In Turin, for the first time, Khalil Rabah's Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind takes the form of an archaeological site, in which the visitor is invited to immerse himself in a historical narrative rendered through testimonies and clues. In the spaces of the Fondazione Merz, the artist challenges the role of the museum as a mere container and focuses on art as a tool for the interpretation and correction of history. Khalil Rabah's artistic practice ranges between painting, sculpture and installation to construct a lucid and careful analysis of history and its interpretations, questioning their narrative modes and the perception they generate. Fundamental themes such as change, memory and identity intersect in his work, creating new ways of representing communities and relationships. ways of representing communities and the relationships that make them up.

The catalogue accompanies the project conceived by Khalil Rabah for the Fondazione Merz and was created as an extension of the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind (PMNHH). Developed as a nomadic museum institution that the artist inaugurated in 2003, Rabah's museum, which includes departments such as geology, botany and palaeontology, has seen several iterations around the world and is identified as a project in constant evolution.

Khalil Rabah is a Palestinian conceptual artist born in Jerusalem in 1961. He studied Architecture and Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Arlington and has resided in the United States for over a decade. His most recent solo exhibitions include Casa Árabe, Madrid (2016); Kunsthaus Hamburg (2015); e-flux, New York (2013); and Beirut Art Center (2012). As well as major group exhibitions, including Manifesta 12 Palermo (2018); Sharjah Biennial (2017); Marrakech Biennial (2016); Kochi-Muziris Biennial (2014); Thessaloniki Biennial (2013); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012); Mathaf, Doha (2010); and Venice Biennale (2009). Rabah is the initiator and artistic director of the Riwaq Biennale and a co-founder of the Al Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem. From 2011 to 2015 he served on the curricular committee of Ashkal Alwan's Home Workspace programme in Beirut, Lebanon.

Rome, end of the 1950s, when the Italian art scene is in great turmoil. One of the protagonists of the debate on the renewal of the arts is the painter Francesco Lo Savio, one of the most problematic personalities of the Italian post-informal avant-garde.
Lo Savio is a participant in the (not only Italian but international) revolution of a generation of young artists who want to break away from the previous Informal culture and move towards a new mechanism of artwork construction, centred on the qualities inherent to painting itself.
There was a lack of a more detailed and organic view of his work in the critical literature. Angelo Di Modica's complex work constitutes a significant contribution to fully reconstructing the difficult and significant artistic and human history of Francesco Lo Savio. It investigates the artist's entire career in all its fundamental passages and returns an image of him that is as defined as possible. It measures the reasons and circumstances of his art, shedding new light on moments of his research that have not yet been sufficiently investigated and at the same time rediscovering themes and personalities that have made up the story of the last century.

Angelo Di Modica holds a PhD in Methods and Methodologies of Archaeological and Art-Historical Research (2022) and he is a research fellow at the Department of Cultural Heritage Sciences, University of Salerno. An art historian, he has published essays and contributions on Italian artistic experiences of the 20th century with a focus on the Roman scene between the late 1950s and early 1960s.

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.

The book tells the story of artist Concetta Modica's project, winner of the PAC - Piano per l'Arte Contemporanea 2021 - Linea committenza call for bids, promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture and commissioned by the Civic Museum of Castelbuono (Palermo). The work she realised is linked to the historical events of the relic of St. Anne, the patron saint of Castelbuono, preserved in the chapel dedicated to her in the Ventimiglia Castle, home of the Museum. It is a large blue felt cloth printed in ink using a special intaglio technique, representing the image of the sky above Castelbuono on the night of 4 May 1454, the date on which the relic was transferred from the town of Geraci to Castelbuono. The image of the starry sky was obtained with the collaboration of the GAL Hassin Foundation - International Centre for Astronomical Sciences of Isnello. The project also makes use of the contribution of the embroiderers of Castelbuono and Isnello, renews the value of collaboration between institutions and communities and promotes a reinterpretation of the cultural heritage by encouraging cooperation between artists, artisans and the territory. The book contains texts by the president of the museum's board of directors, Mariaenza Puccia; museum director, Laura Barreca; curator of the public programme, Maria Rosa Sossai; anthropologist Angelo Cucco; astrophysicist Sabrina Masiero, head of didactics - GAL Hassin Foundation; Michela Eremita, co-founder of the Children's Art Museum of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena; and a conversation between the artist and Valentina Bruschi, curator of the project.

Concetta Modica was born in Modica and lives and works in Milan. Her works reflect on the present and its paradoxes, in particular on the concept of the 'contemporary epic'.

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.