Maxiprocesso brings together 360 photographs by Maria D. Rapicavoli, one for each of the archival folders documenting the largest mafia trial in history, held in Palermo from 1986 to 1987. The volume explores the relationship between memory, justice, and social responsibility, examining the material element of a landmark event in contemporary Italian history.
This is the first monograph on the influential American choreographer and dancer Trajal Harrell. In an entertaining, far-reaching conversation with curator Daniel Baumann, Harrell covers all of his choreographies and performances, as well as his influences, successes, and failures, addressing how he transforms and transgresses the history of dance.
This book offers the first comprehensive overview of Anna Franceschini’s practice. Organized around recurring themes, it explores animation, the body, machines, ghosts, desire, and windows through commissioned contributions and selected writings. Its associative structure reflects her interest in repetition, transformation, and unstable images.
This book accompanies 5 Works, Lydia Ourahmane’s first institutional solo show in Italy, staged at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation in Venice and curated by Polly Staple, during the 61st Venice Biennale, and includes newly commissioned texts and images that further contextualize the artist’s practice and work.
Museums of Tears extends Francesco Vezzoli’s 2024 exhibition at Museo Correr, Venice, combining historical works and new commissions to explore antiquity, emotion and illusion. Conceived as an artist’s book rather than a catalogue, it transforms the museum guide into a hybrid archive and portable museum of memory, beauty and mourning.
A project by Fondazione In Between Art Film, edited by Carla Subrizi, Paola Ugolini, and Maria Alicata, this illustrated volume investigates the cinematic, documentary, and video output of women artists and filmmakers operating in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, situating their research at the intersection of artistic experimentation, politics, society, and technology.
Edited by Laura Barreca, Edoardo Bonaspetti and Beatrice Gibson
Texts by Laura Barreca, Edoardo Bonaspetti, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Alice Notley
Design by HIT
2023, English / Italian, softcover, 21 x 13 cm, 56 pages
ISBN 979-12-80579-43-0
Dreaming Alcestis is an artist’s book by artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson, conceived as an accompaniment to her holographic film installation of the same name. Dreaming Alcestis was co-directed and co-scripted by Gibson, her partner Nicholas Gordon and critic Maria Nadotti. The publication features a specially commissioned essay by poet and translator Allison Grimaldi Donahue, as well as a reprint of the American poet Alice Notley’s 1991 essay What Can Be Learned From Dreams?
Drawing on the protagonist of Euripides’s ancient myth as its ancestral guide, Dreaming Alcestis offers a poetic reflection on living and dying at a time of acute social, political and economic turmoil, documenting—via dream life—Gibson and Gordon’s relocation from Northern to Southern Europe. In the film, two characters, dreaming of a long-dead queen, are filmed in long takes, refracted holographically and interrupted only by the sounds of the city and the sea. In Gibson’s words, “2,500 years after her birth, Alcestis—in the film, a mysterious, Lynchian figure—returns from the underworld, dreaming of, or possibly dreamed by, a man and woman who have traversed Europe in search of her, from North to South, with family in tow. Meanwhile, the ice caps melt, 43 wars rage around the globe and another city burns on TV.” In a feminist key, Gibson, Gordon and Nadotti reclaim a minor heroine from Greek mythology, using her as a therapeutic device to reflect on what it is to be human in the contemporary context.
Premiering at the British Art show in 2022, Dreaming Alcestis was exhibited on the occasion of the artist’s first solo show in Italy, Dream Gossip, at Ordet in Milan, and was subsequently taken on tour, first to the Museo Civico di Castelbuono and then to Macro, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. The book and the film Dreaming Alcestis are part of Alkestis, a project orchestrated by the Museo Civico di Castelbuono in partnership with the British Art Show 9 (Hayward Gallery Touring, Southbank Centre, London), and made possible thanks to the support of the Italian Council (10th Edition, 2021), a program run by the Italian Ministry of Culture’s Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity.
