This book gather Dino Ignani's Dark Portraits collection, a selection of approximately 200 photographs that are part of a much larger series of shots, mostly portraits, taken over the course of five years, and effectively evoke the spirit of the 1989s in the dynamic city of Rome. Ignani's research is a window on the look of the young adults who animated the clubs of the so-called Dark scene in Rome, a scene that was in fact diverse and multifaceted, presenting a range of unprecedented aesthetic and individual declinations that flowed into other moods and styles of the time.

Costruzione dell'Universo: Artists’ Magazines and Publications after Marcel Duchamp is a research project that gathers artists’ magazines and publications by various artists who were active in the realm of “periodical and irregular” printed matter from the 1950s to the present day, beginning with of the work of the visionary artist Marcel Duchamp. This significant and hitherto overlooked sector of artistic production explores the dimension of the newspaper and magazine as an artistic medium. The selection includes extremely rare, a-periodic, and extraordinary printed items, “sensitive” publications in which the artist first handedly draws and designs the cover, the inner pages, the image sequence, or conceives the overall form of the object as a unique, yet replicable work. The publication in this context is sometimes transformed into an open and collective container, capable of engaging and coordinating multiple artists in the same layout or across different issues. The title “Construction of the Universe” points out to the fundamental and pioneering role of the early 20th-century avant-garde movement, referencing the 1915 Manifesto “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe”, the notorious artistic manifesto that was initially released as a flyer and resembled newspaper layout. The 1950s (when our research for this book began) saw a significant rise of a utopian perspective in which artists, finally liberated from the existential weight of world conflicts, often envisioned the creation of a new society, free of relics and debris, made of travelling architectures and wide open spaces, new languages, and characterized by a deep longing for emptiness, a thrust toward the brightness of the future and the cosmos.

This revised edition of I Am Gonzo includes three new erotic stories and supplementary matter tobring it up to date as a new issue of the series. A porn addict amateur who collects dirty Italian comics inan “animalistic” way, Gonzo applies a conservative technique whereby he hides these questionablyviewable images within scientific libraries. This book addresses a widespread form of collecting thatavoids the subject of the “arty” comic strip and instead dives headlong into obscene material and theviewer’s experience of it. This mega-collection of pornographic Italian comics faithfully presents the genrefrom its sensual, sexual-phobic beginnings (1960-1970) to its porno-violent shift, between the years 1985and 2000. Voyeuristic and chock-full of thematic variants, from transgenderism and homoeroticism to fairytale, zombie, and cyber porn.

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.

Global migration is one of the most pressing matters facing contemporaneity, but also a leitmotif in the work of Massimo Ricciardo. In his most recent project, the artist creates a dialogue between photographic objects from the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and objects of migration: things that are functional to the journey, such as passports and nautical charts, but also to identity and memory, such as family photographs, diaries, a sample of earth from the homeland. The installation generated compelling questions about these ‘talking’ objects: who do they belong to? Are they part of our cultural heritage? What are the appropriate artistic and curatorial practices if one decides to collect, archive, exhibit, transform them? The dialogues prompted by Ricciardo’s installation continue in this book and involve a polyphony of voices.

For a decade, from the mid-1990s, Active Worlds was the most popular user-created virtual environment on the internet. It was an online zone full of precedent and potential; a worldbuilding exercise and infrastructure holding the promise of a self-electing global citizenry amidst virtual constructions of their own imagination and creation. Coming from a background in architecture, editors Andrea Belosi and Joana Rafael have led an expedition through the remains of Active World’s principal territory, AlphaWorld. Infused with principles of psychogeography and urbanism, and sprinkled with the dream logic that seasons virtual realities, four avatars were enlisted to walk in relay the 655 digital kilometres that separate AlphaWorld’s northern and southern limits. Alongside an atlas of AW’s 495 public and private worlds, and details of the online platform’s social and technical construction, rules and labor, Lost Zone draws a line through the ruins of our recent digital past, to gain insights into our hybrid present.

Second edition of Yes Yes Yes Revolutionary Press in Italy from Mondo Beat to Zut, this time with a white softcover and dusk jacekt. Densely filled with reproductions of newspapers, magazines, mimeographs, news-sheets, pamphlets, and other ephemera, this book investigates the Italian scene during the turbulent years between 1966 and 1977. These revolutionary printing activities were linked to the political, ideological, and countercultural struggle of a period of protest and occupation of public spaces as areas of freedom and social creativity for a disillusioned generation. A selection of over 600 publications are catalogued in this book, output from the subversive newsrooms of the radical artistic and libertarian movements, and “ultra-political” groups, autonomists, and other collectives seeking change.

I am Gonzo is a book on Italian erotic-porn comics. Gonzo is the immersive and amateur technique chosen by the authors to collect, analyze and look at erotic-porn comics, a poor and modest form of publication, with sensual papery aesthetcis and a high rate of collectability. Gonzo (dupe) is also a person, the amateur porn addict, usually male (porno-man, homo heroticus), who collects and consumes these enjoyable objects with an animal-like, almost wild atittude. This book attempts to describe a fragmented panorama; it is not about the estabilshed art comics, but about the ‘gonzo’ comics of the reader-lover, who owns and consumes the object and its ‘covetous authorship’, and keeps the issues hidden among more scholarly books.
The book brings together a visual selection of comics (published between the 1960s and the 2000s) essays, the exhibition displays that contributed to the development of the research over the course of three years, and a final list of all the comics collected for the research.

Yes Yes Yes Revolutionary Press in Italy indaga la scena italiana della stampa rivoluzionaria di “organi” editoriali in foglio, giornale, rivista, ciclostilato, bollettino, fascicolo, alcuni quotidiani altri periodici, spesso irregolari, altri aperiodici di cui molti numeri unici in reiterata attesa di autorizzazione… La febbrile attività tipografica si lega alla serrata politico-ideologica, antagonista e contro-culturale di un periodo di lotta, conquista di spazi civili, aree di libertà e di creatività sociale. In questo volume si censiscono e selezionano criticamente più di 600 stampati usciti tra il 1966 e il 1977. Questa ricerca è la continuazione naturale della corposa pubblicazione, uscita nel 2014 ed edita dagli stessi editori: Yes Yes Yes, Alternative press, 66-77 from Provo to Punk, curata da Emanuele De Donno ed Amedeo Martegani. Quel primo volume esaminava il ruolo della stampa alternativa, underground e controculturale europea ed americana in un periodo fiorente: 1966-1977; questa nuova edizione si concentra sulla scena italiana, la cui ampia strategia di “connivenze” e la frastagliata geografia regionale hanno posto la necessità, per sezionare tematicamente il percorso, di dare una visione allargata dei mezzi di stampa alternativa, non solo underground, indipendenti e contro-culturali, ma anche della contro-informazione, della editoria “schierata” ultra-radicale politica quindi ideologica. Il nucleo consistente di testate censite nella prolifica rete italiana che si allarga anche alle province è stata reperita grazie ai contributi di archivi messi in rete, collezionisti, cultori, editori e attivisti da tutta Italia che costituiscono una geografia sommersa dell’editoria contro-culturale italiana ma anche di un collezionismo resistente e ragionato. Questi mezzi stampa documentano una ricerca di cultura radicale, di autori e co-autori, promotori/artisti di cultura libera ed alternativa, distribuita in formati di confine e sperimentali.

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.

YES YES YES  is a visual essay, a book of images that examines the role of the alternative, underground and countercultural press in a flourishing period: 1966-1977. Publishers, authors, radical practitioners of that scene, interviewed in this book, rethink those actions and publications that addressed the social urgency of change.
YYY deals above all with the visual culture of “poor” magazines printed off-set, their amazing graphics and their aesthetics liberated in integration with the system of activism and political interventions. In this way the pages of newspapers deal with facts and news, but also support the subversive style and that fervent environment that formed a social network of printers, creative autonomy and trade unions for distribution. In this systemic innovation, the democratization of the press stimulated the experimentation of graphic design on the one hand and the growth of the editorial practice in a culture extended to the community on the other.
The magazines have been cataloged according to themes and, even if placed in an incomplete geography, testify an international cultural scenario between Europe and America. YYY is a collection of countless documents on civil rights and liberation movements, which aims not only to preserve, but also to browse the living pages spreading radical contents and creative layouts.

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.