extensively and come into contact with different traditions that are then reinterpreted, case by case, through a totally personal method of reinvention. Handiwork, gesture, the focus on the materials utilized (with a particular preference for natural ones), represent the fulcrum of my practice, generating works that invite the viewer to experience their form.” Paola Anziché.

A book of images that alternates photography and drawing. “What follows is a sequence, at this point I would say no longer linear as it appears from my description so far, of this research, intertwined between linguistic aspect, sign and personal, artistic and existential and social aspect. Lacchini puts into play all that he feels without contradictions, unconscious and rationality, inside and out, tragedy and joke, intensity and loss, photographic reality and indecipherable drawing.” Elio Grazioli.

Artist’s book in which losing lottery ticket, collected by the artist in the tobacco shop, play as the basis for the composition of short poems inspired by the interpretation of numbers in the Neopolitan Smorfia.

Translation of The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges through progressive passages among the 104 languages encoded by Google online translation service, starting from the first Italian translation by Franco Lucentini for Einaudi, published in the series directed by Elio Vittorini I gettoni, to return to the Italian language again.

NpBsL is the #000 issue of Orchestra Futuro. Building on a reading of ’60s and 70’s conceptual art as methodology, NpBsL is the 11th of a series of homages and reworks of LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969), started by John Baldessarri’s 1972 clumsy musical rendition. Among others, Mario Gaecia Torres’ mute karaoke video and Toom Tragel’s transcription have contributed to the construction of NpBsL’s perspective. NpBsL is a musical arrangement commissioned to Marcello Enea Newman by Federico Antonini. It was performed for the first time on the Steinway grand piano at Casa Mahler, during the public programme of the Artist’s Books Residency organised by Mahler & Lewitt Studios and Viaindustriae in Spoleto (PG), September 2018.