Il collettivo si è costituito nell’aspettativa della mostra personale IM/PERFETTO EQUILIBRIO di Franco Troiani a Spoleto, Palazzo Coligola Arti Visive, aperta il 12 aprile 2014. Il gruppo, formato da artisti, curatori, operatori dell’arte, ha usato la pratica collaborativa epistolare “non firmata”. L’obbiettivo comune è la produzione di un catalogo di mostra fuori-formato, anti-accademico e controproducente. I coautori propongono domande e interrogativi sul campo artistico umbro e confini a cui Troiani dev rispondere personalmente…Collettivo anti-catalogo Troiani

The catalogue to an exhibition curated by Giorgio Maffei at the Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna, during Artelibro 2013 explores diverse artistic experiences using sound and audio storage media since its beginnings around 1960. Central to the interdisciplinary context of dematerialisation of the work of art, visual, literary, performance and other artists have increasingly experimented with the record and sound as a vehicle for investigating the possibilities of verbal and non-verbal expression, considerations of the body and avant-garde tendencies. Hundreds of examples are presented in this impressively researched and carefully documented and illustrated book.

This book is not a catalogue raisonné, it instead takes a look at the library of an amateur, an excuse to apprehend this aspect of Richard Prince’s work which encompasses books and the question of the collection and its incompleteness, revealed here by the ‘ghosts’ of the missing books. Richard Prince is an avid collector of books, an obsessive one.
This fervor is visible in The Good Life or American/English, where he photographs covers of books from his collection, reducing the book to an image, a simple surface.

Catalog of the exhibition Le Bosquet du Labyrinthe with works by Ayumi Makita, inside XXXIII Segni Barocchi Festival, Foligno, 2011. The labyrinth in the garden of Versailles is a fairytale by Charles Perrault who in 1669, inspired by the 39 Aesop’s fables, invented with 39 “station” hydraulic sculpture composed of 333 figurines of animals in painted metal build in a park, to educate Louis the Grand Dauphin, six years old son of the King Louis XIV. What still remains of it is a drawing and a literary testimony wich is given to us from Perrault in his book Labyrinte de Versailles, conceived at that time as a tour guide for the visitors-guests of the palace, with tales a descriptions of the fountains: a poetical map that will be become later the only document of the disappeared labyrinth of Versailles. In fact in 1778 “le bosquet du labryrinthe” ha been laid down and replaced with an arboretum of exotic plants and English garden. To go through that imaginary and literary space means to lost itself in the memory of a physical landscape made of sliding walls, 5-meters-high hedges, meanders and figures which mark time, between plateau and vertigo, between contemplation and disorientation.

Book-catalogue of a private collection of modern and contemporary Italian art, published on the occasion of three exhibitions held at the Palazzo Clemente, Borgo Medievale di Castelbasso, Italy, Mar. 12-May 8 and Mar. 17-May 6, 2011, and at Centro Italiano Arte Contemporanea, Foligno, Italy, Mar. 10-May 6, 2011. Includes bibliographical references.

Divided into four sections, books, scores, records and documents, “Sound Pages. John Cage’s Publications“, (catalogue of the exhibition with the same title at the International Museum of Music, Bologna) systematizes an important part of John Cage’s work addressing the theme of the various productions which the American composer produced, often upsetting the traditional components and structures of composition. Cage has posed the problem of making the sound an object which is sensitive to the visible: texts, books, scores become visual entities in all respects in which the artist tries to juxtapose syntactic connections to a new dislocation of the characters on the surface sheet according to canons and criteria that are purely visual. Edited by Giorgio Maffei and Fabio Carboni, Sound Pages is an editorial project that shows how the complexity of John Cage’s thought, but also his disarming simplicity, have added “beauty” to the printed page so as not to allow the sound space to dissipate in the moment of the interruption of the sound and fix in time its translation in visual space.

The body of the research is composed of a large photographic apparatus, witness of change and, above all, an effective tool for understanding the signs left by the recent history of the Umbrian territory, still little appreciated. In this sense, the project develops within contemporary cultural (globalized and multiethnic) offering a contribution to the interpretation of the territory whose unstable current configuration, in addition to a clear spatial value, is concretely the result of an intense stratification that took place over time.

Catalog of the exhibition Fate le Fate with works by Barbara Lachi, inside XXXII Segni Barocchi Festival, Foligno, 2011. An illustrated book inspired by Les Contes des Fées and Le Fées à la Modeby Madame d’Aulony. Threads. Textures. Weaving as well as writing, the page of a book as well as the fabric of a dress, both say something, the fabric as well as the story, it unfolds, unfolds, stretches… Fairies in fashion is the title of the fairy tales collection written by Madame d’Aulnoy, fairy tales in which princesses, ladies, but above all fairies move in their rich rustling clothes.What emerges from the pages is not only their stories, their gestures but also the patter of their heels on the pavement, the rubbing of sumptuous and heavy fabrics, almost a mysterious and sensual whisper of lace and velvet.

INbookOUTbookIFbook is a longitudinal and transverse study, which has been divided into three steps to explore the artist publishing researches. It is a dialogue ground for operators of contemporary artist’s books, which is conceived as a functional, technical medium, an “experimental room”, an anteroom, a neutral ground.
The first INbook step is an introspective process on the book, in which the archive/library metaphor acts as an impulse. The book indexes itself with recurring titles (The book of, index book, the project book project), whilst the highlighting of a title, the underscores, the anastatic methods and the autistic attitude of the artist-bureaucrat-bibliophile questions its status. The OUT book section is described through the exteriorization processes of the artist’s book starting from a historical-formal path and identifies the rarefaction, the dispersion, and the multiplication as its trail. It is better to speak of publication rather than a book because the first term is semantically wider and more suitable to interpret the present operational-procedural dynamics of the investigating publishing activity, in which the co-generative technological experiences destabilize the authoriality. One question: what if the book…? The third section IF book poses many questions, activating researches on the present scenario, using site-book-specific interventions, contributions, didactics and publishing coproductions. Many methods, possibilities, and potentialities were used to set the book free from genre and format by means of transverse productivity practices and cross-medial infusions, in which the investigating an artist’s publishing activity represents a creative resource.

From the story of Umbrian fashion companies to styles, to cloth activism, to anti-fashion aspects, this book explores a thirty-years happy period from the 60s to the late 80s. It examines 30 years of enthusiasm, materials, design and style innovation. The euphoric mood often influences the design: sinuous dresses, colored fabrics, extravagant models. Happy Fashion considers how that creative and consumeristic society period shaped a new lifestyle, a new way of understanding the work of fashion, a new vision of clothing. This dossier is enriched with images of models and dresses, with the stories of the companies and fashion designers; it is published to document a workshop and an exhibition with contemporary artists and it describes the cultural impact of a happy stage of Italian history before the economic crisis.

RADIOazioni U is a metaphorical trip across Umbria, an alternative guide to explore its places, a suggestion to make stopovers to discover the submerged, the underground, the unknown. This publication is connected to a series of workshops and creative activities for young people who have progressively taken part in the realization of an artistic parade through the streets of Umbria…

After 53 issues published since 1979 in New York and Umbria, PIM (Public Illumination Magazine), the world’s smallest magazine of its kind (7×11 cm) marches on, continuing to illuminate its select readers with enlightening revelations by its pseudonymonous contributors. This special joint-publication of PIM and Ragnatele retraces the 19 issues of PIM published since its relocation to Umbria in 1987. Covers and sample pages are presented amongst artifacts from its environment. Universal yet particular, the nourishing peculiarity of Umbria has proven a happy home for this collaboration. These two magazines have joined characters and dimensions to produce a hybrid publication in an act of cross-fertilization.

Catalogue of the exhibition Grottesco / Incanto de li Cunti with works by Mariella Carbone inside XXXI Segni Barocchi Festival, Foligno, 2010. Illustrations, characters, masks inspired by and text excerpts by Lo Cunto de li Cunti by GianBattista Basile.

Catalog of the exhibition Fata Morgana, at Gallery Apart, Cerere Temporary Gallery. The project was to create a total alteration of a specific space with a dreamlike video installation investigating remote throbbing obsessions. The setting of an obsolete shabby hotel was created in an old print shop: windows, doors, carpeting, wallpaper, furniture, curtains, etc.. The rooms are loaded with memories and dreams and some pending events come back to life. The space is at street level of the ex-Cerere pasta factory located on via Tiburtina in the San Lorenzo neighborhood in Rome. Outside the door, there is a “HOTEL” sign. In collaboration with gallery Apart Roma, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere.

This elegantly designed catalog – published following an exhibition at the Galleria civica Arte Moderna in Spoleto, Italy – offers readers a fairly comprehensive survey of Sol Lewitt’s impressive archive of artist’s books. As one of the medium’s foremost pioneers and advocates, Lewitt created over seventy books and book projects, beginning with the 1967 Serial Project No. 1 (from Aspen magazine), and ending with Chicago (Morning Star Publications, 2002). This book reproduces covers and spreads from this massive oeuvre of artist’s books, almost all of which are now rarities. Critical observations from LeWitt himself are accompanied by essays from Giorgio Maffei, Emanuele De Donno, Didi Bozzini, Cecilia Metelli, and Marilena Bonomo. Texts are in Italian and English.

Catalog of the exhibition Grottesco / Incanto de li Cunti with works by Mariella Carbone inside XXXI Segni Barocchi Festival, Foligno, 2010. Affabula is a journey into Charles Perrault’s world. It is the story of a journey through his fairy tales articulated on a double theme; that of the reinvention and re-reading of texts through new, unpublished and sensitive images and that of the reinterpretation of the space translated into 5 rooms plus a corridor.