Push the Limits is the volume that ties in with the group exhibition curated at the Fondazione Merz from the 7th of September 2020 to the 26the of February 2021.

The book is more than just a catalogue and illustrates an all-female art project. The curators, Claudia Gioia and Beatrice Merz, invited seventeen internationally renowned artists to take part in Push the Limits: Rosa Barba, Sophie Calle, Katharina Grosse, Shilpa Gupta, Mona Hatoum, Jenny Holzer, Emily Jacir, Bouchra Khalili, Barbara Kruger, Cinthia Marcelle, Shirin Neshat, Maria Papadimitriou, Pamela Rosenkranz, Chiharu Shiota, Fiona Tan, Carrie Mae Weems and Sue Williamson.

Page after page, the reader can immerse himself in the exhibition through the images and essays by the curators and Maura Reilly, Paul Mason and Manuel Borja-Villel, and into the search for a language capable of narrating the present.

In addition to providing further insight into the work on display and the current projects of the seventeen artists, Push the Limits also collects their photographs, drawings, film suggestions, excerpts from books and other suggestions.

A polyphony of signs and experiences whose imagination speaks to us of the ability to bring all those realities that are ‘beyond’ to the threshold of thought: a publishing ‘happening’ of culture and life.

The second book in the Ultralibri series, Stanze in a certain way narrates eight years in the creative evolution of the duo of artists and directors Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio, who recently presented SPACCAPIETRE, the only Italian title in competition in Venice Days at the Venice Film Festival 2020.

The book offers an experience full of theatrical, poetic and cinematographic projects dedicated to the Somali lands and to the critique of Italy’s colonial past, linking old and new subjugations. The volume includes, among others, a contribution by Andrea Del Boca and historical essays by Luca Ciabarri and Gabriele Proglio.

Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio were born in Turin in 1978. They have worked together since 1999 as visual artists, screenwriters and film directors. Over the years they have directed short films, documentaries and produced installations that have participated in the most important national and international film festivals and various exhibitions.

The book that opens the new Ultralibri series – volumes that are on the borderline between essay, catalogue and artist’s book, going beyond the notion of book itself – represents the sequel to the exhibition of the young Lebanese artist and activist, Zena el Khalil, held in Beirut in 2017. The exhibition, hosted in the emblematic Beit Beirut on the green line in the city centre, expanded to include a large number of people and communities in 40 days of workshops and meetings, projecting the artist’s work onto the entire city, creating an open, inclusive and circular proposal starting from a symbolic place of the Lebanese civil war. The book not only collects that experience but, in the spirit of the artist, widens the discourse and the possible proposals for the care of a city and an entire people, towards a forty-first day. The book contains texts by the artist and Healing Lebanon, a collective author, a true community that is the result of experiences and dialogue.

Zena el Khalil, born in London in 1976, lives in Beirut. A visual artist, writer, performer, cultural activist and yoga instructor, she works with themes focused on creating a culture of peace and reconciliation. www.zenaelkhalil.com

The Dignitaries of Destiny get together to decide a birth: a new life will be soon assigned to a woman who wish to be a mother. But the decision is taking too much time, and the person who's going to be born decides to ask whether to choose his destiny. So they bring him to that special place called the Yellow Room, where silence can let him be carried by his thoughts, and where a town, a house, a room and a cradle suddenly appear... Here begins the exciting adventure of his birth, full of hopes and expectations, but also of unexpected events that run the risk to prejudice the Call to Life. But finally the miracle is made and what he has just imagined becomes true... From the synergy between Miguel Angel Mendo's words and Chen Zhen's images, a tender and fun fable telling children the mistery of birth through a simple and poetic language, that goes with the colours and shapes of Art.

Chen Zhen (Shangai, 1955 - Paris, 2000). His artistic style had as its basis the encounter between Western and Chinese culture. The artist drew from Taoism, as well as Buddhist religion and philosophy, re-elaborating their meanings, and using them to represent an alternative to the negative influence exercised by the consumer society. The artistic value of his sculptures and installations lies in his constant striving for harmony between body and spirit, which leads to the enriching of one’s inner life.

Miguel Angel Mendo was born in Madrid in 1949. A graduate in psychology, he began working as a psychotherapist in close contact with the world of children and alternative pedagogy. He has written books for children, but also for the theatre, and in the past has been a teacher of cinema, a contributor to various periodicals and an editor for television and radio programmes. The following have been translated into Italian by Edizioni Piemme Junior: Per un maledetto spot which won the Lazarillo Award in 1989, one of Spain's most prestigious prizes for books for the young, and also Un museo sinistro e Che i morti stiano zitti!

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”.