Monumento (2022) is an artistic intervention by Edoardo Tresoldi, commissioned by Generali, promoter of the restoration of the building carried out by the David Chipperfield Architects studio. The building is the Home of The Human Safety Net Foundation, a global movement of people helping people, active in twenty-six countries with a network of NGOs, volunteers and partners that work with those living in vulnerable conditions so that they can transform the lives of their families and communities.

These pages archive the visual and written tracks of those elements that defined the creation of Monumento, an installation built inside the Procuratie Vecchie in Venice.

An extreme weather event hit north-eastern Italy in October 2018. The Sirocco wind blew up to 200 kilometres per hour through the Dolomite valleys, knocking some 14 million trees to the ground. The incessant rain caused torrents to overflow, dragging logs and debris downstream. Overnight, the inhabitants of a number of mountain communities in Trentino,Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia found their cellars flooded and even their houses torn apart by the winds.
More than six years later, the consequences of storm Vaia are still visible and tangible. The slopes of various mountains are barren. The remaining forests have been invaded by the spruce bark beetle: a parasite that feeds on wood. Without the plants, there is no protection against landslides and avalanches. While experts and locals are rolling up their sleeves to try and bring the situation back to normal, the total economic damage has been estimated at three billion euros.

OHT chiude il progetto su Frankenstein con una pubblicazione che raccoglie la ricerca e i viaggi di Filippo Andreatta mentre ripercorre i luoghi e i posti prediletti dalla creatura. Un libro che si presenta esso stesso come un oggetto mostruoso: innestate tra le pagine di Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley appaiono le forme sceniche e i materiali prodotti dall’incontro tra OHT e il romanzo. Sono lembi, frammenti, lacerti di opere la cui vita avviene altrove e che qui interagiscono con il testo di Shelley facendolo esplodere. Un insieme di sovrapposizioni e assemblaggi che formano una diversa prospettiva sul nostro presente. Il volume ripubblica l’edizione del romanzo del 1831 di Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley innestando sopra le sue parole i materiali prodotti attraverso la ricerca artistica di OHT. Una creatura che tiene assieme una serie di viaggi alla ricerca del mostro, uno spettacolo teatrale, una reading session, un EP, un adattamento filmico, un’installazione e un radiodramma abortito.

Fort Biennale 01 — In the Body of Language
edited by Franzensfeste Fortress, Ulrike Buck and Margareth Kaserer

With:
Altınstark, Özlem Altın, Ellinor Aurora Aasgaard & Zayne Armstrong, Gianfranco Baruchello, Alighiero Boetti, melanie bonajo, Alexandra Cardenas, Max Castlunger, Carlfriedrich Claus, Roberta Dapunt, Tracey Emin, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Sylvie Fleury, Julia Frank, Chiara Fumai, Siggi Hofer, Hannes Hoelzl, Roni Horn, Brigitte Kowanz, Sophia Mairer, Beatrice Marchi, Nadja Verena Marcin, Maurizio Nannucci, Bruce Nauman, Masatoshi Noguchi, Sunny Pfalzer, Caroline Profanter, Egon Rusina, Toni Schmale, Berty Skuber, Lawrence Weiner, Karin Welponer, Jörg Zemmle

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.