A green thread links the cherry blossoms in Japan to the gum trees of Malaysia, the botanical gardens of Singapore and the destroyed Perfect Brightness - a green thread that defines the anthropocene and the way nature is plundered, for its immediate utility and to create symbolism in step with current ideologies.
In this volume we look at the stories of our times, seen through the petals of flowers chosen to represent a nation, with the desire to bend a small fragrant corolla to ideologies useful to those in government at the time. They are also the stories of how our poetic images clash against our inability to live without destroying what surrounds us. Through the symbolism of flowers and gardens we talk about politics and history, colonialism and ecology, nationalism and authoritarianism, in an anthropocene short-circuit.

Ilaria Maria Sala is a writer, journalist, poet and ceramist, and has lived in Asia since 1988. She completed her studies in Beijing and London, then moved to Tokyo, and later based in Hong Kong - meanwhile spending long periods in Shanghai, Kathmandu and Dakar. She is the author of four books: the first, Il Dio dell'Asia, religione e politica in Oriente (Il Saggiatore, 2006) won the Brice Chatwin Prize for travel literature; Lettere dalla Cina (Una Città, 2011); Beijing 1989 (Una Città, 2019); L'Eclissi di Hong Kong, topografia di una città in tumulto (ADD Editore, 2022). He contributes to numerous newspapers, both Italian and international, including Il Domani, Internazionale, Il Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The South China Morning Post, and many others, and is a member of the Lettera 22 association of journalists.

Approximately where the 44th parallel North intersects the 8th meridian East, there is a place of memory that Marco Drago brings to life on the page with masterly skill. Drago summons his human beings into a kind of living nativity scene that has a Brewery instead of the Child. As much as this author's writing has an immediate grasp on the reader, skimming in its snappy journeys, concrete to the point of being decoded first by bodies and only later by minds, the outcome of each of his texts contains a compressed and compact worldview and a vision of life that is painful but amused, desolate but sumptuous, sarcastic but passionate - desperate and mystical.

Drago (like all those with a pure talent for writing) is inimitable in many ways. In particular, he has a mysterious ability that allows him to totally overturn the relationship between what we mean by ‘person’ and what we mean by ‘character’, i.e. between his pages live and meet people who everything suggests were in real life (beautiful) characters. Each one with a tic, or a fantasy, or an unmentionable disappointment, or a weakness, or a stigma, or an identity adherence to transient social roles, or an invincible drive, an artistic talent to dissipate, a falling in love.

In his nativity scene, people of beautiful interiority coexist with the more drifting outcasts. All in the bowl of life and time shredder. All loved and mocked in a single gesture by the author. We readers also converge around the brewery, because we feel that there is a buried pulsation there and perceive that only a writer like Marco Drago can make it so immediate.

Dry, poignant, definitive is the finale of this small and universal Bohème.

Marco Drago is a writer, translator and radio presenter. He has published: L'amico del pazzo e altri racconti (Feltrinelli, 1998), Cronache da chissà dove (Minimum Fax, 2000), Domenica sera (Feltrinelli, 2001), Zolle (Feltrinelli, 2005), La vita moderna è rumenta (Feltrinelli, 2012), La prigione grande quanto un paese (Barbera Editore, 2013), Baladin, la birra artigianale è tutta colpa di Teo, with Teo Musso (Feltrinelli, 2013), Sesso calcio e rock and roll (Feltrinelli, 2014) and Innamorato (Bollati Boringhieri, 2023). He has translated many books from English for major Italian publishers. Between 2000 and 2025 he wrote and hosted radio programmes with Gaetano Cappa for RadioRai, Radio24 and RSI. He is part of the artistic factory Istituto Barlumen.

Guide to the work of the famous English artist and the exhibition at the Venaria Reale (Turin) from 31th October 2024

William Blake (1757-1827) is a leading figure in British art and literature. Ignored when he was alive, his visionary works in painting, print and watercolour have inspired entire generations and are now recognised as a unique contribution to world culture.

The catalogue of the exhibition held at La Venaria Reale offers a selection of his finest works from the collection of the Tate UK, set in the context of a convulsive moment in British art, imagination and history. Blake lived through a revolutionary period, a time of radical transformation of ideas about art and the imagination, in which artists pushed art into new and unexplored imaginary territories.

Blake's timeless images are juxtaposed with those of the artists who most inspired and influenced him, including Henry Fuseli, Benjamin West and John Hamilton Mortimer.

The volume is accompanied by in-depth texts on William Blake, on some of the artists close to him and on the artistic current of Romanticism by David Blayney Brown and Alice Insley.

Exhibition Blake e la sua epoca. Viaggi nel tempo del sogno (Blake and His Age. Journeys in Dreamtime)

La Venaria Reale, Venaria, Turin, 31th October 2024 - 2nd February 2025

Within the Echos project, a pas de deux between visual art and theatre, the two artists, Alfredo Jaar and Romeo Castellucci, one for each of the two languages, find themselves answering the same questions, as if in front of an imaginary mirror. The structure of the double, of the mirror in fact, reflects and ideally crosses the different looks, approaches and results that find - not surprisingly - surprising commonalities. Alfredo Jaar and Romeo Castellucci, leading figures in contemporary creation, are the protagonists of the first volume.
(On the occasion of the Festival delle Colline Torinesi in world premiere currently available on the hopefulmonster website and in the bookshop of the Fondazione Merz in Turin.)

Romeo Castellucci, director, creator of sets, lighting and costumes, is among the most significant authors of contemporary theatre. A graduate in painting and set design from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, in 1981 he co-founded the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. In 2005 he was director of the theatre section of the Venice Biennale and in 2008 he was associate artist of the 62nd edition of the Festival d'Avignon. Winner of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2013, the following year he was awarded an honorary degree in music and theatre by the University of Bologna. Among his most recent creations: the plays The Third Reich (2020), Bros (2021), the direction of the operas Pavane für Prometheus IX (2021) and Bluebeard's Castle (2022), the public action Milan (2021) and the installation Tomorrow (2022).

Alfredo Jaar is a Chilean artist, architect and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. He studied architecture during the dictatorial regime in Chile and moved to New York in 1982. His work focuses on socio-political issues, the semiotics of images, themes of utopia and failure. He has participated in the Venice Art Biennale (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), the São Paulo Biennale (1987, 1989, 2010, 2021) and Documenta (1987, 2002). He received the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018 and the Hasselblad Award in 2020. His works have been exhibited worldwide.

The book Arte contemporanea: Scusi, non capisco ('Contemporary Art: Sorry, I Don't Understand') originates from a famous format of the Merz Foundation in Turin, a series of events during which the public was led to listen to and interact with exceptional guests from different artistic fields. The project, based on an idea by Maria Centonze, aimed to meet the general public's need for a better understanding of the languages and thinking behind contemporary works of art.
Each one of us, if stripped of the many prejudices that hinder openness to any world other than our own, can and must try to understand, even in the way of art.
Costantino D'Orazio, art curator, museum director and cultural popularizer, takes readers on a journey through the ‘Scusi, non capisco’ - among others - of Serena Dandini, Andrea Zalone, Lucia Goracci, Ascanio Celestini and Maria Grazia Cucinotta.

Costantino D'Orazio (Rome, 1974), art historian, is the director of the National Museums of Perugia and the Regional Directorate of National Museums of Umbria. He worked at the Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali as resident curator at the MACRO in Rome from 2014 to 2018; from 2008 to 2012 he was curator of contemporary art exhibitions at the National Museum of Villa Pisani in Stra. Recently, he curated the initiative 5 minutes with Van Gogh, the exhibition Artemisia Gentileschi. Coraggio e Passione at Palazzo Ducale in Genoa and Amarsi. Love in Art from Guido Reni to Banksy at the Fondazione Cassa di Rispamio di Terni. Since 2014, he has hosted the column AR Frammenti d'Arte on Rainews24 and is the art expert for Unomattina in famiglia and Linea Verde on Rai1, Geo and TG3 Linea Notte on Rai3. He is the author and host of the programmes Wikiradio and Vite che sono la tua on Radio3, as well as collaborating with the programme Radio3 Suite. From 2014 to 2019 he hosted the cultural popularisation programme Bella davvero and in 2021 the programme Due cose on Radio2. His latest publication as an author is Art Detectives. 30 cases to become real experts (Piemme, 2024).