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.

Basilisco/Basilisk/Василиск (or how to run on water) is an investigation into the potential of a human’s ability to run on water, developed on Biryuchyi Island (Ukraine), Turin and Rome between 2017 and 2019. To achieve this seemingly impossible goal, the project faced a series of trials and difficulties, each one providing valuable results for further stages, in an attempt to execute an apparently impossible act.

Produced in the occasion of the exhibition With the Eyes of the Earth, at COLLI independent art gallery, Rome. 49 years ago Robert Smithson made his first earthwork Asphalt Rundown in October 1969 in an abandoned quarry near Rome with Galleria L’Attico. This publication brings together rare and previously unpublished material from the Archivio Claudio Abate  and Fabio Sargentini (Galleria L’Attico) documenting the iconic flow and the exhibition Smithson realized inside Galleria L’Attico, as well as sculptures and video works from Markus Karstiess who made a dig for the remains of the asphalt in 2014.

The Sound of Normalisation is a collection of audio recordings documenting the sound culture of the ultras group Brescia 1911 in relation to modern football and the wave of repressive measures targeted at organised supporters groups. The recordings were made over a period of fifteen years and cover: 1) the creation, uses and meanings of the chants 2) group principles and collective identity 3) audience participation and the process of social exclusion from the stadium 4) police repression and the political implications of the chants 5) the evolution of drumming in the stadium in relation to the drums ban-order of 2007. Each recording comes with a short introductory text and is presented here as a video with subtitles.

The Map is not the Territory (Montedellarte) is an artist’s book, a video and an installation visualizing the artistic result and process of Montedellarte.
People sometimes confuse the representation of reality with reality itself. The mapping of a territory, therefore, does not constitute the actual territory. Despite our best efforts to control the world around us, we often fail. Perception does not always coincide with reality.
On 1 October 2017, Belgian Artist Griet Dobbels produced the art happening Montedellarte on M Cucco in Biella. A group of hikers drew a physical map in the landscape by walking along a contour line. People from all over the world could watch and participate in the hike via the project website and app.
The artist’s book, takes the form of a layered geographical map. Each layer on the map corresponds to a different aspect of the process behind the project and is an attempt to control the chaos through intensive mapping.
The installation consists of two lightboxes and is conceived as a 3D-presentation of the artist’s book.

Catalogue of the exhibition Ugo La Pietra. Istruzioni per abitare la città 1966-2018, CIAC, Foligno, 24th march – 30th september 2018, curated by Italo Tomassoni, Giacinto di Pietrantonio, Giancarlo Partenzi. Twelve research areas are preceded for their understanding by “Instructions” that offer the key to reading the works. The route unfolds through a hundred two-dimensional works, video pieces, three-dimensional objects and an installation. At the center there is an “Open House”, a full-scale structure with a series of furnishings created through the practice that the author defines as “design reconversion”: some elements of urban furniture are reconverted into domestic furnishing elements.

Sportification is a stunt book, a performative publication composed of euro-texts, a living inventory of 400 performances and 250 playgrounds staged between 1965 and 1999 in several European cities, during the course of the TV game show Jeux Sans Frontières. The authors have used an artistic approach to test different playing fields with ludic actions. The results of a long term research are organized in three sections: Eurovisions, Performativity and Playgrounds. This unusual comparative system sets new grounds for an inter-media definition of European performance in which performances, happenings and art based game-actions interact with televised sub-pop culture.

Lonely is a guide book to Ponte delle Torri (Towers Bridge), which is one of the favourite destinations for travellers, artists and suicides. It is a small publication of extreme explorations, on the border between travel literature, fiction and crime dossier. This is a publication along the lines of the touristic guide ‘Lonely Planet’ which deals with the concept of travelling and its historical, artistic and sociological context, in a transversal way. Several themes are included and debated: timing of fall, jump, damages, history, environment, hotels and restaurants for the last meal, art and a wide section dedicated to other places connected to suicide in Italy and across the border. In this way, instead of pushing the tourist toward the act of committing suicide, this guide tries to bore him and to ‘spoil the party’.

Michel Butor. L’univers géopoétique, rassemble les souvenirs de deux projets, Entre littérature et art, le paysage véritable et Michel Butor. L’opera giardino, à l’occasion desquels l’Auteur francais a été invité en italie en 2012 et en 2016. Les texts contenus dans ce livre composent, entre écriture et oralité, un récital à plusieurs voix qui oscille entra experimentum linguae et experimentum vocis, entre l’écriture et la lecture. Les acteurs d’un tel mécanisme de la parole sont à la fois les mots de Michel Butor, ceux de Mireille Calle-Gruber et de Paolo Fabbri avec la préface de Isabella Bordoni.

The book I Will Work For You For One Hour, But Someone Else Should Pay For It is an artist’s catalog that documents the homonymous exhibition-artistic project that took place in a Turin apartment in conjunction with the contemporary art fair Artissima 2015.
The volume consists of four primary sections: the exchange of “instructions” among the artists to think-produce-set up the works, the essays that analyze the project but above all the general theme “labour and art” and the artist in the position of worker, the exhibition with the illustrated works and the appendix with anastatic images of historical documents of the artistic “syndicalism” (Artists Union, Art Workers’ Coalition etc). The texts, therefore, are both the original ones dedicated to the exhibition and those extracted and selected from critical “historical” writings that deepen the theme of work and the project developed in the network in international contemporary artistic practice. “I will work” deals with a subject that is not very much investigated in current publishing and constitutes both a descriptive catalog of an exhibition / artistic operation and an autonomous essay that is well illustrated on the topic

The volume, an annotated catalogue of all the artist’s editions and multiples from 1967 to the present day, is edited by Maurizio Nannucci and published by Viaindustriae with Colli publishing platform. Nannucci’s editions and multiples, which occupy a central and constant place in his work, are catalogued within the framework of this wide-ranging and prolific publication, involving leading museums, researchers and numerous international artists. The catalogue raisonné of Maurizio Nannucci Editions is organised into sections (multiples, photographs/prints/posters, catalogues, editions, artist’s books, audiovisuals, ephemera contributions) and contains chronological descriptions of his works from 1967 to the present day. Alongside these is an anthology of texts by Carlo Belloli, Christophe Cherix, Stefano Chiodi, Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Gabriele Detterer, Mario Diacono, Maurizio Nannucci, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pier Luigi Tazzi and Tommaso Trini. The corpus of more than three hundred editions, including artist’s books, multiples, discs, manifestos, prints, photos, ephemera and audiovisuals, documents various moments in Nannucci’s extraordinary oeuvre, which has few parallels in the panorama of international contemporary art. This plurality of media bears witness to his interdisciplinary artistic practice, which overcomes the separations and hierarchies existing between the various forms.

Halfway between an artist’s book and essays anthology, Del lancio is the result of research conducted by an artist and a curator. The design of the exhibition The Pitcher (2015, Colli independent art gallery, Rome), during which the book was published, required the intervention of numerous experts: these, if in some cases contributed to the material production of the works, in others they have made sure that the main theme of the exhibition could be launched far beyond the circumscribed minds of the artist and the curator. This strange hybrid, half a work of art and half scientific publication, arises, therefore, from a need for sharing: a necessity that, in practice, has translated into volume, has taken the shape of the printed paper, refusing, nevertheless, to offer itself as a catalog.