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

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”.

This small book/catalogue collects the biographies of the artists and musicians who were finalists in the Third Edition of the international prize that the Fondazione dedicates to the figure and work of Mario Merz, after whom it is named. The two sections of the Prize, music and the visual arts, saw the participation in this edition of artists Bertille Bak, Mircea Cantor, David Maljković, Maria Papadimitriou and Unknown Friends. The finalist composers were Annachiara Gedda, Mauro Lanza, Filippo Perocco, Robert HP Platz and Jay Schwartz. The book contains images of the works that were part of the finalists’ exhibition, held at the Fondazione Merz in Turin from 3 June to 6 October 2019 and of the concert performed on the same date at the Biblioteca Civica Musicale “Andrea Della Corte” - Villa della Tesoriera, Turin.

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Petrit Halilaj. Shkrepëtima curated by Leonardo Bigazzi and held at Fondazione Merz from 29th October 2018 to 17th February 2019.

“In recent years, Petrit Halilaj has succeeded in transforming his own biography and the recent history of his nation, Kosovo, into living matter for his works. Despite working with a public and collective dimension, his work often originates from a personal experience, and is usually the result of an intimate process shared with the people dearest to him. Using sculpture, video, performance and drawing, Halilaj has developed a deep reflection on the construction mechanisms of cultural identity, on the value of memory and on the role of art in the shaping of collective consciousness in contemporary society.