Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
Oh mio cagnetto, is the artist’s first book of writings, conceived as an artwork. It is a collection of 81 little poems that revolve around the missed and mourned figure of a puppy. It intentionally plays on the ambiguity of its nature, as both a book distributed in conventional ways and an art object.
When she started writing the Corona Tales, Chus Martínez had been weighing how people and the media were addressing the outbreak of the virus as an unprecedented disaster. One possible contribution, as curator and writer, would be to write a short story a day…
Edited by Julia Marchand, in collaboration with Vittoria Morpurgo
Texts by Morgan Labar, Julia Marchand, Julie Ackermann, Anya Harrison, Giulia Mariachiara Galiano and Cecilia Larese, Vittoria Morpurgo and Robin Plus, Gaia Vincensini, Raphaëlle Serre, Linda Voorwinde, Tohé Commaret, Louise Nicolas de Lamballerie, Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel, Kevin Blinderman, Mohamed Bourouissa, Michal Novotný, Laura Owens, Magda Szpecht, Thomas Liu Le Lann, Velvet Aubry, Arnaud Dezoteux, Prune Phi, Alban Diaz, Ant łakomsk, Liselor Perez, Francesca Grilli, Camille Aleña, Joanna Kordjak, Katarzyna Kołodziej-Podsiadło
Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2026, English, softcover, 11 x 18.5 cm, 160 pages
ISBN 979-12-80579-89-8
Why be the object when you can dive into yourself and archive your own adolescence? And what about this adolescence when it lasts until the late thirties, and expands beyond the traditional understanding of age group?
This volume redefines the coming-of-age genre by addressing the contours of the obsession with the prolonged teenager years. Contemporary art views adolescence as a mental state, a condition that has eroded the traditional markers of the passage into adulthood; not a transitory phase but a prolonged mode of being or even a critique of a world that itself refuses to stabilize.
Extramentale, a curatorial platform on teenage aesthetics, was founded by Julia Marchand, the editor of this book, which spans the period from the platform’s creation in 2016 through to its eventual closure in 2026. It gave voice to artist-adolescents and author-adolescents, mainly millennials and Gen Zers.
The essays by Julia Marchand and Julie Ackermann examine manifestations of adolescence that draw on gaming, hypersensitivity, and intermediate states of consciousness as a perceptive resource and where contradictory attitudes shape the many dimensions of today’s artists-adolescents. Anya Harrison, with her incisive critical voice, explores moral panics and literary extremity in a time when society’s fetishization of adolescence continues to generate intense debates. Giulia Mariachiara Galiano, writing from her perspective as a Venice-based curator, traces the limits and contours of the “girl online,” reflecting on digital subjectivities staged out by artists of her generation. Morgan Labar argues that adolescence as the territory of our concerns is no longer the preserve of masculine compulsions of infantile provocations; Labar, author of In Praise of Dumbness: Regression and Superficiality in the Arts Since the Late 1980s (Les Presses du réel), also signs the foreword to this anthology.
Adolescent artists of the Extramentale program and beyond contributed to this publication by sharing their words on the many dimensions of the adolescence: Robin Plus, Gaia Vincensini, Raphaëlle Serre, Linda Voorwinde, Tohé Commaret, Louise Nicolas de Lamballerie, Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel, Kevin Blinderman, Mohamed Bourouissa, Michal Novotný, Laura Owens, Magda Szpecht, Thomas Liu Le Lann, Velvet Aubry, Arnaud Dezoteux, Prune Phi, Alban Diaz, Ant Łakomsk, Liselor Perez, Francesca Grilli, Camille Aleña, Joanna Kordjak, and Katarzyna Kołodziej-Podsiadło; interviewed by Venice-based researchers Cecilia Larese, Vittoria Morpurgo, and Julia Marchand.
