Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
Vogliamo tutto. Pratiche culturali e lavoro è una pubblicazione sul lavoro all’interno del contesto socio-culturale in evoluzione: dagli impatti della rivoluzione industriale, al declino post-industriale, fino alla rapida accelerazione dell’era digitale.
Divine Drudgery is an artist book with collages and artworks by James Richards and Leslie Thornton, and contributions by artists, writers and poets centred around liminality and the aesthetics and politics of the invisible.
The book is the first comprehensive monograph on the polymorphous work of Athanasios Argianas. It is published on the occasion of Hollowed Water, a major solo exhibition at Camden Arts Centre in 2020 and ARCH, Athens, in 2021.
Through exquisite craftsmanship, and with reference to romantic nationalism, Ann Böttcher explores how aesthetic and political projections characterize notions of nature, and how such conceptions are taken up by countries, political movements, and other institutions.
Voices (Towards Other Institutions) is the final act of the coral, multiform, articulated, two-year-long experiment carried out by Open, the Russian Federation Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition.
The book deals with Diego Marcon’s practice through the analysis of three film and video works. Monelle (2017), Ludwig (2018), and The Parents’ Room (2020) are his most recent and complex projects, and they are all emblematic of central aspects of his production.
Edited by Edoardo Bonaspetti
Commissioning Editors: Maria Sica (director, IIC Tel Aviv) and Nicola Trezzi (director and curator,
CCA Tel Aviv-Yafo)
Design Lorenzo Mason Studio
2023, English, softcover, 21 x 30 cm, twenty 60 × 40 cm sheets of wrapping paper
ISBN: 979-12-80579-26-3
On March 11, 2011, the most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan created a tsunami that laid waste to the country’s east coast, causing a catastrophic breach at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Since then, access to the contaminated towns and surrounding countryside has been mostly limited to scientists and specialized decontamination crews. The project Don’t Follow the Wind (2015–ongoing)—organized by the Tokyo-based art collective Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group, together with Kenji Kubota, Jason Waite, and Eva & Franco Mattes—marked a historic exception: a group of artists entered the exclusion zone to produce a series of site-specific works. Installed in several venues on loan from former residents, these interventions comprise an exhibition that will remain unreachable in person for many years to come, until it will finally be deemed safe to return.
Fukushima Texture Pack is an artistic record of Eva & Franco Mattes’ engagement with this contaminated landscape. Borrowing the format of books of wrapping paper, it contains twenty large pre-perforated sheets. Each features a visual texture, a surface captured on camera amid radioactive ruins. All such patterns afford a seamless repeating motif, should they be installed in a tile formation as wallpaper. They comprise a representative sample of the 152 textures the artists first released online as freehold digital files. The pages of this book may be used freely to cover other books, decorate boxes, wrap gifts, form origami, or they may be framed as small works of art.
This artist’s book extends Eva & Franco Mattes’ interest in Fukushima’s geographical displacement. Following its radioactive ungrounding, this location is now most accessible through its representation. But images are given to obscuring the matter at hand—to wrapping it up, so to speak, in a reduced form. The tragic proportions of the Fukushima meltdown outstrip virtually all frames. With this in mind, how can one maintain awareness of this nuclear disaster? How might we live with the facts?
The textures—sampling walls and floors, rust, bricks, gravel, underbrush, tatami mats, dirt, desks, closets, and more—are unspectacular by design. Eschewing the gnarled automobiles, collapsed buildings, and other wrecks left in the wake of the tsunami, the visual banality of these posters speak to an invisible crisis. Additionally, their modular, tessellating design allows for the limitless spread of a given motif. As possible wallpaper, they evoke the new baselines of background radiation, omnipresent in and around the exclusion zone—a new surface condition.
The publication is supported by Istituto Italiano di Cultura Tel Aviv in collaboration with CCA Tel Aviv-Yafo.
