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.

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Motto is pleased to invite you to the presentation of Black Med (Humboldt Books), by Invernomuto, with Giovanna Silva, Alexis Zavialoff, moderated by Luca Galofaro.

Dropcity
Auditorium tunnel 60
Via Sammartini, 20125 Milano

Friday 10 June
from 6.20 to 7pm

//

See you there!

With a text by Olaf Nicolai

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Sudan, the only remaining male northern white rhinoceros.
Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Kenya.
This project documents Sudan, the last white rhinoceros of North Africa. Sudan lived his life inside the Prague zoo, before being transferred to Kenya for reproduction and specie preservation. Sudan lives under armed protection. Giovanna Silva spent ten days in his wildlife preserve, following him from a close distance. The book, entitled Good Boy – the way the guards call the rhinoceros, this lullaby which endlessly accompanied Giovanna’s days with the rhino – 0372, his breeding number, is a tribute to this prehistoric and unique animal. The book is conceived as a sequence of abstract images, in which the animal is barely recognizable, and close-up of his skin and his body progressively fading away.

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Special Edition for Giovanna Silva’s Good Boy 0372. Comes in four variations each with a different numbered print.

50€

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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

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Giovanna Silva, ed.
Text by Angelo Del Boca and Giovanna Silva

The book Libya: Inch by Inch, House by House, Alley by Alley is part of a series of publications about nations at war, or in crisis; conceived by Giovanna Silva, they tell the stories of different countries through photographs of their multifaceted landscapes. In the case of Libya, Silva has attempted to outline the architectural structures built by Muammar al-Gaddafi’s regime that were demolished during the recent revolution. Her journey started from Benghazi—the first epicenter of the revolt, as a city that had always been hostile to Colonel Gaddafi—and culminated in Tripoli, inside the bunker-barrack of Gaddafi’s residence. In this construction and de-construction of Gaddafi’s personality, Silva creates a parallel narrative relying on archival pictures she has collected over the years, depicting everything from a young Gaddafi surrounded by the politicians he did business with for years (who would later turn their backs on him), to images of his death, when he lay bleeding and knocked to the ground just like the architecture that embodied his ideals. The publication includes a conversation between Giovanna Silva and Gaddafi biographer Angelo Del Boca, who knew, inside out, just who the real Gaddafi was.

Language: English / Arabic
Size: 11 x 15 cm
Binding: Softcover
ISBN: 9788867490929

Price: €20.00
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Narratives – Relazioni. Baghdad. Red Zone, Green Zone, Babylon. Giovanna Silva. Mousse Publishing.

The first volume of a series that narrates, through images, the history of countries at war or in situations of crisis. Through a combination of evocative images that describe the country in an abstract but precise way, each place is revealed through a narrative path that is simply suggested by the author and can be freely modified by the reader. The images are only halfway legible and can be viewed entirely only by extracting the individual pages – which are not bound, like a newspaper – whose sequence can be freely reorganized each time.

In this first volume the protagonist is Baghdad, described as a fortified city, as a place still defended by walls and thus comparable to its historical precursor, Babylon. After Baghdad, the series will continue with portraits of Afghanistan, the Gulf of Aden, Egypt and Syria.

Format: 14 posters in a folder (26.5 x 38 cm)
2012

D 5€

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