Launched on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death, the project is the result of a profound analysis and reflection that involved various experts and scholars as well as photography experts from the ICCD and looks at the world of the Poet in a completely new way: it focuses on the objects, landscapes and other natural elements that Dante Alighieri deals with in his major works. The luminous and photographic narrative comes to life through a meticulous reconstruction of images and optical illusions from the three Canticles, with the aid of early analogue photographic processes. The works on display have become part of the contemporary photography collections of the ICCD and are enclosed in a volume named after the exhibition, published by Viaindustriae Publishing, which is the result of extensive research into typographic printing materials and techniques. The project was supported by the National Committee for the celebrations of the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death. The photographs of the animals were realised thanks to the collaboration of the Civic Museum of Zoology in Rome.

Il Grillo Minerva is a story about an unknown city. A city built from animal stones. Two brothers, on a break from a long journey, somehow discover its existence. Artist's book by Francesco Cavaliere, printed in 100 copies

Ginestra Finenstra is the imaginary newspaper of the town of Gestri; a town of invention in which Cavaliere is setting part of his latest works. In this first issue: the arrival of Volta di Lame di Lune in the villages of the town, the bell ringer and an exclusive article on Gennarino Speri, the man who managed to enter the town's main tower.

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 2021. It is a diary of the seven days spent with visual artists Davide Barbini and musicians ksara, Vincenzo Marando, Steve Pepe 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. The theme of the project stems from its title, A Week from Monday, loosely quoting the title of John Cage’s A Year from Monday. Lectures & Writings, 1967, a theoretical work mixing reflections on working methods, compositional suggestions, social criticism, sound, music and philosophy. Central to the work that emerged was an investigation into song and voice. Davide Barbini’s work, is a video-diary accompanied by a series of drawings.

The editorial project Caro Campo. Workbook stems from the artistic project Campo: a human, artistic and environmental experience lived by Alberonero from 2019 to 2021 in Campogalliano (near Modena, Italy), in symbiosis with a field of 290 poplars until they were cut down. During “Campo” project, daily immersed in the field of poplars, Alberonero has accompanied its natural changes by transforming the field’s portions through the creation of 20 temporary artworks. The book evokes the portable proportions of the “field notebooks”, the resistant books capable of listing the “trans-actions”, the movements meant both as a “poetic” experience and as a work diary.
“Caro Campo. Workbook” is produced by STUDIO STUDIO STUDIO, published by Viaindustriae and supported by the Italian Council (11th edition, 2022), the program aimed at supporting Italian contemporary art in the world promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity within the Italian Ministry of Culture. Cultural Partners: Arte Sella – The Contemporary Mountain, Borgo Valsugana (TN), Italy; Associação Anda&Fala, Azores Island, Portugal; Domaine de Boisbuchet, Lessac, France; CENTRO DE INVESTIGACIÓN ARTE Y ENTORNO, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain; University of Balamand, Tripoli, Lebanon; Taller Chullima, La Habana, Cuba.

Pila Thinkerwiller is a work composed of two metal plates, one copper and one zinc, placed at the north and south ends of the village of Toscolano. These two elements are placed at the north and south cardinal points to imagine the village as a large stack, the positive pole of which is the copper plate and the negative pole is the zinc plate. Both were engraved from the artist's drawings. The copper plate depicts the ideas and wishes of the inhabitants with respect to their village, collected by Pajè during his stay. The zinc plate, on the other hand, shows geometric shapes, numbers, and diagrams derived from the artist's research into spiritual, magical, and pseudoscientific theories. This investigation interests the artist both aesthetically and speculatively. Indeed, the theories he has studied have given rise to a series of graphic elements that, according to Pajè, have potential formal value, usable as a veritable visual alphabet. They also bring to light central themes in contemporary times, such as the construction of official discourse on truth and the different and unusual forms of encoding reality, time and history. The use of copper and zinc alludes to the first static electricity generators invented in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by Alessandro Volta and John F. Daniell. Another reference is the initiatory techniques of a small mountain community in the Caucasus, recorded in a 1955 manuscript by S. C. Walewski, for whom copper and zinc are the basis for the construction of analog devices that generate a microcurrent in the human body, useful for rebalancing vital energies and amplifying the intentions of the user. Pila Thinkerwiller reworks this technique, poetically transferring its supposed operation from the human body to the inhabited suburb. Pila Thinkerwiller isan amplifier of ideas, a portrait of a time, a place, and a community.

Earth Field Land Clay are different words that rotate around a single element: the matter, and on which the poetics of this publication is built. Earth Field Land Clay is an artist’s book, in which the theme of the process of making objects is approached by making a parallel between the process of ceramics and the geological processes of the planet. The publication presents a series of images of objects made by the participants of the workshops “making the immaterial” conceived by the author of the book and held in various cities in Italy. The book contains a critical essay written by curator Jo Melvin, on the collective processes of creating objects in relation to the territory and the transformative character of these actions.

Ten years of performance practices of the Pietribiasi/Tedeschi Company around the long term project #memoriedelsuolo told through the manipulation of a wide range of materials. A creative journey where the emotional temperature and degree of truth of the joint work of the artist duo Cinzia Pietribiasi and Pierluigi Tedeschi puts collective memory and archive in dialogue with processes, experimentations, readings, writings, stage gestures, public actions.

"This book is about love, life, death and resurrection. In March 2008 Carla, the love of my life, died. We had been together for 35 years and had never left each other. The painful sense of lack had created a void in me that I perceived as a half-death. Placed at the edge of that dark abyss I was distracted by a call to life. It was Evelina, also suffering from the loss of her friend. We began an almost daily email correspondence that lasted a couple of years, writing about topics suggested by our state of grief. From those very many pages I have extracted short sentences that reconstruct the dialogue at the time for this artist's book. In the front facing each sentence I drew a black vignette differentiated only by the outer outline. Black hole where everything seems to fall. Black fabric button that years ago was worn on the lapel of the jacket of mourning males." Aldo Grazzi

“What is a documentary?” “Why do I make documentaries?”. Soda Kazuhiro – one of the most prominent Japanese filmmakers, who has based his documentarist career on a radically independent filmmaking method, – writes this reflexive diary on his own work pursuing to find answers to these and to other crucial questions that arose along his long path of research. This first curated English version of his most enlightening and complete text has been enriched with a brand new iconographic apparatus from Soda Kazuhiro’s movies and a new updated introduction by the author himself. 

Interspecies Kin is the first publication enclosing the research that Giovanni Chiamenti has carried out over the past two years. The project was developed between the United States, specifically in New York during his residency at the NARS Foundation and a subsequent collaboration with the community biolab Genspace, and Italy, thanks to the collaboration with Spazio Volta and the support of his cultural partners Attiva Cultural Projects and The Blank Contemporary Art. Chiamenti’s practice lies somewhere between scientific popularization and his intent to be formally speculative, bordering on the sci-fi. The artist has created an organic glossary, originated from interspecies relationships, in which creatures demonstrate their adaptability to an increasingly polluted environment and the hybrid becomes the protagonist of rhizomatic relationships capable of interconnecting extremely distant worlds. The texts within the publication address the issue of micro-plastic pollution plaguing the oceans and its subsequent integration within the evolutionary process of organisms and bacteria inhabiting the deep sea. The topic is addressed not only by curators and critics but also by a marine microbiologist and a biomedical engineer. This is a transdisciplinary project in which the imaginative power of the forms generated by the artist is not intended to obscure the scientific component, but instead to bring the reader closer to the studies conducted in recent years in evolutionism.

Global migration is one of the most pressing matters facing contemporaneity, but also a leitmotif in the work of Massimo Ricciardo. In his most recent project, the artist creates a dialogue between photographic objects from the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and objects of migration: things that are functional to the journey, such as passports and nautical charts, but also to identity and memory, such as family photographs, diaries, a sample of earth from the homeland. The installation generated compelling questions about these ‘talking’ objects: who do they belong to? Are they part of our cultural heritage? What are the appropriate artistic and curatorial practices if one decides to collect, archive, exhibit, transform them? The dialogues prompted by Ricciardo’s installation continue in this book and involve a polyphony of voices.

What’s your idea of a natural place? Starting from this question, addressed to a heterogeneous audience, of different ages, professions and nationalities, Claudia Losi has put together Being There. Oltre il giardino (Beyond the Garden), the last chapter of a twenty-year-long research project focusing on that interweaving of meaning, perception and memory that humans deploy when looking at the world. In conducting her investigation, Losi hybridizes sociological-scientific language with artistic language, translating the many responses to her question (about four hundred, collected through an open call and a series of seminars) into images and drawings woven on an 18-meter tapestry. The work graphically synthesizes the contributions collected during the various stages of the research, constituting a visual diary between word and drawing. This book brings together a series of traces in the form of textual contributions, drawings and photographic documentation of the journeys and works that made up the project. Texts by Giorgio Vallortigara, Mauro Sargiani, Ugo Morelli, Riccardo Komesar, Cesare Raimondi, Gioia Laura Iannilli, Alice Benessia.

Epidermis collects suggestions and scans of urban space, or rather of its decorative mantle, as part of an analytical practice aimed at detecting the distorions and pitfalls of the collective and democratic enjoyment of its public spaced. Cypriot artist Meletios Meltiou’s board book, of which 100 copies have been printed, consists of fifteen four-color and singe-color printed panels based on graphic elaborations in which the artist digitally shapes and molds a core of iconic patterns of hostile architecture.

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).

Bibliothèque d’un Amateur. Richard Prince’s Publications takes a look at Richard Prince’s library and production of artist’s books published between 1980 and 2020. This book is not a proper catalogue raisonné, but rather an invitation to browse the library of an amateur’s. It allows us to consider this important aspect of Richard Prince’s work, addressing books as well as the notion of a collection and its incompleteness, revealed here by the “ghosts” of missing books. Richard Prince is an avid book designer and collector; this zeal and fervor transpire in many book works where he photographs books from his collection, transforming a publication in an infinite library. Bibliothèque d’un Amateur is also the catalogue of the exhibition “ALL BOOKS AND SOME PRINTS” at Centre de la Photographie Genève (16 March–30 May 2021). 

Un percorso critico per la città di Roma alla ricerca delle tracce dell’impresa coloniale italiana. Accompagnati dalla riscrittura in chiave contemporanea di dodici eventi memorializzati da monumenti, arredi urbani, ponti e toponomastica, a cui fanno eco dodici voci e radici multiculturali, seguiamo un percorso che ci invita a confrontare e affrontare questa parte rimossa della nostra storia. Il viaggio si conclude nell’ex museo coloniale, in una visita attraverso alcuni oggetti della collezione, anche loro in attesa della nostra riscrittura partecipe.

Pink for Flower is the first in-depth international publication about the work of Italian artist Caterina Silva. The book is a comprehensive, polyphonic canon spanning over a decade of the artist’s practice with written contributions by a selection of curators, artists, poets, writers and academics from across a range of disciplines. The 178-page book will be published and distributed across UK Europe as 500 coloured soft-cover copies by Bosse&Baum and the prestigious Italian publishing house, visual art research centre, archive and exhibition space, Viaindustriae. Caterina Silva (1983, Rome) is a visual artist based between Rome and London working with painting and performance.  She uses painting to probe at the obscure spaces of the mind, those which are impossible to explain in words. She creates open images available to the interpretation of the observer, a consequence of a process of deconstruction of her own internal superstructure carried out through the matter of painting itself and its translation into choreographic experiments and performances. The list of collaborators includes curator Laura Smith, independent writer and curator Marta Federici, choreographer and dance-maker Cristina Kristal Rizzo, artist Bea McMahon, indologist, academician, one of the major experts of tantric shaivism and Hindu aesthetics Raffaele Torella, and researcher of radical psychiatry, Hannah Proctor.  

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.

For a decade, from the mid-1990s, Active Worlds was the most popular user-created virtual environment on the internet. It was an online zone full of precedent and potential; a worldbuilding exercise and infrastructure holding the promise of a self-electing global citizenry amidst virtual constructions of their own imagination and creation. Coming from a background in architecture, editors Andrea Belosi and Joana Rafael have led an expedition through the remains of Active World’s principal territory, AlphaWorld. Infused with principles of psychogeography and urbanism, and sprinkled with the dream logic that seasons virtual realities, four avatars were enlisted to walk in relay the 655 digital kilometres that separate AlphaWorld’s northern and southern limits. Alongside an atlas of AW’s 495 public and private worlds, and details of the online platform’s social and technical construction, rules and labor, Lost Zone draws a line through the ruins of our recent digital past, to gain insights into our hybrid present.