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.

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.

Sound Chapters: Voices of Sound Experimentation in Italy is a hybrid volume dedicated to the Italian auditory arts scene. Using textuality as an intimate form of sound, the book reflects the texture of the voice in writing. Words function like ventril-oquy, imitating remote vocalities. In the chapters, short stories, essays, research papers, poems, scores and songs sound without hierarchy, emphasising plurality. By weaving together contri-butions that elude conventional modes of writing, the project amplifies a fluid and inclusive bibliography on the subject. Le autrici e gli autori di questo libro sono artiste, ricercatrici, curatrici e organizzatrici culturali che, negli ultimi dieci anni, hanno avuto un ruolo attivo nella scena sperimentale della arti sonore in Italia. The book is not only a theoretical reflection on the Italian soul scene but also a catalogue for Mezz'aria. La strana apertura della ricerca sonora, a collective project that explored sound research within the exhibition setting of the Museo del Novecento e del Contemporaneo di Palazzo Fabroni a Pistoia (20.05-15.08 2023). Artists and researchers: Marco Baldini, Elena Biserna, Luca Boffi, Andrea Borghi, Mattia Capelletti, Francesco Cavaliere, Stefano De Ponti, Nicola Di Croce, Giulia Deval, Alessandra Eramo, Paolo Gabriotti, Giulia Gonfiantini, Renato Grieco, Riccardo La Foresta, Enrico Malatesta, Chiara Pavolucci, Leandro Pisano, Diana Lola Posani, Radio Papesse, Francesco Toninelli.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Contenuto Rimosso is an "experiment in psychoanalysis applied to the environment." A work on collective memory, it addresses the issue of depopulation of mountain areas, experimenting with a community art where community forms of life that have a centuries-old tradition survive, in alpine communities. In particular, Contenuto Rimosso ved refers to the paradoxical nature of a process of reconstruction that was at the same time a process of collective removal, the Rifabbrico in Cadore. On the evening of July 30, 1855, a fire destroyed the historic center of Lorenzago. The settlement was rebuilt, giving rise to Quadrato, a neighborhood that is now mostly uninhabited. Since 2012, the Contenuto Rimosso project has included the discontinuation of public lighting along the streets of the neighborhood and an installation of fires, flashlights and candles on the anniversary of the fire. Over the years, the action has become a new tradition, the village's main celebration. Contenuto Rimosso is not a "commemorative" event proper, because it does not celebrate or perpetuate the memory of anything. The reactualization of the memory of the fire is thought of as a trigger for a "counter-image" to emerge, for the local community to reclaim its past by using public space as a place for the elaboration of a self-image inverse to the stereotypical one. By ritualizing a recurrence and building a narrative around it, Contenuto Rimosso contributes.

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.