The book is the catalogue of the solo exhibition that the Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporanea of Trento dedicated to the work of the Turinese artist Marco Gastini from 22 January to 13 March 1993. Besides the rich iconographic apparatus, the volume opens with a critical essay by Danilo Eccher, followed by a contribution by Francesco Poli and texts by Lisa Parola, one of which is dedicated to the artist’s most recent works at the time. Parola is also responsible for the extensive biographical and bibliographical notes that closes the catalogue.

This book forms the catalogue of the group exhibition of the same name, curated by Dede Auregli, held at the Villa delle Rose in Bologna from 24 January to 11 April 1993. The group exhibition, with works by international artists such as Massimo Barzagli, Thomas Bernstein, Vittorio Corsini, Thomas Grünfeld, Vincent Shine, Wastijn & Deschuymer and Craig Wood, reflects on the theme of nature and landscape, on its logical representation and on the multiple directions of meaning that this theme suggests to the sensitivity of contemporary artists. In addition to an introductory text by the curator, the volume includes an essay by Stefano Zecchi.

This monograph devoted to the artist-director duo Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi traces a large part of their work from the early 1970s to the 1990s. Thanks to a conversation curated by Sergio Toffetti and Daniela Giuffrida, it reconstructs the thread of a journey that begins with Angela Ricci Lucchi’s training in Salzburg with Oskar Kokoschka and the early film experiences of Gianikian; films that use found objects to focus on the themes of memory. The meeting of the directors’ artistic practices and their respective lives has fostered attention on the theme of the “catalogue”: the true pole around which Gianikian|Ricci Lucchi’s poetics revolves and unfolds. In addition to the aforementioned interview, the book includes texts by Alberto Farassino, Janis Crystal Lipzin, Scott MacDonald, and Michel Hommel, and is completed by texts by the filmmakers featured in the book.

What are the origins of the construction of power, of the use of violence as a conscious instrument, of bloodshed as the foundation of the collective, which form the basis of the thought and practices of our civilisation? When Rome decided to build the Capitol, a human head with an intact face was discovered beneath the foundations. It was as though the soldier depicted in the foreground of the work by A. Caron (1521-1599) opening the book, standing in triumph on a round podium, had just found it. The exhibition shows how one shows a trophy. One might say that these battles, these assassinations take place on the plinth, on the very supports of the monuments. These fundamental battles are the subject of this book, called the Libro delle fondazioni (Book of Foundations). Foundations of stone walls on flesh, foundations of the city, of its history, its culture, its spectacles, its politics: but also of our own. An essay in the philosophy of knowledge, this book is a search for reality distorted by ideological formations, and traces the possible outlines of a knowledge and a thought constructed outside the fury of verbal struggles and the delimitations of power. These are the terms of a culture, nature, civilisation, which here, in negative and in positive, find a new determination.

“Considering equality as a value to be realised obscures the sense of the equality we currently experience: when men are equal, decisions of collective interest are taken by majority vote according to the principle ‘one man one vote’, but nothing suggests we may attribute the virtue of justice or knowledge to this majority”. Castellano's essay offers an in-depth investigation into the political power of truth and the theory of pluralism.

The book, like Giulio Paolini’s works themselves, is coherently suspended between the visible and the invisible, the defined and the unresolved. Once again the artist looks at the riddle of his work as a participatory author and critic, in a dynamic progress, preserving intact the attitudes of wonder through which he fascinates the spectator with whom he identifies. In his book, the artist uses seven rooms – as many places of refraction, reference and accumulation, where anything can happen – to allow or suggest to the reader, who is mirrored in the work, the activation of an exchange of role and experience, to explore what happens outside and inside himself. The book features the photographic collaboration of Paolo Mussat Sartor.