The volume recounts and illustrates the project of the same name, which brought a new cultural offering to Umbria during the summer of 2024, enlivening the region with extraordinary initiatives spanning the ancient and the contemporary. From 15 June, for the first time, it was possible to visit Umbria's fourteen national museums, where contemporary art exhibitions alternated with major exhibitions, performances and installations designed specifically for the various sites, stimulating the eyes and minds of the public. Archaeological parks, Etruscan and Lombard treasures, masterpieces from the Middle Ages and the Baroque period, prehistoric finds and wonderful Renaissance gardens were enriched by dialogue with the work of masters of our time.

This volume presents the second edition of PUSH THE LIMITS, an exhibition project by Fondazione Merz curated by Claudia Gioia and Beatrice Merz. The exhibition explores art's ability to respond to current and urgent issues and to bring about change, rejecting resignation to immobility. It brings together 20 artists from different generations and backgrounds who make the overcoming and transformation of imposed and supposed limits their artistic grammar.

In renaming the second edition of PUSH THE LIMITS, Mario Merz's phrase, “Culture strips itself bare and reveals war”, has been added. The reference is to the traditionally complex role of culture in situations of conflict and the need for culture to strip itself of its muffled image in order to highlight its combative nature. This also serves to emphasise the freedom and responsibility of art and culture, as well as the goal of pushing boundaries, especially today, when all the principles of coexistence and law are constantly being overturned, so that new words can emerge to start thinking again in terms of justice and international, social and civil relations.

The exhibition, open from 27 October 2025 to 8 March 2026, features works by the following artists: Heba Y. Amin, Maja Bajević, Mirna Bamieh, Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Rossella Biscotti, Monica Bonvicini, Latifa Echakhch, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh/Rozenn Quéré, Cécile B. Evans, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, Jasleen Kaur, Katerina Kovaleva, Teresa Margolles, Helina Metaferia, Janis Rafa, Zineb Sedira and Nora Turato.

Through dates, personalities and generational transitions, Filiu describes the scenario of one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes since the Second World War. The tragic current events in Gaza have unfortunately obscured the long history of this prosperous oasis, which since ancient times has been involved in the affairs of all the empires in the region. It was in 1948 that the fate of this ancient land was overturned, reduced to a strip of territory, first administered by Egypt and then, two decades later, occupied by the State of Israel. Mother of the fedayeen and cradle of the Intifada, Gaza has since played a decisive role, for better or worse, in Palestinian nationalism. Far from being merely a besieged enclave, Gaza holds the key to peace or war in the complex Middle Eastern framework, because it is there that both Israel's security and Palestine's future are at stake. The research carried out in this volume, in its first translation into Italian, is unrivalled in terms of the breadth of its documentation and goes beyond historical reflection on one of the major political crises of our time to cover contemporary developments.

Jean Pierre Filiu is a university professor of Middle Eastern history and the author of seminal essays, including Mitterand et la Palestine (Fayard, 2005), Main basse sur Israël (La Découverte, 2019) and Comment la Palestine fut perdue (Seuil, 2024). He contributes to Le Monde, publishing the column Un si proche Orient on the newspaper's website, which is followed by millions of readers.

It all began in September 364 AD, with what the Greek governess Baubo dared to tell the Roman emperor Flavius Valentinianus before going to sleep. Between imperial Milan and the mysteries of Eleusis, while the Germans were being fought off at the border, in the feverish emperor's room, stories dedicated to the mysteries of the goddess Demeter and Persephone, Mother and Daughter, stories that are still unknown, were whispered. Francesca Sensini, opting for the ancestral tone that moves the act of laughter, brings its resonances to deeply sabotage our vision of the Western epochal transition from paganism to Christianity, helping us to see our cultural and anthropological continuity with the primordial world of myths from a different perspective. The combination of the feminine generative principle, universal fertility, and the tension that emerges between the darkness of power and the brightness of laughter are actions that the author performs with skilful simplicity and lightness, masterfully suggesting a fundamental and very complex shift with far-reaching emotional and cultural effects.

Francesca Sensini, writer, lecturer and researcher, is currently an associate professor of Italian Studies at the Université Côte d'Azur in Nice. Trained as a classicist, she devotes most of her research to Italian literature between the 19th and 20th centuries, studies of classical reception and gender studies in literature. Born in Genoa in 1974, after graduating in Classical Literature, she moved to France, where she continued her studies, obtaining a PhD in Italian Studies at the Paris-Sorbonne University and teaching at various universities, living first in Paris for ten years and then in Nice. Her publications include La guerra è stupida (Gammarò, 2020), Pascoli maledetto (Il Nuovo Melangolo, 2020), La lingua degli dei. L'amore per il greco antico e moderno (Il Nuovo Melangolo, 2021), La Trama di Elena (Ponte alle Grazie, 2023) and Afrodite viaggia leggera (Ponte alle Grazie, 2024).

The volume originates from the exhibition of the same name that the Fondazione Merz, in collaboration with the MAO Museum of Oriental Art in Turin, dedicated to the Franco-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada, winner of the fourth edition of the Mario Merz Prize. The exhibition, which ran from 20 February to 18 May 2025, curated by Davide Quadrio with Giulia Turconi, referred in its title to the agricultural practice of removing wilted flowers from a plant to stimulate its growth. Taking up the metaphor of a return to the essential in order to release new energies, the exhibition featured the most representative works of Yto Barrada's artistic research, including films, sculptures, installations, textiles and prints, some of which were created especially for the occasion. The book includes an introduction by Beatrice Merz, texts by the exhibition curators and an essay by Myriam Ben Salah, independent curator who will curate the French Pavilion at the next Venice Art Biennale dedicated to Yto Barrada. The volume contains a rich collection of images of the exhibition.

Yto Barrada, born in Paris in 1971, lives and works between Tangier and New York. Through an archival approach and connected to public actions, Barrada's installations reveal lesser-known stories, reveal the prevalence of fiction in institutionalised narratives, and celebrate everyday forms of claiming autonomy. Her work includes different media such as photography, film, sculpture, installation, and engraving. She is the founder of the Cinémathèque de Tanger, a cultural centre that has become a historic institution bringing together the Moroccan community to celebrate local and international cinema. Yto Barrada has won numerous awards including the 2019 Roy R. Neuberger Prize, the 2016 Tiger Award and a nomination for the 2016 Prix Marcel Duchamp in Paris, the 2015 Abraaj Group Art Prize and the 2011 Deutsche Guggenheim Artist of the Year award. Barrada's work is included in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum (New York), Tate Modern (London), MoMA (New York), Guggenheim (Berlin), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museo de Sao Paolo and the Venice Biennales 2007 and 2011.

A particular game is packaged in ‘I due’ (The Two), in which a writer and his translator clash and their miserable and admirable deeds are recounted.

An absurd and heated confrontation that germinates and proliferates in a scatological and foul-mouthed mixture: from the outset, they are opposites, yet at the same time inseparable. Two assholes desperately trying to separate, but ending up being each other's shadow, in dizzying duplications and gravitational collapses.

Dedicated by Moresco (with defenceless tenderness) to his French translator Laurent Lombard, the text, as foul-mouthed as it is metaphysically unrestrained, depicts the two through their relationship, publishing life, life in general and the afterlife, right up to the presence of an unforgettable creator, an arsehole like them, and like them grandiose in the dirty and childishly free setting that stinks and ferments here.

Antonio Moresco was born in Mantua in 1947. He has been translated into numerous languages and has established himself as a uniquely singular author on the national scene. Among his vast body of novels, essays and plays, we recall his trilogy Giochi dell'eternità (Games of Eternity), consisting of Gli esordi (The Beginnings, Feltrinelli, 1998), Canti del caos (Songs of Chaos, Feltrinelli, 2001; 2003; 2009) and Gli increati (Mondadori, 2015). His latest works include Canto di D'Arco (SEM, 2019), Chisciotte (SEM, 2020) and Canto del buio e della luce (Feltrinelli, 2024).