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.

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.

Ring! is an artist album by Francesco Cavaliere and Dick El Demasiado created during A Week From Monday 2023, an artistic residency organized in Umbria by Viaindustriae Publishing and Holydays Festival. The residency involves a week-long research and production phase, in which the artists divide their time between Foligno's industrial zone and the mountain village of Scopoli with the intent of exploring possible points of contact between visual and sonic artistic languages. Ring! is the result of an immersive listening experience, involving the manipulation of field recordings taken during a historically inspired jousting tournament. The artists shared the experience of listening and recording, while further manipulation and production of the tracks was carried out individually.

Francesco Cavaliere opens Il fuso del cavallo infilato nell'anello (20' 5") with a vocal reinterpretation of the Bando di Giostra—a text traditionally read aloud to announce the horse race, typically recited into a microphone by a designated actor on the day of the event, in the complete silence of a crowded stadium. He then focuses on the stark solemnity of the race itself, during which a certain kind of restless silence takes center stage, as the ear tunes in to the essential sounds of the stadium: the horse's gallop, the lances striking or missing the rings. This creates a long sequence of speaking silenceswhere, from time to time, the chatter of the crowd suddenly breaks through.

In Never Be The Saddle (15' 50"), Dick El Demasiado works with editing, repetition, layering, and delay as subtle yet decisive gestures, creating a vaguely unsettling and out-of-the-ordinary sound experience. His interventions are so discreet that one may not immediately notice them—or possibly never notice them at all. Here, the main elements are saturated sounds, such as the amplified voice of the race announcer, the cheers, drums, and trumpets, which are occasionally interrupted by the same speaking silence that we hear in Cavaliere's piece, a defining sonic element of the experience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Between September and October 2019, the artist Irene Coppola in collaboration with the architect Vito Priolo conducted an intense period of research in the village of Armila, in Panama’s Guna Yala indigenous community. A variety of languages were used, ranging from writing to drawing, sculpture, photography and video. This publication features authorial materials about the project, whose local dimension is closely connected to global issues and urgencies, expolred in the essays by three contributors active in the field of contemporary art. The project is supported by the Italian Council (6th Edition, 2019), program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Apeninnes Map Linea 1201, an artistic project on the Italian Apennines decised by Angelo Bellobono and developed together with the curators Elisa Del Prete and Silvia Litardi. Setting out from Rome, the artist’s operative base, Angelo Bellobono undertook an itinerant programme of residencies which crossed the Apennines in four stages in order to investigate and narrate the highlands of Italy through art, in dialogue with other artists, experts and mountain lovers. The number ‘1201’ used in the title of the project represents the length of the mountain ridge in kilometres, from the southern end at the Calabrian Aspromonte, right up to Monte Maggiorasca in Liguria. Linea 1201 began in the moment of the reopening after the first lockdown due to the Covid-19 health emergency in spring 2020 with a view ro capitalising on a number of reflections on themes which had emerged, such as isolation and borders, the relationship with the landscape and the environment, but also with regard to the changes that our approach has undergone towards walking and our relationships, and last but not least, the mountain territory and the specific ways it may be frequented.
Part of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to the restoration of one of the precious cartographic documents found in the Italian Geographical Society collection in Rome.

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.

The exhibition Mirabilia Urbis is configured as a particular path that crosses stops located in different spaces, both commercial and institutional, between the Parione and Regola districts: a maze of streets and alleys that characterize one of the most peculiar areas of Rome. The title, borrowed from the ancient tourist guides for pilgrims created in the Middle Ages, stems from the need to trace and map a new unexpected path, offering the visitor a particular experience in approaching a totally new space. The project is created by Carlo Caloro and produced by artQ13, curated by Giuliana Benassi.

Until the end of the Sea, aims to focus on a five-year long-term research on the theme of the so-called Extreme Lands of which Ramdom has become over time a privileged observatory. The book is a sort of database and a tool for investigating and spreading the results so far obtained through the intervention of professionals in different disciplines whose goal is to build a new cognitive mapping of the land’s end.

Starting from the specific case of Gagliano del Capo and Basso Salento, the book becomes a universal device capable of creating an ideal bridge with similar geo-anthropological situations. In addition to the artists involved – Elena Mazzi e Rosario Sorbello; Romina De Novellis; Lia Cecchin; Riccardo Giacconi e Carolina Valencia Caicedo – who translated the theme through the tools of visual language, the book can count on the contribution Paolo Mele, Claudio Zecchi, Radical Intention, Massimo Carozzi, Domenico Licchelli, Luca Coclite, Heba Amin e Francesca Girelli, Carlos Casas, Alessandro Carboni e Alessandra Pioselli. This diversification brings a dual function: on the one hand narrate the theme of the Extreme Lands from different perspectives, on the other indicate the multi-disciplinary methodology with which Ramdom has always approached the work creating relations capable of multiplying the plans of access and deepening.

The day after Fidel Castro’s death, three Colombian artists begin a journey through Cuba, from Havana to Santiago de Cuba, with the intention of drawing a cartography of the island’s cultural and social actors, by inviting different groups of (d)estructura. The game begins with the question “How do you see your life in ten years and what’ do you need to make that happen?” and ends with the realization of a collaborative and participatory structure. By (d)estructura individual intentions and experiences are dissolved in collective decisions, while art becomes an opportunity to imagine the future of the country together.

This book is a translation raisonné of Una Bella Passeggiata or a walk in wartime Italy, already published in 1995 in both English and Italian language. The author is an English soldier, Arthur “Ettore” Page who, during the Second World War, while trying escaping from the Germans and the fascists, finds himself into a journey across Italy and the Apennines. While walking, advised by the natives to andare sempre giù alle montagne (always go down to the mountains), he mentally takes note of all the stages of his bella passeggiata (nice walk) that will later become the chapters of his book, a posthumous war diary and a way to thank the villagers who had helped him and hid him.

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.

Questo libro documenta il progetto di ricerca e residenza Manufatto in Situ fondato da viaindustriae (2007-2017). Inizialmente basato su una specifica ricerca-azione nel paesaggio marginale e radicale dell’area rurale-montana di Cancelli e della Valle del Menotre, Manufatto ha poi utilizzato metodi ipertestuali e progetti extra-situ per disegnare collegamenti tra i diversi siti, i tipi di intervento e i paesaggi “tematici”. Il risultato è un’ampia indagine, una mostra e un libro di arte-architettura-natura sullo spazio pubblico, le pratiche artistiche site-specific, gli interventi e studi sul paesaggio in Italia e confini. Questo progetto di archivio è costituito di 10 sezioni tematiche composte di tracce artistiche, opere e documenti relativi a 10 paesaggi umbri, collegati a loro volta a 10 siti “paralleli” extra-regionali, ambienti ed esperienze storiche radicali dagli anni ’60 fino ad oggi. Ciò introduce una supervisione non ortodossa e critica del paesaggio contemporaneo, tra arte ambientale e architettura, natura e città. Questo catalogo è il tentativo di inglobare il vasto database della mostra, concepita come un sistema integrabile di documentazione orizzontale (documentario/tavolo), inventario verticale (muro), e di “proiezioni”, artefatti provvisionali, forme complesse situate nel paesaggio (utopia/piramidi). I testi pubblicati sono estratti dal materiale generato e raccolto durante il corso dela programma di residenza e della mostra.