This small book/catalogue brings together the biographies of the artists and musicians who were finalists in the Fourth Edition of the international prize that the Fondazione Merz dedicates to the figure and work of Mario Merz, to whom it is named. The Mario Merz Prize, created in 2013, was created with the desire to launch a new project projected towards the future of art and to identify and highlight personalities in the field of art and allow young composers to propose themselves for an innovative contemporary music project.

The two sections of the Prize, music and visual arts, saw for this edition the participation of artists Yto Barrada, Paolo Cirio, Christina Forrer, Anne Hardy, He Xiangyu and Koo Jeong A. The finalists were Katherine Balch, William Dougherty, Farzia Fallah, Füsun Köksal and Claudia Jane Scroccaro. The book is completed by images of the works that are part of the finalists' exhibition, held at the Fondazione Merz in Turin from 9 June to 25 September 2022.

There is the ocean. There is the sycamore, and the jujube too. There is the war. There are mothers, daughters. And there is the habaryar, the little mother. There are Mogadishu, Rome, the Europe of hers and the Europe from the African history. Ubah Cristina Ali Farah's world unravels in a complex and clearly contemporary space, marked by profound references to an ancient wisdom and an often, but not always, dreamlike dimension. The first collection of short stories published in Italy includes the entire literary journey of Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, as well as a series of poems and an unpublished play. The refinement of her language emerges powerfully, showing the international stature of one of the most interesting Italian writers on our artistic scene.

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is a Somali and Italian writer and poet. Winner of the Lingua Madre Prize (2006) and Vittorini Prize (2008), she's the author of three novels: Madre piccola (Frassinelli, 2007; 66thand2nd, 2022), Il comandante del fiume (66thand2nd, 2014; 2022), Le stazioni della luna (66thand2nd, 2021) and the ekphrasis La danza dell'orice (Juxta Press, 2020) inspired by a work by Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu. In 2018 he worked on the rewriting of Antigone directed in Palermo by Giuseppe Massa and the libretto of the community opera Silent City for Matera 2019, directed by James Bonas with music composed by Nigel Osborne. He is a consultant for UNDP Somalia on the Oral History Histography for Peacebuilding project.

The book recounts the project "Il taglio, l'innesto, il castello" (The Cut, the Graft, the Castle) by the artists Domenico Mangano & Marieke van Rooy, winner of the PAC - Plan for Contemporary Art 2020 - Linea committenza (Contracting Line), promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, curated by Valentina Bruschi for the Civic Museum of Castelbuono (Palermo). This is a participatory operation conceived with the aim of involving the community and the natural environment, involving both the ecological and social spheres. The origin of the research is an artistic experiment in ceramic workmanship, obtained by grafting with manna, a resin extracted from the carving of the trunk of ash trees, typical of the Madonie mountains. The title refers to the wound from which the manna flows, a sort of healing incision that generates new lymph and new forms when grafted into another material. The artists adopted a process of experimental research conducted during their artistic residency in the 14th-century Ventimiglia Castle, home of the Civic Museum of Castelbuono, an architectural archetype of a noble residence, later transformed into a civic institution, destined to host cultural activities for the community and the public. The publication bears witness to the complex phases of the creative process and its final outcome with the creation of a sculptural and performative installation that involves the spectator in a physical as well as visual experience. The group of sculptures finally enters the permanent collection of the Civic Museum of Castelbuono.

The duo Mangano & van Rooy formed in 2014 in Amsterdam. Their research and artistic practice address issues of a political nature and social architecture, with the aim of realising participatory projects and educational processes returned through different media, such as film, sculptural installations, performances and publications.

Giorgia Tribuiani's luxuriant literary output seems to revolve around a central point that is brought into direct focus here: the author wrote these pages gazing at the eyes of Medusa. But instead of being petrified, she has managed to creatively take us to this perturbing place.  The short and dry chapters of this novel take us ruthlessly into a tragedy with no way out, namely the scene in which the suicidal person awaits impact. The lingering trauma, however, is that of the train driver, who can do nothing against the inescapable approach of the crash, in spite of all the attempts required by the intervention protocol. The lost life of the suicide creeps into the driver's life like an element nested deep within. The stark, linear chapters in which this tragedy unfolds alternate with other chapters in which we see the traumatised man trying to cope with this disruption in his life that has seeped into him.

The author accompanies her text with an excellent interview on post-traumatic stress disorder with Dr. Domenico De Berardis, psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Director of the Giulianova (TE) Mental Health Centre.

Giorgia Tribuiani was born in Alba Adriatica in 1985. She has a degree in Publishing and Journalism and a master's degree in Marketing and Communication. She has collaborated with several newspapers and edited online communication for some multinationals. She currently teaches creative writing and holds literary consultancies. She has published Guasti (Voland, 2018), Blu (Fazi, 2021), Padri (Fazi, 2022), Superstar (Tetra Edizioni, 2022) and has appeared in the anthologies Abruzzesi per sempre (Edizioni della Sera, 2019), Polittico (Caffè Orchidea, 2019) and Nuvole corsare (Caffè Orchidea, 2020). For Audino Editore she is the author of a creative writing manual on the uncanny genre, Writing the Uncanny. Models, Techniques, Strategies (2023).

Gherardo Bortolotti is both a refined and a dodgy writer. He manages to create extraordinary hypothetical worlds in this geometrically perfect and sentimentally deep composition. These novels are just drafted, they are digressions that instantly hit. Bortolotti here takes from Calvino and Perec, allowing him to bring the astonishment and tremor of our fragile, at times useless, lives to the page. We face yet another proof of this author’s humble and great talent. 

Gherardo Bortolotti was born in Brescia in 1972. Visionary and experimental, he has published Tecniche di basso livello (Laveri, 2009), Oltre il pubblico: la letteratura e il passaggio alla rete (Nuova prosa, 2014), Le storie del pavimento (Tic Edizioni, 2018), Low. Una trilogia (Tic Edizioni, 2020), Romanzetto estivo (Tic Edizioni, 2021).

This autobiographical short story accompanies us throughout half a century of a devouring passion, born by buying a small bamboo fishing pole in a stationary store. It takes the protagonist to the final line of fly fishing, the only technique with a culture and tradition, even literary, that dates back centuries. A personal and spiritual evolution is described with a transporting intensity, but always with politeness and irony, giving the reader unthought of images, absolute ethical questions, extraordinary narrative pictures. Moreover, it opens up a lost horizon: that even today life among nature might be possible after all. 

Raul Montanari was born in 1959 in Bergamo; he lives and works in Milan, where he has been holding creative writing courses since ’99. His most famous works are his novels, La perfezione (Feltrinelli, 1994; Baldini & Castoldi, 2019), Il regno degli amici (Einaudi, 2015) e, sempre per Baldini & Castoldi, Che cosa hai fatto, Chiudi gli occhi, La prima notte, Strane cose domani (Premio Strega Giovani, 2010), La vita finora (2018), Il vizio della solitudine (2021). With Aldo Nove and Tiziano Scarpa he has written Nelle galassie oggi come oggi (Einaudi, 2001), unusual poetry bestseller. He has published the essay l Cristo zen (Indiana, 2011; Baldini & Castoldi, 2022), among plays, screenplays, translations of classical and modern authors.