Texts by Pier Paolo Tamburelli, Noura Al Sayeh
Taken at the height of the Assad days, the images of the photographer Giovanna Silva overlap in this publication with Syrian tourist guides’ images and texts, creating a net of intended and unintended relationships and time interconnections. As Pier Paolo Tamburelli writes in his essay, “Silva’s photo speak of time that is twice lost. […] When I look at them, I can smell that apparently eternal condition of no-change in Syria before 2011. I recognize the omnipresent, idiotic smile of Bashar – at the time still considered the gentle son of Hafez al-Assad (the ophthalmologist who lived in London and did not really wanted to leave to become a dictator and who finally had to substitute the nasty brother probably killed by Mossad). Now that the civil war has erased everything that belonged to that Syria, now that everything changed, I have the impression that that world is way more lost than many other episodes of the past. Both for Syrians and for foreigners the memories of the civil war will occupy all the space that could have been dedicated to these last twenty years of Syrian history. […] Not only are those moments gone, but they will not be remembered. The boredom of that period entirely disappeared in the cruel excitement of the war. The pictures are a strange homage to a lost world”.

€25.00

Buy it

Follow Me is a book created for the exhibition by Susan Philipsz in the city of Genoa. Designed on the basis of a contemporary Baedeker, this book offers an original itinerary in the city, read through the work of the Scottish artist, invited by the Museum of Villa Croce in conceiving an exhibition inside the historic center of the city. The book is thus a city-guide that links different places and times, and that also moves from the habit of moving, investigated as a typical phenomenon of the Grand Tour – and that is the origin of the term “tourism”.

Susan Philipsz (Glasgow, 1965) won the prestigious Turner Prize in 2010 and has presented her installations in 2007 at Skulptur Projekte, Muenster, in 2012 at documenta13, Kassel and in 2015 at the Istanbul Biennial. Susan Philipsz has gained widespread recognition in the international artworld for the sharp execution of her works, unique in their genre, based on the rigorous analysis of the history, memory, and traditions of a specific place that she transposes into immaterial architectures creating an introspective environment for the “viewer”. The universal narrative of loss, hope, and homecoming is conveyed through the reproduction of tunes and melodies that, blending with the genius loci, generate a subjective storytelling.

€25.00

Buy it

Fara Fara means face-to-face in Lingala and is a musical phenomenon deeply rooted in Congolese culture. Two groups play at the same time at adjacent locations, and the ones who play longest win. In times gone by, disputes were sometimes settled in this way; nowadays, it is more about musical leadership. A Fara Fara is a massive event attracting huge crowds, but it happens very rarely.

This book is about a film where a Fara Fara takes place in Kinshasa, a musical battle between the two major proponents of Congolese contemporary rumba. The film has not been made yet. It will be directed by the artist Carsten Höller and the film director Måns Månsson.

The book contains photographs taken during various preparatory trips, made since 2001 by Pierre Björk, Hoyte van Hoytema, Reed Kram, Armin Linke, Giovanna Silva, Patrik Strömdahl and the directors. The Swedish writer and music cognoscente Elin Unnes provided the text.

Concept: Carsten Höller
Graphic design: Christoph Steinegger/ Interkool
Text: Elin Unnes

PVC softcover, hot foil

€30.00

Buy it

I spent more than two months alone on a bicycle, travelling along the perimeter of the Italian peninsula, and then two weeks cycling around Sardinia. I put together hundreds of images of horizons which, day after day, came to form a chromatic stave of seas and skies. Finally, from the confines of my studio, image after image, I pieced back together a fair part of the Italian skyline. (A.R.)
Three years passed between the first journey around the peninsula, over the summer of 2011, and the second journey around Sardinia, in the summer of 2014. This book brings together the photographs that currently make up the work Orizzonte in Italia, starting out from the visual, graphical and theoretical notes that accompanied the artist.

Antonio Rovaldi was born in parma in 1975. The artist’s research moves around the relative themes and perceptions of spaces and landscapes, always showing the relations of the different materials used, like that of photography, video, sculptures and drawings. Since 2006 Rovaldi divides his time between Milan and New York. His recent solo shows include: Hirshhorn Museum Washington dc, The Goma Madrid, Museo MAN Nuoro.

Design: Alessandro Costariol & Antonio Rovaldi

Texts by Antonio Rovaldi, Luca Bertolo, Francesco Zanot, Leonardo Passarelli, Lorenzo Giusti, Pier Luigi Tazzi

Language: Italian / English

€30.00

Buy it

Jesus Days: Slide show and publication presentation @ Motto Berlin. 22.11.2013.

Jesus Days, 1978 – 1983
Photographs by Greg Reynolds

“In the late 70s and early 80s, I was a closeted gay man in his 20s working as a campus minister for an evangelical Christian student organization called the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. I struggled with my homosexuality. I was overwhelmed by grief and saw no option other than to repress my desires for sex and love. In 1978, a missionary friend gave me a 35 mm Pentax K1000 that she didn’t use. I knew very little about photography, but I loved taking pictures. It wasn’t my intention to document the American evangelical movement, but rather to take photographs of the people and places that were important to me. Now I see that the camera allowed me to say in pictures what I could never say in words.” 

From 19.00, slide show begins at 19.45

Motto Berlin
im Hinterhof
Skalitzer Str. 64
Berlin 10997

Sometimes I cannot smile, Piergiorgio Casotti.

Part of Casotti’s “Arctic Spleen project”, Sometimes I Cannot Smile is documentation on the problem of teen suicide in East Greenland. The book is a personal, intimate journey inside the Greenlandic juvenile world where nature, violence, boredom and a strong cultural legacy have been claiming for decades the highest and saddest “toll”. That of hundreds of young lives.

Hardcover, 168 pages.

Price: €37

Buy it

AZURAZIA, «Lowering the Mediterranean, irrigating the Sahara»: the first volume of “original soundtracks produced for film which doesn’t exist yet”. Produced in Morocco during the summer of 2011, this record contains tracks made out of local music in North Africa and field recordings, transformed and remixed. Welcome to the Azurazian world, along the lowered Mediterranea by the Gibraltar dam, and follow the adventures of Ghazi Van Keering, searching to learn the new Daseinphilosophy in wasted landscapes. A print art work is included with the record.

Pressed by: Grautag Records

D 20 €

Buy It

With contributions by Nadja Abt / Ann-Leonie Auer / Michele d’Aurizio / Juliette Blightman / Mikaël D. Brkić / Eli Broad with photos by Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda / Merlin Carpenter / Gürsoy Dogtas / Martin Ebner / Genoveva Filipovic / Edgars Gluhovs / Mauricio Guillén / Julian Göthe / Alexander Hempel / HIT / Tom Holert / Karl Holmqvist / Egija Inzule / Morag Keil / Nina Könnemann / Adriana Lara / Andrea Legiehn with an illustration by Siw Umsonst / Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho / Eric Lavesson / Adam Linder and Shahryar Nashat / Fred Lonidier / Fiona McGovern and Magnus Schäfer / Luise Pilz / François Piron / Bonny Poon / Gottfried Schnödl / Silberkuppe / Mathew Sowa / Maraike Steding / Megan Francis Sullivan / Sergei Tcherepnin / Benjamin Thorel / Danh Vo / Colin Whitaker / Amy Yao a.o., including A document made by Paul Thek and Edwin Klein / Textiles: Open Letters by Rike Frank and Grant Watson / A reportage on Andreas Dorau / Lars Eidinger on Rainer Werner Fassbinder / A retrospective account of a 1990 artwork / Fernando Mesta on Joseph Strau’s jewelry / A Drive by Robert Walser with an introduction by Susan Bernofsky.

Language: English
Price: €15.00

Buy it

Location: Date: Time: by Meriç Algün Ringborg

“Location: Date: Time: is both a two-part reflection and demonstration of disappearance in both personal and cultural terms. The first portion contains an essay that illustrates contemporary and historic assumptions of space and time. Rather than trying to articulate the very meaning of lacking substance, Ringborg writes the idea of disappearance through its converse–documentation, power, place and surveillance. The second portion contains a series of fragments taken from different unnamed sources that both describe and demonstrate erasure in all its moods, ranging from the humorous to the poignant.”

D 15 €

Buy it

Leith Thomas & Mark Groves (An Individual Note 01)

An Individual Note 02: Their Amorous Journey ‘Home…Away…Home’ (The Nature of Field Recording)

– Performance and Talk by Philip Samartzis

Philip Samartzis is Coordinator of Sound in the School of Art at RMIT. He is a researcher in the areas of sound art, acoustic ecology and spatial sound practices. His PhD, Surround Sound in Installation Art, examined the place of sound in contemporary art practice through a range of site determined sound art projects. In 2010 Philip was awarded fellowships by the Australia Council for the Arts, and the Australian Antarctic Division to document the effects of extreme climate and weather events on the human condition in Antarctica. Since returning, Philip has presented this work at numerous festivals and galleries across the world.

3pm start, doors close at 5pm

Motto Melbourne / Pin Up Project Space
15-25 Keele St, Collingwood 3066
Australia

Please visit The Daphne Oram Trust