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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jonathan Monk's first show with Yvon Lambert’s Paris gallery was in 1997 and the artist continued working with him until he closed in 2014. At some point in the early 2000’s Yvon gave Monk a ruler, stamped into the top are the initials SL and he was told that twenty years earlier Sol LeWitt left it behind after installing a show. This 30cm ruler was the starting point for the publication and the edition of 100 ceramic rulers it documents. Jonathan Monk’s rulers aren’t straight, they don’t have any numbers nor lines on them and each one is slightly different to the next. The process used is the one of extrusion, pushing manually the clay through a metal profile made exactly as the original ruler given to the art­ist by Yvon Lambert. Sol LeWitt Rules was produced at the historical ceramic workshop La Gioconda in Deruta, which in the 1980s worked closely with Sol LeWitt for his production of ceramic plates and tiles. This book includes 100 photographs of the 100 rulers made on the occasion of Jonathan Monk’s exhibition SL at the Torre Bonomo in Spoleto. The quicker you flick through it, the faster it moves. 

You can now purchase the Sol LeWitt Rules project bundle, which includes the artist's edition and Jonathan Monk's artist's book.

A new series of sculptures by Jonathan Monk titled Sol LeWitt Rules (ceramic, approx. 30 x 3 x 1.5 cm, 2024), produced by Fabio Veschini at the ceramic workshop La Gioconda in Deruta which worked closely with Sol LeWitt on the production of ceramic plates and tiles. Monk created the edition as part of his residency at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios and subsequent exhibition ‘SL’ in the Torre Bonomo for the Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi 67, curated by Vittoria Bonifati. The exhibition explored the direct and indirect connections between the work of Monk and LeWitt (see installation photographs of the rulers in ‘SL’ below and the related exhibition page here).

Together with the rulers' edition, the artist has produced an artist's book of the same title, published by Viaindustriae, which can also be purchased individually at the following link: https://viaindustriae.it/books/sol-lewitt-rules

If interested in the artist's edition only, please contact: info@mahler-lewitt.org. Sol LeWitt Rules is an edition of 100 and has been generously donated to the Mahler & LeWitt Studios by the artist. All proceeds support our programs. Each ruler is available for a donation of 120euros, plus postage and packaging. To donate and receive an edition, please email info@mahler-lewitt.org with your postal address and you will be sent a unique donation link.

Back in 2017, the research team composed of Luca Trevisani, Mario Ciaramitaro and Giulia Morucchio exposed themselves to hundreds of artworks in search of examples of works capable of creating tension, a centrifugal force for anyone who might encounter them without any introduction or notice. Works that reach out to someone, seek attention, set a trap for someone. This approach, conceived by Luca Trevisani, became a collective studio practice of learning and teaching, open to wild and unexpected suggestions and ideas revolving around the possibility of finding these tensions, this gravitational field. Luca Trevisani and Mario Ciaramitaro printed, composed, and photographed this illustrated itinerary on the wall, unfolding the cartography of these remote and powerful encounters on the perimeter of our Iuav classrooms. All that remained was to photograph this map, reprint it, lay it out, and then offer this flow of lively and rebellious images. The process originated from the images that have been collectively sought for several months. While Mario and the students engaged in their role-playing as iconauts, with Giulia Morucchio, persisted in collecting and reworking texts, captions, and overheard legends, always mindful that every beautiful story holds an element of truth. What you read below are the traces, the details, and some of the clues that comprise our collection of fresh fossils and the salad we crafted from them.

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.