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Various satellites are gravitating around Andrea Canobbio's major production, whose greatest achievement was the monumental La traversata notturna (La nave di Teseo, 2022): short, apparently simple texts which delicately touch on autobiographical points, aspects of the author's own character. This 'Portrait' is one of them. Canobbio's writing is probably the clearest and most transparent among those in our language, and this elegant but coy characteristic highlights and conceals at the same time a complexity of composition which is always ironclad and extraordinarily articulate. Beneath the veil of the declared autobiographical value, this 'Ritratto' is above all a game of concealment and discovery conducted on several levels: the author comments on his own diary written in his youth (the management of distance and proximity is exquisite), demolishing it, reconstructing it, fragmenting it and recomposing it. In this operation, Canobbio takes us inside his refined writing workshop and shows us some of his tools: the image, the photograph, the memory, the jigsaw puzzle, the box of precision instruments to apply to the confusion of chaos. This autobiographical satellite (not only 'auto' but also 'bio/graphic') can be described as a 'pearl'.

Andrea Canobbiowas born in 1962 in Turin, where he lives and works in publishing. His books are: the collection of short stories Vasi cinesi (Einaudi, 1989), with which he won the Grinzane opera prima prize and the Mondello opera prima prize; the novels Traslochi (Einaudi, 1992), Padri di padri (Einaudi, 1997), Indivisibili (Rizzoli, 2000), Strega prize finalist, Il naturale disordine delle cose (Einaudi, 2004), Brancati prize, and Tre anni luce (Feltrinelli, 2013), Mondello opera italiana prize; and finally the two short autobiographical texts Presentimento (Nottetempo, 2007) and Mostrarsi (Nottetempo, 2011). In 2022 he published the book La traversata notturna (La nave di Teseo), a finalist for the Strega Prize 2023.

Marta Cai's writing is difficult to frame: one can only be taken aback by the innovation of her style, of her thought, of her approach, and of the relationship between the word and the sense it makes. The unusual mixture of intelligence and sensoriality, the mirroring between syntactic development and perceptive gestures of this author give us these 'Brasilampi'. They are texts reminiscent of the so-called 'chronicles', short compositions without genre, epiphanies of the every day or reflections on the highest systems where everything is allowed, except the obvious, solidly present in Brazilian literature but not so codified in Europe. Marta Cai, who recently moved from Italy to Brazil,  does not tell us about Brazil, she does not force it into categories, into descriptions, into interpretations, but she allows herself to be permeated by it. She thus reaches a fascinating space, as much geographical as interior. She enters (and so we do) into an ancestral glade of non-understanding, of pre-verbal impact with what exists. She registers in its presence, like a highly sensitive seismograph, her own native illuminations, as if they were lullabies (when in fact they are vertiginous lexical and syntactic acrobatics). Thus from Brazil flash unexpected flashes, expertly set up in a hidden but powerful, circular, omnipresent structure. We cannot call them "short stories", although they are peopled by characters caught in peculiar moments; we cannot call them "chapters of a novel", although the author composes them in a unitary narrative arc; we cannot call them "sketches", although the writer also proceeds here, as in her previous works (Enti di ragione, SuiGeneris, 2019 and Centomilioni, Einaudi, 2023), with rapid angles, unexpected divarications, unpredictable coring into the depths. We can call them 'Brasilampi', and so we will.

Marta Cai was born in Canelli in 1980 and has lived for some years in Curitiba, Brazil. Some of her short stories have been published in magazines ("inutile", "il Reportage"), in anthologies (Ti racconto una canzone, Arcana 2022; Overlook loop, Collana Trema Edizioni Arcoiris 2023; Splendere ai margini, Oligo Editore 2023) and in 2019 in the collection Enti di ragione (Edizioni SuiGeneris). For Einaudi, he published Centomilioni (2023), premio Campiello finalist, and for Tetra Edizioni Tipopsicanalisi (2023).

The volume constitutes the catalogue of Francesco Bartoli's project for mudaC | Museo delle arti Carrara and brings together images, drawings, photos, notes, and sketches documenting the genesis of the film of the same name and its final installation. The volume is conceived to disseminate the project on display and as a vehicle to promote tourism and the local cultural heritage. The project "Sculpting the Wind" by Francesco Bartoli, winner of the PAC - Plan for Contemporary Art 2021 of the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, curated by Laura Barreca, included the production of a film and it is one of the 39 projects selected from the 98 proposals that reached the 2021 edition of the call for proposals, for the acquisition, production, and valorization of works of contemporary art and creativity destined for the Italian public heritage. The title of the work is freely inspired by Andrej Tarkovskij's famous book "Sculpting Time", and in line with the museum's cultural orientation, it takes the form of a poetic narration and a dialogue with the territory of the Apuan Alps, linking together past and present, sculpture and landscape, art and technological innovation. The project was also realised with the collaboration of the Omero Museum for the Blind in Ancona and in partnership with the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara. "The production of a work as complex as Bartoli's," commented the museum's director Laura Barreca, "is an extraordinary opportunity to reinterpret the Carrara area through creativity and poetic intuition, the outcome of which will be a film that will become part of the mudaC's permanent collection, thanks to the support that the DGCC has allocated to support Italian museums through the PAC Piano per l'Arte Contemporanea 2021.

Catalogue of the exhibition Palermo Mon Amour curated by Valentina Greco for the Fondazione Merz in collaboration with the Centro internazionale di fotografia Letizia Battaglia and the Enzo Sellerio archive. The book tells the story of Palermo from the 1950s to 1992 in images. A story that has the rhythm similar to a visual walk through the research and intuitions of five photographers, five gazes, who have investigated the poetic imagery of Palermo with different feelings, recounting a city in continuous deflagration, and not always recomposed in its complexity. The subject of a gentle, playful, cultured, anti-rhetorical vision, which is also an acute testimony to the social scene of the 1950s and 1960s, dense with stratified situations of misery and degradation but awaiting a possible civil and economic rebirth, Palermo underwent the further assault of the 1970s, of daily events of ferocious chronicle, until 1992, the year in which it seemed, once again, that everything could change. Through the photographs of Enzo Sellerio, Letizia Battaglia, Franco Zecchin, Fabio Sgroi and Lia Pasqualino we understand a new visual code, the sequences of their photographs amplify our feelings and add notions to those we have acquired of what it is necessary to see in order to position oneself in the world.

In addition to the curatorial text by Valentina Greco, the book is enriched by biographical contributions by Olivia and Antonio Sellerio for the Enzo Sellerio Archive, Marta Sollima for the Letizia Battaglia Archive, Franco Zecchin, Fabio Sgroi and Lia Pasqualino, as well as a moving story by Giorgio Vasta.

In the monologue "Clic", by the unforgettable author of "Code", the scene is hinted at as a hospital. He exists, evoked by a mere name, which makes him a very powerful character, a certain Dr. Dickmans. The monologue speaker apparently freewheels about various themes and issues, produces his own reflections on himself, the world, the situation he is experiencing. But we follow this voice with growing disquiet, as it becomes clearer and clearer to us at every step that the narration itself is the story, not what the voice says. Indeed, the voice is often interrupted by a sign/sound, i.e. a 'click', which breaks its course just as it simultaneously breaks our mental reconstruction of the scene.
The continuous fractures are thus as much of the monologue-giver as of the reader/listener. This simple but ingenious 'click' binds us to the monologue more than any other empathic, or narrative, or visual, or experiential gimmick.

Mario Giorgi was born in Bologna in 1956. He has written texts for radio, theatre, TV. He has published "Codice" (Bollati Boringhieri 1994), "Biancaneve" (Bollati Boringhieri 1995), "Sulla torre antica" (Portofranco 1998), "23 : 59" (Rai Eri 1999), "Torpore" (Portofranco 2001), "Alter E" (Un fagiano) (:duepunti 2010), "Società del Programma Spaziale" (CS_libri 2016), "Configurazione Alieno" (CS_libri 2019), "Fiori" (Tiemme 2019).