Speaking Nearby blends theoretical orientations and artistic gestures that embody various degrees of intimacy, sympathy, and permeability. The researchers and artists in the 10-month residency at Istituto Svizzero, within the framework of Roma Calling 2023/2024, present punctual emergences of their research, revealing the intra-action between bodies and matter through different protocols of encounters, the attunement to certain environments, and the transformations resonating within situated processes.

Iva Lulashi. Love as a Glass of Water is the catalogue for the homonymous exhibition at the Albanian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2024, Stranieri ovunque – Strangers Everywhere.
The “Theory of the Glass of Water”, linked to radical thinker and feminist Alexandra Kollontai (St. Petersburg, 1872 – Moscow, 1952), calls for a sexual and emotional revolution in which impulses are seen as simple human needs, to be satisfied with the ease and carefreeness with which a glass of water is usually drunk.
Love, desire, impulse and sexuality are the essence of Iva Lulashi’s work, transcending boundaries and uniting multiple perspectives. Inspired by the erotic media, Lulashi captures stills from films and videos, igniting the creative process for her artworks, which predominantly feature female figures. These works subtly suggest scenarios of potential eroticism, evoking emotions of strength, fear, hope and a longing for freedom. They serve as a tribute to female desire, reflecting unresolved pasts intertwined with global political issues that are encountered on a daily basis.

Art for Radical Ecologies is a platform impulsed by Institute of Radical Imagination that brings together art workers and eco-activists to discuss the role art can play in the creation of new radical ecologies. The Art for Radical Ecologies Manifesto is the initial result of our collective writing, to reflect on the positioning and role of art within the interconnected struggles for climate and ecological justice. The essays in the book expand on the main points presented in the 16 articles of the Manifesto: the need to intertwine new materialisms and historical materialism; the specification of who the subjects of the struggles are in a more-than-human perspective; the setting of possible strategies against censorship and artwashing, and a radical critique of extractivism and colonialism.

Contributors
Andrea Conte (Andreco), Léna Balaud, Marco Baravalle, Manuel Borja-Villel, Emanuele Braga, Ashley Dawson, Rosa Jijón and Francesco Martone, Oliver Ressler, Tiziana Terranova, The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life (Ovidiu Țichindeleanu, Raluca Voinea), The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Isa Fremeaux, Jay Jordan), Federica Timeto, Igor Vamos, Françoise Vergès (with Maddalena Fragnito, Marco Baravalle)

Il suolo, oltre ad avere significati metaforici, rappresenta un ecosistema complesso che porta con sé narrazioni letterali e materiali: è una struttura per le città, un nutriente per le piante e può avere un’influenza sulle tecnologie per il sostentamento umano.
La scienza del suolo, nata nell’Ottocento, studia la complessità di questo elemento, coinvolgendo, oltre a geologi e agronomi, figure provenienti da diverse discipline, tra cui l’antropologia, l’economia, e l’arte.
Soils Matter nasce nell’ambito di Scientific Visualisations: Impact on Practice [SVIP], un progetto di ricerca interdisciplinare sviluppato presso la Libera Università di Bolzano tra il 2019 e il 2021 e nato dalla collaborazione tra ricercatori e ricercatrici della Facoltà di Design e Arti, e della Facoltà di Scienze Agrarie, Ambientali e Alimentari.
Il volume raccoglie contributi che riflettono sull’intersezione tra diversi ambiti professionali, esplorando il suolo attraverso diverse prospettive disciplinari.
Soils Matter è a cura di Elisabetta Rattalino, German A. Duarte, Andrea Facchetti e include testi di Giovanni Aloi, Maria Elena Balza, Marcello Barison, BAU – Institute for Contemporary Art and Ecology (Simone Mair & Lisa Mazza), Luigimaria Borruso, Elena Mazzi, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Giulia Mengozzi e Camilla Rossi-Linnemann. Il volume presenta le traduzioni inedite di testi di John Dupré & Gemma Anderson, Jussi Parikka e Maria Puig de la Bellacasa.

published on the occasion of the exhibition Appunti Fotografici. La Venezia di Luigi Ferrigno, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venezia

“Over the course of more than fifty years, Luigi Ferrigno has observed and documented Venice, going beyond the picture-postcard stereotypes to reaffirm the city’s uniqueness and myriad contradictions. His is an attentive look, capable of entering the folds of daily life, pondering the passing of time and the themes of a divided Italy in the post-war years, between the euphoria of freedom and the difficulties of the country’s reconstruction. But his approach is also discreet, revealing unexpected glimpses and points of view that are never trite, and which fully inscribe Ferrigno within the tradition of what has been defined as humanist photography.”

“Nel corso di oltre cinquant’anni, Luigi Ferrigno ha osservato e documentato Venezia, superando gli stereotipi da cartolina e restituendone l’unicità e le molteplici contraddizioni. Uno sguardo attento, capace di entrare nelle pieghe della quotidianità, di soffermarsi sullo scorrere del tempo e sui temi di un’Italia divisa, negli anni del dopoguerra, tra l’euforia della libertà e le difficoltà della ricostruzione. Ma anche un approccio discreto, che restituisce scorci inattesi e punti di vista mai scontati, iscrivendo appieno Ferrigno nel solco di quella che viene definita fotografia umanista.”

Lorenza Bravetta

Italy is the country with the most UNESCO World Heritage sites. This enormous artistic and natural heritage attracts more than 60 million visitors from all over the world every year.

“The often passive fruition of attractions by tourists as they traipse along the routes from one absolutely unmissable place to the next, as sold to them by tour operators or cultural marketing strategies, is at last offered redemption here in the appropriation of such experience. Thanks to Louis De Belle’s work, while following in the footsteps of their more sophisticated eighteenth-century ancestors, today’s travellers take on an active role here in the use of their mobile phone cameras – a key tool for interpretation and reading, very much on a par with the notebook and fountain pen tucked into the pockets of young gentlemen on the Grand Tour of yesteryear. […]” Alessandro Morandotti

a cura di / edited by Cristina Cobianchi

Coordinamento progetto editoriale / Editorial supervision Marta Bracci

Testi / Texts Carola Barbero, Arianna Cecconi, Cristina Cobianchi, Davide Dal Sasso, Anna Daneri, Diletta De Cristofaro, Alessandra Donati, Jean-Paul Felley, Eva Frapiccini, Federica Martini, Giulia Palomba, Vincenzo Santarcangelo, Paola Ugolini

Contributi di / Contributions by Sara Berts, Ali MacGilp, Daniele Ninarello, Zane Onckule, Alberto Peola, Catalina Quijano, Alexandra Stock, Michele Tavano, Paola Tognon

The King is dead, long live The King! restages Tiane Doan na Champassak’s first self-published artist’s book, The King of Photography. Back in 2011, the volume was gathering a collection of images found on the internet which represented King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand with a photographic camera. The King was a keen photographer and was rarely seen without this device. After the King’s death in 2016, Doan na Champassak decided to complete his iconographic research with a new arsenal of images depicting the former King and his beloved camera in a “sequel” limited to 250 copies: The King is dead, long live The King!

Conserving the Future is the book that bears witness to twenty-five years of curating contemporary art in the same place: the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice. It is a long time in which curator Chiara Bertola has been able to observe the metamorphoses and rebirth of this ancient palace, which, through the different visions of the artists projected into its spaces, have made it many places each time. Conserving the Future is a program and a working method based on the relationship with time, the past, and history because in every project the historical place becomes a subject that asks to be seen, recognised, listened to and then opened to dialogue with present. Chiara Bertola recounts, in a single text that trace the site-specific exhibitions from 1997 to 2022, the questions, thoughts, and discoveries made together with the artists living with them the creative process. She defines a curatorial line beyond the canonical and consolidated confines, focused on the concepts of precariousness and instability. The perception of a time never closed, the intuition of hidden possibilities behind established meanings and the search for margins of meaning revealed beyond the usual confines become the keys to open up unexpected poetic worlds.

I don’t care (About Football) is a participatory artistic project involving the players of the Marangoni 105 football team, created in 2011 as part of one of the rehabilitation residences of the Udine Mental Health Department managed by the Duemilauno Agenzia Sociale Cooperative. The title, inspired by the words of a girl from the community, suggests how the game is not an end in itself but rather a practice of social inclusion and integration. Marangoni 105 is made up of service users together with its operators and supporters. They all wear the number 14, that of the legendary Ajax player Johan Cruijff – one of the most emblematic proponents of total football. Over three years of mutual understanding and hard work, workshops were held in which, through artistic-expressive practices, there was a choral reflection on mental discomfort and on the path undertaken over the course of the residence. Photographs, meetings, travel, training, stretching sessions, performance actions, interviews, writing exercises and collages are the actions that transform the art object into a place of dialogue, where it is the discovery of the other and the self that takes centre stage. The process of analysis/self-analysis turns into a creative impetus via the appropriation and re-signification of images. Through the cut lines around the bodies, it thus becomes easier to investigate that ‘not’, that ‘not’ that gave the project its name, that difficulty which is such a common trait of existence yet to which it is very difficult to give voice, form and meaning.

I don’t care (about football) è un progetto artistico-partecipativo che coinvolge le giocatrici e i giocatori della squadra di calcio Marangoni 105. La Marangoni 105 nasce nel 2011 all’interno di una delle residenze riabilitative del Dipartimento di Salute Mentale di Udine gestita dalla Cooperativa Duemilauno Agenzia Sociale. Il titolo, ispirato dalle parole di una ragazza della comunità, suggerisce come il gioco non sia fine a sé stesso, ma un esercizio di inclusione e integrazione sociale. La squadra è composta, infatti, dagli e dalle utenti insieme a operatrici e operatori, sostenitrici e sostenitori. Tutti vestono il numero 14 di Johan Cruijff, leggendario giocatore dell’Ajax, inventore del calcio totale. Durante tre anni di conoscenza e lavoro, Iacolutti ha attivato dei laboratori in cui si è riflettuto coralmente sul disagio mentale e sul percorso svolto in residenza, usando il calcio come metafora di un percorso e di un’esperienza di cura. La ricerca si compone di fotografie, incontri, viaggi, allenamenti, sedute di stretching, interviste, progetti, esercizi di scrittura e collage, tutte azioni che trasformano l’oggetto d’arte in un luogo del dialogo, in cui è la scoperta dell’altro e del sé ad assumere centralità. Il processo di analisi e autoanalisi si converte allora in moto creativo che diviene parte dell’opera stessa; è attraverso le sagome ritagliate dei corpi che si indaga sul “non” che ha dato nome al progetto, quel negativo a cui è complesso dare voce, forma, senso.

with texts by / con testi di Maddalena Fragnito, Giulia Iacolutti, Igor Peres, Tiziano Possamai

Michel Butor’s Description of San Marco (1963) is an unusual book; an unorthodox intermingling of overheard dialogue from the iconic Venetian square in question, thick descriptions of persons and buildings, along with sober historical information. In the original, each genre of information is assigned a distinct typography of its own, hence interacting like voices in a play.

Six decades later, the artist Giovanna Silva stumbled upon an English translation of the French essayist’s queer text in an archive at the New York Public Library. Returning to Venice, she cast her eye to the square and its surrounds, an iconic space at once populated by signs of contemporary life, but also astonishingly unchanged.

Art for UBI is a manifesto: the world of art positions itself in favor of universal and unconditional basic income, placing in the foreground its advantageous conditions in economic, social and ecological terms. The manifesto was born as collective writing within the School of Mutations, a project of the Institute of Radical Imagination, an international platform of artists, researchers, activists and curators engaged in the experimentation of post-capitalist artistic practices. In addition to the introduction by the curators, the volume contains the contributions of diverse artists, theorists and activists addressing UBI in the panorama of the generalized precariousness of artistic work, the demand for income in transfeminist and decolonial struggles, mutualism practices in the independent art scene, the relationship between finance, fabulation and crypto philosophy.

The volume includes the dramaturgy of Una Renta, Muchos Mundos / One Income, Many Worlds, a performative investigation by IRI on the subject of income conducted in Madrid involving a diverse sample of residents. The performance was staged at the Reina Sofia Museum in the framework of the program On The Precipice of Time. Practices of insurgent imagination. The Zapatista Forum in September 2021.

Texts by Emanuele Braga, Kuba Szreder, Ilenia Caleo, Maddalena Fragnito and Raising Care Assembly, Gabriela Cabaña and Julio Linares, Erik Bordeleau

Cabins is the outcome of Matteo Ghidoni’s theoretical and critical research on “being”. Relying on architectural drawing, and through the investigation of a human most basic needs, Ghidoni produces ten abstractions of architecture, dedicated to the care of body and soul.
Cabins are not residential units as described by modern architecture; they do not impose fixed domestic functions although they anticipate potential daily actions by organizing them around a certain minimum number of elements: a bath- tub, a sitting area, a shower, a shelf, and little more.
The sober character of the project is defined by the drawing exercise, bound to essential principles imposed on the sheet: the rigorous use of axonometry, the grid system for clad- ding, the repetition of standardized elements. They all come together describing the selfimposed and subtly circumvented rules of the game.

EUPavilion Eight proposals features eight projects for the first European Pavilion at the Venice Biennale drawing on both artistic and architectural practices from across Europe. Armature Globale, BB (Alessandro Bava and Fabrizio Ballabio) in collaboration with Tomaso De Luca, Jasmina Cibic, Diogo Passarinho Studio, Plan Común, Something Fantastic, TEN and Evita Vasiljeva were invited by the curators of the exhibition to reimagine the national pavilion – to this day the dominant symbolic and spatial paradigm in the Giardini and the Biennale context in general.

The EUPavilion catalogue is conceived as the collection of the results of the EUPavilion Eight Proposals exhibition alongside the research produced by the collective since 2018. It also features two essays by Sebastiano Fabbrini and Carlo Palazzolo. Its design is both a homage and a challenge to the bureaucratic aesthetics of EU publishing.

Argh! is an onomatopoeia which references a bodily expression, a state of mind described through a sound rather than words. It hints at fatigue, exhaustion but also a reaction and a release of the body towards a situation or an environment. Argh! introduces the recurring presence of the body in Davide Savorani’s series of private notebooks through drawings. They are an expressive necessity, but also an artistic tool of enquiry, a source of ideas, space for personal confessions and emotions.
This publication is an intense selection of drawings the artist made in the last 15 years. In doing this, we have paid attention to the crossing of visual scripts for performative actions, written materials describing personal occurrences or delving into theoretical obsessions. Rather than categorise or index the drawings, the graphic design as well as the text commissioned to and composed by Allison Grimaldi Donahue, embrace a lexicon of fragments, of chance overlapping and of close memories, triggered, yet not contained, by the drawings.

Argh! è un’onomatopea che rimanda a una manifestazione del corpo, a uno stato d’animo, cedendo a un suono la possibilità di esprimerlo. Allude alla stanchezza, all’esaurimento, ma anche a una reazione e a una liberazione del corpo nei confronti di una situazione o di un ambiente. Argh! riporta la presenza ricorrente del corpo nei disegni di Davide Savorani raccolti in diari personali. Il disegno per Davide Savorani è diventato una necessità espressiva, ma anche uno strumento artistico di indagine, una fonte di idee a cui attingere, uno spazio per confessioni private ed emozioni.
La pubblicazione è frutto di un’intensa selezione di disegni realizzati negli ultimi 15 anni. Nel concepirla, si è prestata attenzione alla sovrapposizione di script visivi pensati per azioni performative assieme a materiali scritti che descrivono avvenimenti personali o che approfondiscono ossessioni teoriche. Invece di categorizzare o indicizzare il materiale delle pagine dei taccuini, la coreografia grafica scelta così come le nuove parole scritte da Allison Grimaldi Donahue, abbracciano un lessico di frammenti, di sovrapposizioni casuali e di ricordi vicini, innescati, ma non contenuti, nei disegni stessi.

The book talks about graffiti writing, or more simply, writing. About tags, sprays, streets and letters. With the photographs and words of its protagonists, it tells the birth and evolution of this phenomenon in Italy, how a handful of kids changed the face of our cities forever. All it took was minimal resources, a lot of perseverance and a fair dose of style. Signatures appear on the ground, on lamp posts, on tall buildings, in the tunnels of the metro and on public transport. They are the triumph of overbearing individualism, a reaction to the city itself that tends to dissolve the individual.

Il libro parla di graffiti writing, o semplicemente di writing. Di nomi, spray, strade e lettere. Con le fotografie e le parole dei suoi protagonisti racconta la nascita e l’evoluzione del fenomeno in Italia, di come una manciata di ragazzi ha cambiato per sempre il volto delle nostre città. Sono bastati pochi mezzi, tanta perseveranza e una buona dose di stile. Le firme appaiono per terra, sui pali della luce, sui palazzi più alti, nei tunnel del metrò e sui mezzi pubblici. Sono il trionfo dell’individualismo prepotente, una reazione alla città stessa che tende a dissolvere il singolo.

with / con
Sonda, Vandalo, Graffio, Naps, KayOne, Rae, Dumbo, Verbo, Fone, Creso, Longe, Hekto, Zeal, Ouch, Utero, Zuek, Cento, Rame, Naso, Poison, Ver, Stand, Rocks, Jason, Heman, Atomo, Fumo, Joys, Peeta, Fayer, Zeal, Lemon, Sky4, ZeroT, Dayaki, Solow, Rendo, Spyder7, FlyCat, Drop C, Mace, Sika, Rusty, Kaos, Panda, Styng, Bean, Dem, Boost, Tawa, Metro, Airone, Eron, Lego, Dra, Krisa, Arix, Texas, Mind, Zoe, Blast, Fra32, Clock, Nitro, Muko, Trota, Sand, Rayn, Kid, Mastro K, Isey, Chob, Magma, Dafne, Senz, Karma, Evian, Oste, Brus, Pilchi, Snitch, Sher, Sera, Game, Zelda, Jamba, Sayko, Besk, Secse, Capo, Filthy, Hero, Worn, Rats, Files, Dodge, Wish, Rohw, Ringo, Font, Chaos, Rud, Onil, Enko4, Sherif, Matar, Norma, Dirty, Loser, Spice, Zeus, Neo, Pazol, Opium, Eroin, Giose, Cromo, Vins, Smit, P.zee, Fonser, Aber, Kotone, Tapes, Gees, Noce, Reps, Nemo, Swoc, Rhum, Daze, Rancy, Tyson, Doz, Kers
and many others… / e molti altri…

Works by: Andrea Abati, Giampietro Agostini, Giovanni Ambrosio / Sébastien Louis, Autopalo / Gli Impresari, Davide Baldrati, Olivo Barbieri, Gabriele Basilico, Walter Battistessa, Ruth Beraha, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Mario Cattaneo, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Cesare Colombo, Mario Cresci, Matteo de Mayda, Emilio Deodato, Paola Di Bello, Vittore Fossati, Federico Garolla, Carlo Garzia, Ando Gilardi, Giulia Iacolutti, Giuseppe Iannello, Mimmo Jodice, Martino Marangoni, Paola Pagliuca, Piero Pozzi, Marco Previdi, Daniele Segre, The Cool Couple, Hans van der Meer, A.S. Velasca, Fulvio Ventura, Manfred Willmann