This book documents the exhibition Messico famigliare / Domestic Mexico held at the Fondazione Merz in Turin from 19 January to 28 February 2010. The title, Domestic Mexico, is evidently a play on words (in the original Italian Messico/lessico) referring to Natalia Ginzburg’s Domestic Vocabulary, published in 1963 and which centered upon the expressed internal relationships of families. Mocellin and Pellegrini, through their own parenting experience, take a look at the family at the present time and its paradoxes: it is no longer considered to be a closed entity, but it’s difficult to think of it as open; it still functions as a traditional screen in the name of which to remedy conflicts and organize consensus. The artists weave fragments of their family memories together with the experience of being new adoptive parents and the widespread diffidence towards a family that proposes to differ from the scheme of the classic patriarchal model. Joining the personal with the political has raised discussions about the concept of neutrality in the lives of men and women, claiming personal responsibility as one of the factors necessary for renewing social relationships.

Ottonella Mocellin and Nicola Pellegrini were both born in Milan, respectively in 1966 and 1962. They lived in London from 1984 to 1993, where they studied Public Art and Architecture. They spent the year of 2001-02 in New York, as representatives from Italy in the P.S.1 International Studio Program. Their works, including installations, videos, photography and performances, have been exhibited in museums and galleries in Italy and abroad. They are represented currently by the Lia Rumma Gallery, with locations in Milan and Naples.

This artist’s book records the project of the show by German artist Wolfgang Laib at the Fondazione Merz from 9 April to 7 June 2009. A sense of the balance and harmony that governs the world and the work of man, essential guardian of the universe, lies at the base of the artist’s thinking. An installation of hundreds of small rice mountains, a line of small mountains of pollen and a great mountain of beeswax Ziggurat fill the entire space of the Fondazione. Furthermore, from 1 to 7 June, and for only seven days, the Fondazione was host to a special event that was part of the artist’s project: fortyfive Brahmins priests, from one of the most important temples of southern India, officiated at the rite of fire, which has been part of Indian tradition for millennia.

“A long story lies behind the genesis of this event. For Documenta 1987, Mario Merz invited me to exhibit a vase of pollen on a spiral table. That was the beginning of a beautiful and very precious friendship between two artists with – I believe – different lives, different ages, but sometimes a very similar way of looking. We were both fascinated, something that has much enriched our lives… So it will be much more than an exhibition of different objects and works; not an exhibition for an individual artist, it will concern the whole world, the universe and also our very existence. I have had this dream for the whole of my life, since when I tried to be a doctor, realising very quickly that that meant only dealing with the physical body, whereas our life and existence cannot be reduced simply to matter. The pollen recalls the beginning and creation; the rice mountains and the beeswax Ziggurat (pyramid and steps) nourishment and the bond of the sky with the earth; in the end, fire recalls destruction and the possible renewal of the world, the transformation of what is physical to a new cycle, to a state of change” (Wolfgang Laib).

The history of Russian art between 1919 and 1930 offers numerous examples of collaboration between painters and writers who came into close contact in the avant-garde groups. Malevich, for his part, felt that the pictorial medium was insufficient to respond to the more precise demands of a new logical discourse, and in the summer of 1919 he temporarily abandoned painting in order to turn to the creation of theoretical texts. Rejecting the “imperfection of the ruffled brush” in favour of the “subtlety of the pen”, Malevich crossed the boundary between painter and philosopher. He did not write about Suprematism, but wrote as a Suprematist, drawing on the extra-pictorial consequences of the new meaning he attributed to painting.

Jean-Claude Marcadé, emeritus director of research at the C.N.R.S Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, has been the curator and scientific commissioner of numerous exhibitions, including the monographic exhibition dedicated to Malevich at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bilbao in 2006.

Nadia Caprioglio graduated from the University of Turin in Russian Language and Literature. She completed a PhD in Comparative Slavic Literature at the University of Milan and spent time at the A. Pushkin Institute of Russian Language and Literature in Moscow, the Lomosov University in Moscow, the Université Libre in Brussels and the University of Nebraska in Omaha. She has been a researcher at the University of Turin since 1992, and since the 1996-97 academic year has held the chair of Contemporary Russian Literature at the Faculty of Education where she holds courses on twentieth-century poetry and preparatory seminars on Russian versification.

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the show of the Italian artist Luisa Rabbia at the Fondazione Merz from 19 June to 20 September 2009. The exhibition evolves around three central works, consisting of a video and two installations, with traveling as the main theme, through an intimate, imaginary and surreal journey. Luisa Rabbia combines her own world of loneliness, fear, anxiety and personal memories with images taken from other people’s lives. The result is a sort of diary, a narrative that develops through a net of drawings: endless roots, fragments of the artist’s work and clips from her previous videos that are all like blood vessels of a life journey.

From January 23 to February 27 2010, the exhibition will be hosted by the Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires (Argentina).

This is the fourth publication belonging to fondazione merz i quaderni series and it presents the exhibition hopes & doubts (curated by Costantino D’Orazio) held at Fondazione Merz from 22 January to 1 March 2009. Eight Lebanese and eight Italian artists showcase their work in both Beirut (Lebanon) and Turin (Italy). The cutting edge body of work will focus on daily life, translating the special emotional condition of the Lebanese people into paintings, photography, video and installation.

At the same time as the exhibition hopes & doubts the Fondazione Merz presented the solo show of Gabriele Basilico, Beirut 1991, which includes about twenty photographs taken from the great photographic service shot in Beirut in 1991 at the end of the civil war that devastated the country. The result is a photographic document that intends to reflect on what remains of a city after the conflict of war and how it prepares to ‘start again’.

Artists: Gabriele Basilico, Elisabetta Benassi, Ginou Choueiri, Elisabetta Di Maggio, Michael Fliri, Francesco Gennari, Pascal Hachem, Lina Hakim, Joanne Issa, Zena el Khalil, Marzia Migliora, Randa Mirza, Giuseppe Pietroniro, Luisa Rabbia, Marwan Rechmaoui, Rima Saab, Andrea Salvino.

The artist’s book brings together 138 drawings created by Marzia Migliora between 2006 and 2008.

The title Ink on paper incisively defines the content of the book, in which the choice of colour, limited to two Indian ink colours, red and black, determines the thread accompanying a journey through images without the aid of the written word. The book contains no critical apparatus or texts: a choice designed to highlight the expressive and evocative freedom of the language of drawing. The sequence of drawings traces a narrative thread that is composed in the eyes of the viewer without imposing a pre-established reading. The book is divided into six projects with a blank page, a pause, a breath to take the eye to another place. The subjects represented move from the woods to the high seas, from domestic interiors to spaces in which an undefined outline sees the protagonists floating in the white of the paper, the void. This too takes shape, becoming a consistent physical space: a place.

Drawing for Marzia Migliora is an act of discovery, a glance at her surroundings, a private act in close relation to her own reserve of past observations, the blank sheet of paper a condition of existence, the area in which to give birth to a situation and make it become conscious.