Protege Noctem
Mattia Balsamini &
Raffaele Panizza
21x28,5 cm / 200 pages
800 copies / Hard cover
Design by Multi Form
Published in February 2023
ISBN: 979-12-80177-22-3
€40
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Shipments estimated for end-March
For all of us, blinded by the shards from billions of artificial lights (or ALAN: Artificial Light At Night), the night sky has become a soiled canvas, an unknown phenomenon. Eighty-three per cent of the world’s population has never seen the Milky Way, the galaxy we call home. And in cities like Shanghai, where the world’s largest astronomy museum recently opened, ninety-five per cent of the stars are now in fact invisible to the naked eye. Public lighting, windows, street lamps and even LED headlights emit blue spectrum light that dazzles the nocturnal ecosystem and damages the human circadian cycle, our endocrinal interplay of sleep and wakefulness, promoting the simultaneous onset of diseases such as breast and prostate cancer, diabetes and depression. Epidemiologists are united in considering the disappearance of the night as a risk factor on a level footing with pollution, alcohol and smoking. “We call on the Commission to put into place an ambitious plan to significantly reduce the use of outdoor artificial light by 2030,” wrote the European Parliament in alarmed tones, in its document titled Biodiversity Strategy 2030: Bringing nature back into our lives. It’s not only light on Earth but also up there: the proliferation of telecommunication satellites creates false cosmic streaks that prevent astronomers from studying the celestial vault. And natural life itself appears to have been harshly affected: migratory birds veer off course, plant leaves no longer sense the onset of winter, and many insects face extinction: this is why defending the darkness represents the vanguard in the ongoing ecological battle to avert apocalypse. Protege Noctem is a documentation project chronicling the unofficial alliance between scientists and citizens to counter the disappearance of the night and its creatures. God, may you protect the shimmering of infinity, wherever it may be found.
Diachronicles
Giulia Parlato
24x30 cm / 120 pages
500 copies / Soft cover with Swiss binding
Design by Nicolas Polli
Text by David Campany
Published in February 2023
ISBN: 979-12-80177-21-6
€35
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Diachronicles is an examination of the historical space, regarded as a fictional container where an apparent collection of evidence opens up to the fantastic. In this space, the attempt to reconstruct the past falls into phantasmal gaps, where things are generated, used, buried, unearthed, transported, and relocated.
This nomadic and fragmentary nature of what has been left behind, reveals how the movement, transfiguration, and misinterpretation of objects shape historiography and ultimately, the real.
In the impossible search of academic legitimation, the viewer is invited into a world where the factual and the fake overlap. The work is about the absence of memory and addresses the leading role archaeology, photography and the museum space play in a historical narrative. In doing so, the human body is used to suggest scale and as a means to display objects.
Furthermore, Diachronicles digs into a parallel history, filled with disappearances, figures to decode, nonexistent artefacts and forgeries hidden in museums basements
As a Flower
Sara Lorusso
17x22,5 cm / 104 pages
750 copies / Hardcover
Design by Giulia Boccarossa
Text Laura Rositani
Published in November 2022
ISBN: 979-12-80177-20-9
€35
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Go to the special edition
“How can the photo of a flower hurt so much?
If your photos, Sara, had a flavour it would be that of the wardrobe in which my mum
stashed clean sheets and where I used to love hiding. If I close my eyes and smell As a
flower’s photos, I squeeze my nose in clean laundry and wait for someone to come and look
for me.”
If your photos, Sara, had a flavour it would be that of the wardrobe in which my mum
stashed clean sheets and where I used to love hiding. If I close my eyes and smell As a
flower’s photos, I squeeze my nose in clean laundry and wait for someone to come and look
for me.”
Laura Rositani
So Far So Good
No Sovereign Author
17x24 cm / 128 pages
500 copies
Soft cover with Swiss binding
Design by Alejandro Acin & No Sovereign Author
Published in November 2022
ISBN: 979-12-80177-19-3
€30
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So Far So Good goes to meet the Hachmi family, accompanying them in their bureaucratic journey to seek asylum in Belgium. The context in which this work takes place coincides with the first period of confinement decreed by Belgium. Using the archive images of the family, recovered from broken smartphones, No Sovereign Author put in tension two discourses that never meet : that of the possible meeting on the one hand, delivered by a thread of everyday images, accumulated and accompanied by the comments of the woman telling her memories; and on the other hand, the discourse of non-meeting, that of the State, vertical, disembodied, made readable by the reproduction of extracts from interviews and the response of the General Commissioner for Refugees and Stateless Persons
Review
PhMuseum
PhMuseum
Heat of Sand
Satoshi Tsuchiyama
23x30 cm / 108 pages
Limited edition of 350 copies
Soft cover with dusk jacket
Design by Eric Dahl Palmér & Dada
Published in September 2022
Winner of Landskrona Foto & Breadfield Dummy Award 2020
ISBN: 979-12-80177-14-8
€35
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After living for several years in the chaos of influences that is New York, the visual artist Satoshi Tsuchiyama realized that it is Israel that is the world’s hub for contemporary dance. His experiences of working with both dance and Jewish artefacts fused together. Questions arose in his head: Since the political situation has long been unstable in this religiously and culturally rich region, what kind of normal everyday life can be found there? What colours and scents does a country like this retain, and how do the dancers appear and move under the influence of an environment like this? He decided to go there to witness the extraordinary on a daily basis.
During his four visits to Israel and Palestine in 2017–19, he wandered in scorching sand and graffiti-filled streets, climbed to the collapsing top floor of the art school. He followed the desires of his eyes. The dancers he met came from all over the world, but they seemed to share the same mood, the same force that oozed out of the ground. And one and the same aura accompanied their bodies in a common direction. He avoided all the areas at high risk of terror, but death and the random character of life were present wherever he went. The energy of the inhabitants to survive was strong, and he experienced a singular beauty in this raw, tough and vulnerable ordeal of perseverance and adaptation.
