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.

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.

The volume documents the Mineur Mineur project of the artist Bertille Bak, winner of the third edition of the Mario Merz Prize, conceived for the Fondazione Merz and curated by Caroline Bourgeois. The artist turns, with her work, to communities of people more or less aware of the characteristics of their identity and to those minorities often forgotten or repressed. The title of the exhibition itself refers to the video installation Mineur Mineur ("minor miner"), addressing the issue of child labor which still today deprives about 152 million children worldwide of their childhood. Through a fairytale language that employs artifices, Bak offers a contemporary truth made up of tragic destinies, a social story that becomes a sort of memory archive that intertwines the lives of the people with the production of a new common imagination. The volume documents the genesis and development of the exhibition, and includes, in addition to the curator's introduction text, an extensive conversation with the artist and other writings from different disciplinary fields that collect points of reflection on such an important and urgent social issue and on Bertille Bak's artistic career.

Bertille Bak, the granddaughter of Polish miners from northern France, was born in 1983 in Arras and lives and works in Paris. From 2002 to 2007, she attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris where she was a student of Christian Boltanski and then continued her studies at the Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Tourcoing.
Her works can be found in numerous collections worldwide. She has exhibited in group and solo shows at institutional venues and private galleries, such as The Gallery Apart, Rome, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Maison du peuple de Vénissieux and Galerie Xippas, Paris.

Fifty years ago, the first Italian movement for the liberation of homosexuals was born in Turin: FUORI!. At the same time, the magazine of the same name came out, the voice and the organizational tool of a "community" that is slowly expanding throughout Italy. To retrace the genesis, developments and legacies of an experience that marks the physiognomy of the current Italian LGBTQ + movement, the Diffused Museum of the Resistance together with the Polo del '900 and the Sandro Penna Foundation - OUT! present the exhibition “FUORI! 1971 - 2021. 50 years from the foundation of the first homosexual movement in Italy ”, which takes place from 24 September to 24 October 2021, of which this book is a theoretical and historical-critical restitution and integration.

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 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”.