The project is a critical reflection on failure, seen through the presence of badly drawn swastikas on public surfaces across Italy. The result of research conducted between 2009 and 2025, it reflects on how one of the most ancient and widely disseminated symbols—later appropriated by the Nazi regime—is repeatedly drawn incorrectly by those who attempt to reproduce it to assert ideological authority, turning the symbol into an impressive achievement in failure and revealing their makers’ incompetence, thereby undermining the very claims to rigor and control they were meant to convey.

Combining humor, political critique, and personal reflection grounded in leftist perspectives, Epic Fail 2009-2025 situates these graphic failures within a broader framework of ideological production and collapse. It considers how incompetence operates not merely as an incidental flaw but as an expression of larger political and cultural bewilderment. The project also considers these failures within a broader context of personal and collective struggle, where political defeat, absurdity, and laughter often seem to occur together.

Holding Place is the final outcome of the project Caravan: Thinking with Alexandria. This itinerant residency programme explored the European cities of Athens, Brussels, Marseille, and Nicosia through the lens of Alexandria and its contested urban imaginaries.

Participants travelled across the geographies connected to the project, revisiting these places through various artistic productions. These are documented in one of the booklets that compose this publication, conceived as a constellation of editorial materials.

Alongside the production path defined by the institutions leading the initiative, and in order to address the dissonances inherent in a project that seeks to interpret the urban universe of Alexandria— a North African, Egyptian, and Mediterranean city—through a specifically European perspective, some of the residency participants convened for a series of organised conversations. These intimate, critical, and at times challenging discussions ultimately gave rise to the self-produced publication Place Holder.

Bringing together diverse voices, perspectives, and approaches, Holding Place aims to offer multidimensional narratives on Alexandria, Europe, and the Mediterranean, inviting readers to engage with urban and regional landscapes through their blind spots and complexities, rather than through functional and reductive geopolitical imaginaries.

Conceived as a long-form reflection on a practice unfolding over more than two decades, the book seeks to render the complexity of a body of work that moves across photography, collage, found imagery, drawing, and video, tracing its development from its initial articulations to the present.

For Spranzi, photography and video are, first and foremost, ways of seeing and of reimagining the world. Rather than privileging technique, her attention is directed toward the elementary gestures of the photographic act—looking, enlarging, reducing, reproducing, reassembling—understood as actions through which the image is continuously analyzed, displaced, and rewritten. These processes generate bodies of works in which fragments, objects, and memories are staged, and in which the familiar is subtly unsettled by slippages and suspensions of meaning.

The volume articulates the evolution of Spranzi’s practice while foregrounding a set of recurring motifs that persistently traverse and structure her research, such as the tension between scale and intimacy, the circulation and transformation of images, and the oscillation between reality and marvel.

The publication features original contributions by Cecilia Canziani, Ilaria Gianni, Estelle Hoy, Quinn Latimer, and Simone Menegoi, whose essays offer historically grounded readings, critical perspectives, and poetic deviations that run alongside and in resonance with Spranzi’s work.

The work of the Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji (born in Gaza in 1966, currently based in Paris) is indissolubly tied to the collective history of his homeland and his people, although refracted through the lens of his individual experience.

Through photography and video, drawing and painting, sculpture and installation, he gives life to works imbued with a sense of impermanence and fragility, which explore the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, the material and the im-material, presence and absence. Poetic reflection and a bitter irony are the means through which Batniji deals with the trauma of displacement and the representation of disappearance.

This book, whose title is drawn from a verse by Mahmoud Darwish, documents his exhibition Abitare il tempo, held at the Fondazione Ago in Modena, and presents two recent bodies of work: Out of the Blue and Remnants, the latter emerging from a painful reflection on images of the genocide in the Gaza Strip.

The publication features an original text by Karim Kattan.

A few years after the 1968 earthquake, the Istituto Superiore per l'Edilizia Sociale of Rome sent the plan for the total reconstruction of Gibellina Nuova, inspired by the models of the English New Towns. After an initial phase during which mayor Ludovico Corrao invited international architects and artists to participate in the city redesign, in the late 1970s a group of professors from the University of Palermo organised a series of seminars and workshops to reflect on the reconstruction. At that moment, Oswald Mathias Ungers was called to design the central area of the settle-ment, which was still undefined. His Civic Centre proposal reflected on the relationship between built and public space, between city, monument and history. However, little was real-ised, not really with rigour. The hotel, started on the edge of town, was soon abandoned. The artisanal district was freely adjusted to the needs of local activities. The housing along Viale Belice was built but its public walkway leads nowhere. What remains of the block of houses that was supposed to enclose a garden is a huge dry meadow and a small lake, ironically the element most faithful to the original project, in the centre of the town.

Bolletti/no is a journal of experimental didactics published for each solstice and equinox over a period of 3 years, between 2020 and 2023, for a total of 12 issues + a final extra issue. It was created to give a concrete printed form to a series of practices developed by Virginia Di Lazzaro and Giulia Filippi during their shared workshop activities with children and adults. Over these three years, the artists and authors have reflected on the world around them, accompanied by characters, stories, artistic practices and techniques, materials, matter, the seasons, and all the people and living beings they've encountered. Bolletti/no was created with the intention of being a tool that sparks action and inspiration. Each issue invites the reader to experience the world around them through exercises of observation, experimentation, collection, and storytelling, allowing them to build a small collection of "domestic art". Bolletti/no has experimented not only with content but also with distribution methods over the years: initially distributed individually, then as a subscription sent directly to the homes of those who chose to support the project, it now becomes a box set containing all 12 issues, plus the special issue and the related posters.

This book collects photographs taken by Pietro Perotti – a worker at the Fiat Mirafiori plant in Turin – who, starting in 1985, created protest writings and drawings in the factory toilets to oppose the oppressive policies of the company and of the FIAT boss Agnelli. This widespread and personal form of protest followed years of activism in class struggles and strikes during the previous decade.

Perotti systematically photographed the drawings and writings, secretly bringing a camera into the factory and timing the shutter release with the automated toilet flushes to muffle the sound of the click.

Perotti’s story starts at a precise moment in time, at the beginning of 1985, and in a precise location, the FIAT factory at Torino Mirafiori, transporting the reader back in time. Assembled for the very first time in this volume, here is a working-class story that was first scrawled and scribbled in the large factory’s toilet cubicles, and then docu­mented on photographic paper.

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. 

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.

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.

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.