Λ (Lambda). Micol Assaël. NERO

Posted in Uncategorized on November 25th, 2022
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Λ (Lambda) is an artist book by Micol Assaël which collects a series of 72 drawings made by the artist starting in 2011 as a reflection on light.

The work well exemplifies Assaël’s interest in natural phenomena and in their unpredictability which often makes it impossible for the artist to control the work. The drawings “describe” biomorphic figures inscribed within circles, and are based on the attempt to define a blot of color despite its constant modification over time. Unlike previous series of drawings, Λ (Lambda) is made with orange enamel and blue ink.

The drawings, conceived to be charged with light, have been exposed to direct, very intense sources of illumination. The title Λ (Lambda) alludes to the symbol used in physics for the wavelength of light.

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Soggetto nomade. Various Authors. NERO

Posted in photography, politics on April 24th, 2022
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With an afterword by Rosi Braidotti, an introduction by Cristiana Perrella and Elena Magini and selected words by the photographers.

The book has been published in collaboration with Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci which hosted the eponymous show.

Soggetto nomade (Nomadic Subject) gathers, for the first time in one volume, shots taken by five Italian photographers between the mid 60s to the 80s. The photographs are giving glimpses on the way female subjectivity was lived, represented and interpreted back in the days, in a time of great social change in Italy. Years of transition from political radicalism to hedonism, the lead years were also years of great participation and civil conquests, mostly due to the feminist struggle. This book is a visual reflection on identity and representation departing from the extraordinary portraits of the trans community in Genoa by Lisetta Carmi (Genoa, 1924), followed by the portraits of actress, writers and artists by Elisabetta Catalano (Rome, 1941-2015); the feminist movements’ shots by Paola Agosti (Turin, 1947); women and young women captured by Letizia Battaglia (Palermo, 1935) in a Sicily disfigured by the mafia; to end with the photos of men who used to turn into women for a day, during carnival, in the small towns of Campania captured by Marialba Russo (Naples, 1947).

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Taxonomy of The Barricade. Image Acts of Political Authority in May 1968. Wolfgang Scheppe. NERO

Posted in history on April 14th, 2022
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An iconographic taxonomy—researched, conceived, and ideated by Wolfgang Scheppe, also author of the book’s final essay—that traces the state and police visual control through almost 500 images from the May 1968 police archives in Paris.

The pictorial order of a regime of surveillance applied during the last wide-ranging insurgence in Europe’s history surfaces from the analysis of this unique visual archive. Following the events happening at the Sorbonne in May 1968, alongside general strikes and nationwide factory occupations, France’s state of emergency becomes apparent through a specific iconography of visual control.

This critical moment in the development of governmental visualization strategies towards a totalitarian god’s perspective on the urban fabric has been researched and documented for the first time, by employing the vast photo archives of the Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris. Among other characteristic typologies of authoritative monitoring aspects, the events in May ’68 marked the historic beginning of the deployment of helicopter based aerial photography as a means of governmental crowd control in a situation of escalating insurrection. The political will to gain an unobstructed view on any individual motion pattern represented in the project leads to epistemically-new technologies that combine observation with political governance, and the use of force as recently manifested in the agency of drones and face recognition.

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When In Rome. Nero.

Posted in Uncategorized on June 15th, 2012
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When In Rome.

When In Rome has been promoted by Provincia di Roma and Depart Foundation and took place in the spaces of the Italian Cultural Institute with the participation of the Hammer Museum and LA>Buy

Wrong Test. Riccardo Previdi. Nero.

Posted in photography on June 11th, 2012
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Wrong Test. Riccardo Previdi.

Conceived as a work halfway between an artist’s book and an exhibition catalogue, Wrong Test by Riccardo Previdi presents the newest works from the series Tests that the artist started to work on three years ago. Previdi culls his test patterns mostly from the internet. He started out using test patterns created to calibrate printers, to verify the color accuracy of digital cameras, or in conjunction with medical testing. Previdi prints the images on standard A4-sized paper, crumples them up, photographs them and then reprints them, often in enlargement, following this process of apparent destruction. Printed on a wooden board or stretched on a frame, the Tests vary in texture and are integrated into spatial interventions and installations in dialogue with existing architecture. Wrong Test presents some 46 test patterns across 120 pages, accompanied by a brief text extracted from Amazon.com customer reviews of the commercial products. The series was produced for this publication.
The selection, reminiscent of a visual scientific study, places particular focus on the commercial use of digital photographs and sheds light on various aspects of the technical image. Another focal point is the confrontation with the history of the technical image and the conditions of seeing.
The catalogue includes two critical texts by Laura Barreca, the curator of the exhibition, and Thomas Tiel.
The “Premio Selezione” is a project by the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, conceived as an opportunity to present the excellence of young Italian art. The winners – artists selected by an international jury – hold a personal show at the exhibition spaces of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York. Riccardo Previdi and Nicola Pecoraro are the winners of the first edition of the “Premio Selezione” held in 2011.

Edition: 500 copies
Year: 2011
Editor: Lorenzo Micheli Gigotti
Art Director: Francesco de Figueiredo

Wrong Test is published in conjunction with the first edition of the “Premio Selezione Italian Cultural Institute New York 2011” at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York.

20€

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Wonders of the Volcano. Salvatore Arancio.

Posted in writing on December 28th, 2011
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Wonders of the Volcano. Salvatore Arancio.

Wonders of the Volcano is the first artist’s book by Salvatore Arancio, published by NERO in collaboration with Federica Schiavo Gallery.
Wonders of the Volcano is a faithful reconstruction of a Victorian era book that is part of Arancio’s own collection and the source of some of his etchings. The original volume, printed in London presumably in the second half of the 19th century, was written by Ascott R. Hope and comprises 11 original illustrations in black and white.
Salvatore Arancio has re-elaborated the book’s original images, altering their scientific and documentary function, and added 8 plates to the final section of the volume. The text from the first edition has instead been reprinted in its entirety, and the book’s material and typographic characteristics are identical to the original.
The volume by Ascott R. Hope is an impassioned piece of research into the naturalistic wonders of volcanoes and of the geo-telluric phenomena related to them. The inexact geology of the late 19th century mixes here with landscape descriptions so ingenuous that they transform the underlying romanticism into loose and enthusiastic popular adventure literature. The most impressive natural phenomena – registered at that time not only in Italy, but also throughout Europe, South America, in the Indian east and across the entire Mediterranean basin – are described with all the imprecision of a vague science. In this book, the inductive method overlaps with the deductive, making space for oral testimonies, fairytales and superstitions, all philologically inventoried.
It is not by chance that Salvatore Arancio has chosen to work within a context that is “science-fictional” avant la lettre. The ambiguous alterations that the artist has brought to the original images do not merely evidence the book’s original nature, but, decontextualizing it, reinvent an inexistent past that oscillates between mythology and fantasy.
Such a rehabilitation of the past bears a twofold temporal valence: it looks back in order to go forward. Indeed, by means of this enigmatic booklet, Arancio reverses the very direction at the heart of the concept of innovation – scientific innovation, if we look strictly to the contents of the book; artistic, if we consider the entire conceptual operation – evidencing an “innovative” past on the one hand, and on the other a future that never occurred. And it is precisely into this temporal fissure, tinged with nostalgia, that Arancio drops his hypnagogic, unconscious and apocalyptic imaginary, letting it fluctuate in a spatiotemporal field that belongs neither to the present, nor to the future, nor to our past.
Wonders of the Volcano is accompanied by an insert containing a critical essay by Michael Wilson, editor and freelance critic, and a text on the relation between mythology and geo-telluric phenomena written by Luigi Piccardi, Researcher at the C.N.R. – Institute of Geosciences and Earth Resources, Florence.

D € 20

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Rischi Minori. Giulia Piscitelli. Nero

Posted in Uncategorized on October 6th, 2011
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Rischi Minori. Giulia Piscitelli.

The catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition by Giulia Piscitelli Rischi Minori, January 25 – April 2, 2011 at Fondazione Giuliani per l’arte contemporanea. The catalogue includes a special project by Giulia Piscitelli and two critical texts by Stefano Chiodi and Salvatore Lacagnina. This is the first monograph dedicated to Giulia Piscitelli.

Published by Nero
Language: English / Italian
Designer: Francesco de Figueiredo
Photographer: Gilda Aloisi
19 x 27 cm
339 g
ISBN: 978-88-97503-01-9

D 20€

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All I Remember. Elisabetta Benassi. Nero

Posted in Uncategorized on September 27th, 2011
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All I Remember. Elisabetta Benassi.

Conceived as an artist’s book as well as a work of art, All I remember, is a collection of 477
backs of photos retrieved from the archives of the most important daily newspapers in the
world, collected and photographed by the artist over the last three years. Elisabetta Benassi
has selected the most significant photos of the 20th century in a backwards route through
personal and collective memories. Each page of the book corresponds to a single photo back
characterized by a data sheet with the dates, the photographers’ names and an objective
description of that which is represented in the image, as is usually done in image filing
systems. The result is an original history of our past, made of written images, of memorable
moments of the history of the 20th century.

Published by Nero 2011
484 p.
165×215 cm
Edition of 1’000
Language: Ita /Eng
ISBN 978-88-97503-00-2

D 50€

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AVERE LUOGO. Nora Schultz. NERO

Posted in literature on September 15th, 2011
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AVERE LUOGO. Nora Schultz. NERO

The catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition by Nora Schultz avere luogo,
October 12 – December 31, 2010 at Fondazione Giuliani per l’arte contemporanea.

The final section of the catalogue is a special project carried out by the artist in collaboration with NERO.
The 32 pages are part of a selection of over 2,000 70 x 100 cm test sheets originating from the Marchesi printing houses, used for the print machines’ start-up. The layouts of the books to be produced are printed on
these sheets, one on top of another. This gives rise to a series of palimpsests, characterized by a
stratification of levels which, randomly overlapped, create abstract images of an almost sculptural physicality. Given that this special project is composed of recycled material, each one of these catalogues, in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, is unique and original.

D 25€

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