A fairy tale for everyone, adults and children, a book that holds the words of a great author, Paola Mastrocola, and the work of the famous artist, Marisa Merz, the only woman to be a leading protagonist of the Arte Povera movement. This story of a strange little girl in a land inhabited by benevolent or terrible figures marks the rhythm of the pas-à-deux between the writer and the famous artist, who did not live to see the publication of this volume that she would have liked so much. This fable, which accompanies a new season in the series and for the publishing house, is both her legacy and our tribute to one of the most interesting and free women on the international art scene.

Paola Mastrocola was born in Turin and taught literature in a scientific high school. Until 1998 she devoted herself to theatre, poetry and literary research. In 2000 she made her debut in fiction, later publishing a large number of novels.

Marisa Merz, born in Turin in 1926 and deceased in 2019, was a famous international artist. Her work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions and is included in the collections of some of the most important international museums dedicated to contemporary art.

The catalogue of the exhibition curated by Danilo Eccher at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila from 8 February to 8 June 2020. The book gathers together a vast iconographic and textual repertory and in documenting the cultural path of the exhibition, as the curator himself states, “a visual writing that caresses the experiences [of Arte Povera] and grasps its scent, not only presents the works but proposes the global image of a single ‘landscape’ through which to immerse oneself in the emotion of a research that has marked an important page in the history of art”.

This small book/catalogue collects the biographies of the artists and musicians who were finalists in the Third Edition of the international prize that the Fondazione dedicates to the figure and work of Mario Merz, after whom it is named. The two sections of the Prize, music and the visual arts, saw the participation in this edition of artists Bertille Bak, Mircea Cantor, David Maljković, Maria Papadimitriou and Unknown Friends. The finalist composers were Annachiara Gedda, Mauro Lanza, Filippo Perocco, Robert HP Platz and Jay Schwartz. The book contains images of the works that were part of the finalists’ exhibition, held at the Fondazione Merz in Turin from 3 June to 6 October 2019 and of the concert performed on the same date at the Biblioteca Civica Musicale “Andrea Della Corte” - Villa della Tesoriera, Turin.

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Petrit Halilaj. Shkrepëtima curated by Leonardo Bigazzi and held at Fondazione Merz from 29th October 2018 to 17th February 2019.

“In recent years, Petrit Halilaj has succeeded in transforming his own biography and the recent history of his nation, Kosovo, into living matter for his works. Despite working with a public and collective dimension, his work often originates from a personal experience, and is usually the result of an intimate process shared with the people dearest to him. Using sculpture, video, performance and drawing, Halilaj has developed a deep reflection on the construction mechanisms of cultural identity, on the value of memory and on the role of art in the shaping of collective consciousness in contemporary society.

This small publication has been printed on the occasion of the exhibition Shkrepëtima by Petrit Halilaj (29 October 2018 - 17 February 2019) held at Fondazione Merz.

The Shkrepëtima project presented at the Fondazione Merz continues the artist’s investigation into the historical roots of Runik, the little Kosovar town in which he grew up, from its Neolithic origins to its recent past. The exhibition is the culminating and conclusive moment of the project, entirely produced by the Fondazione Merz. The first and fundamental chapter of the project was the performance held on 7 July 2018 in the ruins of the Runik Culture House, which for over thirty years had been the symbol of the cultural identity of its citizens. This show was followed by another, at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Berne, Switzerland (20 July - 19 August 2018).

The exhibition presents a new series of sculptures and monumental installations that re-contextualise the settings, costumes and stage props of the performance inside the exhibition space. In the work of Halilaj the ruins of the Culture Centre take on a voice to recount history, becoming the expression of a precise will to remember the past in a context in which the desire for removal of memory is very strong. Through his dreamlike and visionary language, Halilaj has achieved a surprising balance between the weight of the history of these fragments and the physical lightness arising from their suspension.

The first cycle of exhibitions and events proposed by RADICETERNA closes with an exhibition by Ignazio Mortellaro. The creator, together with Valentina Bruschi and Vittorio Rappa, of the entire project for the promotion and dissemination of contemporary art hosted in the eighteenth-century spaces of the Calidarium of Palermo’s Botanical Garden, Mortellaro is an eclectic and versatile artist in the Renaissance sense, a man of letters and an engineer. For the exhibition entitled E già sono deserto – which is complemented by this book full of texts and references – he conceives a new objectification for the term desert, understood as landscape, a place of extreme atomisation, free space and ever-changing labyrinth. The reflections on human and cosmic natures, the literary and geographical references, become narratives on time and its many forms and dimensions.