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. 

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.

Ogni anno, al Carnevale di Sant’Eraclio (Foligno, PG), sfilano carri allegorici. Vengono fatti in cartapesta usando tre tipi di giornale: bianco (La Nazione), giallo (Il Sole 24 Ore), rosa (La Gazzetta dello Sport). Quattro prova ad aggiungere un quarto colore. Quattro può essere acquistato con o senza multiplo in edizione limitata.

Il Grillo Minerva is a story about an unknown city. A city built from animal stones. Two brothers, on a break from a long journey, somehow discover its existence. Artist's book by Francesco Cavaliere, printed in 100 copies

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.

"This book is about love, life, death and resurrection. In March 2008 Carla, the love of my life, died. We had been together for 35 years and had never left each other. The painful sense of lack had created a void in me that I perceived as a half-death. Placed at the edge of that dark abyss I was distracted by a call to life. It was Evelina, also suffering from the loss of her friend. We began an almost daily email correspondence that lasted a couple of years, writing about topics suggested by our state of grief. From those very many pages I have extracted short sentences that reconstruct the dialogue at the time for this artist's book. In the front facing each sentence I drew a black vignette differentiated only by the outer outline. Black hole where everything seems to fall. Black fabric button that years ago was worn on the lapel of the jacket of mourning males." Aldo Grazzi

Epidermis collects suggestions and scans of urban space, or rather of its decorative mantle, as part of an analytical practice aimed at detecting the distorions and pitfalls of the collective and democratic enjoyment of its public spaced. Cypriot artist Meletios Meltiou’s board book, of which 100 copies have been printed, consists of fifteen four-color and singe-color printed panels based on graphic elaborations in which the artist digitally shapes and molds a core of iconic patterns of hostile architecture.