I don’t care (about football). Giulia Iacolutti + Marangoni 105. bruno

Posted in photography, sports, writing on March 7th, 2023
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“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. Football thus became a metaphor for such a path and an experience of treatment. 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. 

Texts by Maddalena Fragnito, Giulia Iacolutti, Igor Peres, and Tiziano Possamai

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Roses of Resistance: A Dozen Tales of Active Flowers. Federico Hewson

Posted in politics, writing, Zines on February 25th, 2023
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Artist Federico Hewson describes, accompanied by botanical drawings, how roses have been tools and symbols for activists and movements around the world throughout and today.

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TECKEN – Lettres, Signes, Ecritures. Roberto Altmann, Ann-Marie Björklund, Eje Högestätt, Elisabeth Liljedahl (Eds.). Malmö Konsthall

Posted in Exhibition catalogue, poetry, typography, writing on February 24th, 2023
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Catalogue published in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition held at Malmö Konsthall from 22 March to 7 May, 1978.

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Merci Danke Grazie. Sophia Eisenhut, Simon Freund, Leonie Herweg, Olga Hohmann. Windparks books

Posted in illustration, research, writing on January 25th, 2023
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ca. 100 Hundetüten gesammelt von Simon Freund, kuratiert von Leonie Herweg, gesetzt von Paul Jürgens, mit Texten von Sophia Eisenhut und Olga Hohmann. Jedes Buch ist ein Unikat, die Anordnung der Bilder variiert.

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SEX. Raja’a Khalid (Ed.). ZIGG

Posted in Editions, illustration, magazines, poetry, politics, writing on January 14th, 2023
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This edition of ZIGG is interested in exploring sex as an evolutionary psychology. It brings together contributions from a network of friends, peers, colleagues who have engaged or encountered the makers of ZIGG through intellectual, psychosexual vibrations. It includes text messages, illustrations, drawings, poetry, code, conversation, rants, and essays. 

Contributors: Hala Bint, Alex Cecchetti, Common Accounts, Kelly Fliedner, Chitra Ganesh, Drew Gordon, Margaret Haines, Raja’a Khalid and Ahmad Makia, Amanda Lee Koe, and Deepak Unnikrishnan.

ZIGG is a publishing association engaged in critical thinking from Dubai. It circulates amorphous aesthetics, printed matters, and promotes the disciplinary blurring between sex, media, earth matter, magic, and politics.

Edition of 300

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Yves Klein Japon. Éditions Dilecta

Posted in painting, travel, writing on January 12th, 2023
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Yves Klein (1928–62) first traveled to Japan as a young man in 1952, motivated primarily by his interest in judo. During his 15 months abroad, Klein had numerous important creative and philosophical revelations that culminated in the launch of his artistic career upon his return to Paris.

Prepared in collaboration with the Yves Klein Archives, this volume details Klein’s relationship with Japan through nearly 150 archival documents, photographs and letters, inviting the reader on his journey from martial arts to fine art at the very beginning of his career. Along the way we learn of Klein’s important encounters with art critic Takachiyo Uemura, painter Keizo Koyama and design professor Masaki Yamaguchi. “Yves Klein Japon” provides essential insight into the origins of Klein’s oeuvre as both a groundbreaking visual artist and prolific writer whose short-lived career helped to transform postwar art.

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Who Can Afford To Be Critical? Alfonso Matos (Ed.). Set Margins’

Posted in graphic design, Theory, writing on December 20th, 2022
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‘Critical Designers’ produced by an increasing number of design schools are prompted to address social, political and environmental issues through their practices. Yet, who can afford to continue such effort after graduation?

In a dynamic style holding multiple voices, “Who Can Afford To Be Critical?” discusses the limits that affordability, class and labour impose upon the educational promise of holding a ‘critical’ practice. Why do we tend to ignore the material and socioeconomic constraints that bind us as designers, claiming instead that we can be powerful agents of change? In fact, where does our agency lie?

Instead of focusing on the dream of ethical work under capitalism, could we, instead, focus first on designers’ own working conditions, targeting them as one immediate site for collective action? And can we engage politically with the world not necessarily as designers, but as workers, as activists, as citizens?

With contributions by Silvio Lorusso, J. Dakota Brown, Marianela D’Aprile, Evening Class, Somnath Batt, Danielle Aubert, Jack Henrie Fisher, Alan Smart, Greg Mihalko and DAE students 2021/2022.

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Symbionts. Caroline A. Jones, Natalie Bell and Selby Nimrod (Eds.). The MIT Press

Posted in politics, writing on November 26th, 2022
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Essays, conversations, selected texts, and a rich collection of thought-provoking artworks celebrate a revolution in bio art. Expertly designed by Omnivore and printed on special papers, including chlorophyll cover and crush citrus and crush cocoa pages.

The texts and artworks in Symbionts provoke a necessary conversation about our species and its relation to the planet. Are we merely “mammalian weeds,” as evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis put it? Or are we partners in producing and maintaining the biosphere, as she also suggested? Symbionts reflects on a recent revolution in bio art that departs from the late-1990s code-oriented experiments to embrace entanglement and symbiosis (“with-living”). Combining documentation of contemporary artworks with texts by leading thinkers, Symbionts, which accompanies an exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center, offers an expansive view of humanity’s place on the planet.

Color reproductions document works by international artists that respond to the revelation that planetary microbes construct and maintain our biosphere. A central essay by coeditor Caroline Jones sets their work in the context of larger discussions around symbiosis; additional essays, an edited roundtable discussion, and selected excerpts follow. Contributors explore, among other things, the resilient ecological knowledge of indigenous scholars and artists, and “biofiction,” a term coined by Jones to describe the work of such theoretical biologists as Jacob von Uexküll as well as the witty parafictions of artist Anicka Yi. A playful glossary puts scientific terms in conversation with cultural ones.

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Attached. Jessie Bullivant. Rooftop Press

Posted in writing on November 23rd, 2022
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Attached is a collection of texts that document a diverse range of artworks made by Jessie Bullivant (AU/FI) over the past decade. By replacing the default photographic documentation with written accounts, the artist raises questions about how immaterial artworks are preserved, accessed and ultimately remembered, allowing space for nuances often lost in photographic documentation. As an incomplete survey of the artists’ work, the book blurs the boundaries between art and its documentation, between a conventional monograph and an experimental artist’s book. It gives an exciting glimpse into a committed artistic practice tackling a variety of issues from representation, power and access to subtle social interactions.

Design: Tuukka Kaila
Introduction: Katie Lenanton

Edition of 400

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Modernism/Murderism: The Modern Art Debate in Kumar. Nihaal Faizal, Sarasija Subramanian (Eds.). Reliable copy

Posted in writing on October 29th, 2022
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Modernism/Murderism, translated by Vasvi Oza, brings together, for the first time in English, a forgotten debate on Modern Art that took place in the pages of the Gujarati-language periodical Kumar between 1959 and 1964. Published across various issues, the debate brings into conversation Pherozeshah Rustomji Mehta, a writer and art connoisseur from Karachi, and Jyoti Bhatt, a young artist who had just begun teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda. While Mehta chose to defend what he believed were the timeless and traditional values of art, Bhatt proposed that Modern Art was no stranger to these values and in fact had much in common with them. Alongside the articles by Mehta and Bhatt, the publication also brings together responses to the debate from various readers who interjected in the ‘Readers Write’ column of the periodical, as well as notes from Kumar‘s editor, Bachubhai Ravat, who informally acted as a mediator. Offering a vantage point from which to view the entry of Modernism and its affiliated discourses into the art practices of the region, this volume proposes itself as a reader to these histories and revisits this crucial moment.

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