A visual and poetic investigation of the enigmatic figure of the "Middleman", combining short punchlines and full-page illustrations, which are wryly reminiscent of Kafka's fictional world. The publication comes with a cardboard puppet, to be screwed and assembled.

Who is the Middleman? A viewer? An author who mediates between the world of ideas and the material world by creating drawings, sculptures, and texts? A simplified and symbolic puppet that can be moved by various forces?

In his latest book, artist Honza Zamojski makes an illustrative and poetic attempt to describe the Middlemen, their everyday life, and the realities that surround them. The book's short punchlines mark the rhythm of the Middelmen's life and their movements in the illustrations, which are wryly reminiscent of Kafka's fictional world.

Produced by the International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC) in Ljubljana and realized on the occasion of the exhibition Middleman in 2023, the publication comes with a Middleman cardboard puppet, literally the "hero taken from the book and put aside," a  playful object to be screwed together, assembled, and dealt with, sometimes feeling a bit guilty.

A collection of essays and a critical attempt to rethink and improve the relationship between artists and art institutions and to give visibility to the precarious, complex, and very often existential reality of the art workers.

"Beneath the glamorous surface of the art world—the openings and dinner parties, the record-breaking auction prices, the media attention—lies a reality that is precarious, complex, and very often existential: only a tiny minority of artists support themselves with their work and fewer still manage to do so throughout their lives. This book tells those other stories, for example of artistic practices grounded in performance, research, and political activism. These practices are not necessarily oriented toward producing marketable objects. Thousands of artists around the world, at all latitudes, struggle every day under precarious work conditions, in the absence of shared rules, and with a debilitating sense of insecurity caused not only by the threat of global pandemics but also by war and political oppression, resurgent nuclear threat, competition for dwindling resources, and perhaps most pressing of all, the climate crisis.The economic challenge of supporting oneself as an artist immediately turns into an ethical one." — Andrea Bellini

The book is a reprint of a cult text of post-1968 psychedelic culture: The Rainbow Book, published in 1975 in Berkeley, California, on the occasion of The Rainbow Show exhibition held at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

The Rainbow Book is a collection of essays and illustrations devoted to the rainbow and color spectra, analyzing the significance of color (both physical and metaphysical) from antiquity to modern times.

An encyclopedia of the cultural and artistic manifestations of the rainbow: in myth, magic and paintings, as well as in prints and poems. The book includes poems by Virgil, Dante, Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, and others; paintings by Giotto, Bosch, Van der Weyden, Dürer, Rubens, Blake, Turner, Constable, and Church; and the sacred art of Tibet.

The book is printed on sheets of different colors, according to the rainbow spectrum, and reports notions of increasing complexity, accessible at first to younger readers and later to the more experienced and interested in the subject.

The reprint accompanies the exhibition Rainbow. Colors and Wonders between Myths, Arts and Science at MUDEC in Milan (February 16–July 2, 2023), and the release of the first issue of MUdec United.

A new revised version of the notebook of the legendary American dancer, artist and choreographer Simone Forti in which she shares her poetry as well as her thoughts on dance, the body, writing, the state of the world. A collection of experimental texts, imagined dialogues, news animations and poetic thoughts on life and politics. The book contains an afterword by Fred Dewey and a postscript by poet and Fluxus artist Jackson MacLow.

American dancer and choreographer Simone Forti (born 1935 in Florence, Italy) has been a leading figure in the development of contemporary performance over more than fifty years. Artist, choreographer, dancer, writer, Forti has dedicated herself to the research of a kinesthetic awareness, always engaging with experimentation and improvisation. Investigating the relationship between object and body, through animal studies, news animations and land portraits, she reconfigured the concept of performance and dance. Forti emigrated from Italy with her family via Switzerland to Los Angeles in 1938, where she subsequently studied for four years with choreographer Anna Halprin and has since spent most of her life. She joined the experimental downtown art scene in New York during the emergence of performance art, process-based work and Minimal Art and spent a fruitful time in Rome in the late 1960s, where she used the spaces of L'Attico to study and perform. Her work is seen as a precursor of the famous Judson Dance Theater—a group of artists experimenting with dance, including Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer—and Minimal Art, although she prefers to be referred simply as a "movement artist."

Combining art and activism, semiotics and capitalism, art and finance, control and subversion, Monitoring Control by Paolo Cirio represents a critique of the social manipulation imposed by new technologies, while examining the counter-control that individuals can implement to dismantle these forces, sabotage them, and protect themselves.

The book presents a collection of ten texts by Paolo Cirio, artist, hacktivist, one of the most attentive investigators in the artistic field of the effects of the information society. With a text by Bruce Sterling and a conversation between Christian Marazzi, Marco Scotini, and Paolo Cirio himself, it gives visual and verbal form to all the forces that control our existence: new media such as Instagram, Facebook, mugshot websites, Google Street View, etc., highlighting the overt yet covert ways in which these tools control our daily activities and lives.

The volume is accompanied by a gallery of images representing some of the thousands of patents of algorithms collected by Cirio on the web to highlight the tools used on the Internet and by artificial intelligence for surveillance and social manipulation.

The control of images, their authentication as facts, the possibility of making visible portions of reality removed from our gaze through pixelation–a technique in which the image becomes unrecognizable–are the central themes of the artist's research.

The cycle, created by recombining advertising photos alongside images of mutilated bodies, aims to stimulate a cultural and political reflection on the visual imagery of our contemporary world, on what is made public and what is concealed or censored. Hirschhorn overturns the selective logic with which images are normally shown: he pixelates capitalism, the consumerism to which visual culture is constantly subjected, and de-pixelates the most dramatic reality; he makes visible what comes to our eyes without mediation, and invisible or only partially visible what arrives artificial or filtered. 

In addition to essays by the curators and international critics, the catalog includes an anthology of Thomas Hirschhorn's writings and an unpublished text. A section of the volume is dedicated to research materials and the sources used by the artist to create his works: paintings by other authors, advertising and reportage images, books, and short texts. The book is also accompanied by a rich iconographic apparatus that documents the installation views, and the images collected in the Catalog Raisonné, a complete documentation of the 122 Pixel-Collage.

Conceived entirely by the artist on the occasion of the homonymous solo exhibition at MAXXI, Rome, this volume documents Thomas Hirschhorn's research on Pixel-Collage, an impressive cycle of works realized between 2015 and 2017.

Edited by Hou Hanru and Luigia Lonardelli.
Texts by Thomas Hirschhorn, Hou Hanru, Luigia Lonardelli, Lisa Lee, Nataša Petrešin Bachelez, Yasmil Raymond, Dirk Snauwaert.

The ultimate ambition of this book-tool is to “disappear on the street”. Its pages collect words and stories of people whose right to exist and be visible in public spaces was forced to confront the concepts of “legality” and “justice”.

Considering the assumption that the law is a fluid parameter, which changes depending on where we are in the world, the historical period in which we live and the sort of privileges we enjoy, the law defines what is considered moral, licit, in other words, what is right. It distributes power and the perception of power in society, defining, categorizing, dividing and controlling.

WILL YOU MARRY ME? is a public lecture and an artist’s book by Sara Leghissa and Marzia Dalfini, investigating a specific portion of the spectrum of illegality, namely the relationship between illegal acts and public space. It explores how we can act disobedience before everyone’s eyes, suggesting possible forms of complicity and public resistance.

All the content was collected by the artist during meetings and conversations that took place in Prato, Milan, Ramallah, Marseille, Madrid, Nyon and Lausanne and with this book-tool their words become manifestos that the reader is invited to detach and relocate into the public space.

Designed by Marzia Dalfini. Published by NERO with the support of L’Altra.

Format: 42 x 29,7 cm
Pages: 28
Language: IT / EN
Year: 2021

A reference book containing all the transcripts of Simone Forti's News Animations.

The book is the complete collection of Simone Forti's News Animations, one of the works that best reveal her artistic practice. The news and, more broadly, the most pressing issues of the global socio-political situation, are used to explore the potential of language, its dimensions, and its combination with dance, movements, words, images, and music. Simone Forti has always "danced" the news, it's the way she tells them. But, above all, it's the way she internalizes them, feels them, and processes them. Through a stream of consciousness, the artist grants voice and body to thoughts about the world, its conflicts, war, injustices, and inequalities. 

The volume collects Simone Forti's News Animations from 1980 to 2018—through the transcriptions of the performances, images, and drawings—seeking to capture their spirit, their poetic stance and, mostly, understand how they manage to describe the society and the world we live in.

Introduction by Luca Lo Pinto
Published August 2021

First retrospective monograph: an essential resource for any in-depth critical study of Chiara Fumai's work and thought, including a first systematic analysis of her oeuvre.

This book is dedicated to the complex artistic trajectory of Chiara Fumai, who played a significant role in the development of performance and feminist aesthetics in the twenty-first century and who died prematurely in 2017, at the age of only thirty-nine. Conceived as a critical monograph on Fumai's work as a visual artist, performer, DJ and music curator, Poems I Will Never Release is the first volume to trace the entirety of her artistic path: from her scathing video performances and large-scale installations, to her more intimist practices of automatic writing and collage and her incursions into music.

Almost 500 pages long, the volume is divided into three main chapters. The first of these brings together essays by prominent writers, curators and artists who examine Chiara Fumai's work from various perspectives, highlighting its intersections with anarchism, feminism, ideological forms and discourses of power and oppression, the animal rights movement, theater, surrealism and esotericism. The second chapter presents an imposing iconographic apparatus that documents Chiara Fumai's entire artistic production, from 2007 to 2017, while the third offers an exhaustively detailed chronology and bibliography. 

The book collects essays by Irene Aristizábal, Andrea Bellini, Federico Campagna, Milovan Farronato, Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, Mara Montanaro, Chus Martínez, Paulina Olowska and Giovanna Zapperi, as well as conversations between Raimundas Malašauskas and Gabriel Lester, and Cristiana Perrella and Marcello Bellan. The chronology and bibliography are edited by Sara de Chiara.

A body of essays and visual contributions by radical theorists around the prosthesis and the "augmented body" issues.

"We all need means of supplementing our natural capabilities, since nature is indifferent, inhuman (extra-human), and inclement; we are born naked and with insufficient armour."  — Le Corbusier

Once confined to the narrow circle of "medicalizing" practices, the prosthesis finally colonized our imagination thanks to the promise of an "augmented body" capable of undermining traditional dichotomies such as artificial vs. natural and organic vs. non-organic. But what are their speculative, theoretical and political repercussions? In this selection of original papers, the authors of Insufficient Armour reflect on the subject from their own peculiar perspectives, each of them contributing essays, political-philosophical analysis and theory fiction experiments.

Texts and contributions by Luigi Alberto Cippini, Matt Colquhoun, Helen Hester, Simon Sellars.

Italian edition

Cosa succede quando il genere umano, dopo aver irrimediabilmente alterato gli equilibri del pianeta Terra, smette di essere il centro del mondo? E nel pieno della crisi ecologica, che relazioni è possibile recuperare non solo tra individui umani, ma tra tutte le specie che il pianeta lo abitano? In questo testo denso ed emozionante, scritto in una lingua immaginifica che si ispira tanto alla fantascienza quanto alla grande lezione del femminismo radicale, Donna Haraway ci ricorda che tutto è interconnesso, tutto è contaminato, tutto ci riguarda. Contro i semplicismi delle discussioni sull’antropocene, Chthulucene immortala la centralità di Donna Haraway tra i più importanti e originali pensatori del nostro tempo.

La caccia alle streghe è tornata scatenare nel XXI secolo una nuova ondata di violenza, interpersonale e istituzionale, contro le donne. E anche oggi, come nel Medioevo, questa violenza misogina che demonizza la donna procede di pari passo con l’accumulazione capitalistica, che si sviluppa attraverso processi di espropriazione e distruzione dei rapporti di solidarietà e potere che regolano la vita delle comunità.

Silvia Federici esamina le cause profonde della guerra in atto, fatta non solo di violenza domestica e sessuale, ma anche economica e strutturale, il cui esito è ancora una volta quello di sovvertire i processi di riproduzione sociale per spaccare le comunità e aprire la strada all’individualismo funzionale al progetto neoliberista. Caccia alle streghe, guerra alle donne è un’indagine sulle cause di questa nuova violenza e una chiamata femminista alle armi, che attraverso la memoria e l’analisi del passato offre spunti inediti per le lotte a venire.

Hyperemployment – Post-work, Online Labour and Automation is an attempt to scrutinise and explore some of these issues. A catchphrase borrowed from media theorist Ian Bogost, describing “the Exhausting Work of the Technology User,” hyperemployment allows us to grasp a situation which the current pandemic has turned endemic, to analyse the present and discuss possible futures.

Edited by Domenico Quaranta and Janez Janša, featuring words by !Mediengruppe Bitnik (Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo) and Felix Stalder, Silvio Lorusso, Luciana Parisi, and Domenico Quaranta and works by !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Danilo Correale, Elisa Giardina Papa, Sanela Jahić, Silvio Lorusso, Jonas Lund, Michael Mandiberg, Eva and Franco Mattes, Anna Ridler, Sebastian Schmieg, Sašo Sedlaček, and Guido Segni.