First Meeting is the first monograph on Argentinian artist Santiago de Paoli. From his early, experimental projects to his most recent explorations, the book delves into his innovative approach of painting on unconventional materials. The book features commissioned essays by Fernanda Brenner and Mariano Mayer, as well as a conversation between Christian Rattemeyer and the artist.
Infinite Memory is Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s first monograph, co-published with Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and Lenz. Like a memory card, the book stores information about a selection of films from the initial decade of the artists’ practice. Considered as an object, much like a piece of hardware that stores digital memory, the book offers the possibility to scroll infinitely, with no beginning or end.
Through the words of the sound artist and theorist Brandon LaBelle, the book explores the social and relational component of sound that gave rise to Benevolence, the site-specific project by Sonia Boyce. The Joy of Cacophony is the second book in a series of essay collections inspired by the site-specific projects conceived for GAMeC at Palazzo della Ragione.
Consisting of a richly illustrated booklet and a record vinyl, this special release accompanies the performative sound-based project A Comparative Dialogue Act by artists Andrea Mancini and the collective Every Island, hosted in the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.
Conceived as a catalogue and an artist’s book, the publication offers a deeper insight into the eponymous 2022 exhibition staged at Indipendenza Roma, and explores tensions that can be generated between artworks and their surrounding architectural context, raising questions of taste, value, function and decoration.
The practice of Tomaso Binga (Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, 1931) toys with the notion of gender, reconsidering women’s social roles and rights. This monograph, edited by Eva Fabbris, Lilou Vidal, and Stefania Zuliani, analyses her work through various languages and features a selection of poems, highlighting the author’s critical and artistic approach.
Maurizio CattelanYou Don’t Make a Masterpiece, You Survive One
Edited by Lorenzo Giusti and Valentina Gervasoni
Texts by Lorenzo Giusti and Lisa Parola
Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2025, English / Italian, softcover, 11 x 17.7 cm, 96 pages
ISBN 979-12-80579-96-6
On the occasion of Seasons, Maurizio Cattelan’s exhibition at GAMeC, art historian Lisa Parola, investigates how contemporary art can redefine the idea of the monument: no longer an immobile place of celebration, but a critical space of removal and transformation, promoting new relationships with both history and the present. Parola reflects on the changing concept of the monument and how cultural institutions choose to deal with layered and sometimes contradictory symbols. Lorenzo Giusti, curator of the exhibition, accompanies the essay with an insight on the works presented in order to show how, in Cattelan’s work, symbols stratify, shift, and contradict each other. How the imperial eagle becomes a vulnerable body; how the nineteenth-century statue dedicated to Garibaldi is turned into a pedestal for something else. Who? A grandson on his grandfather’s shoulders? A new Garibaldian? Or a little vandal mocking ancient values? By so doing, he notes how between history and nature, cracks, fractures, and new possibilities may be opened up.
You Don’t Make a Masterpiece, You Survive One is the fourth book in a series of short essay collections inspired by the site-specific art projects specially conceived for GAMeC at Palazzo della Ragione: a symbolic, time-honored location in the city of Bergamo that embodies all the values of community life and participation. The artists were asked to name an author who interests them—be it a researcher, a philosopher or a scholar—and whose thinking could be said to underpin their project, with a view to finding a path through the complexities of the present day, starting from the work produced but without necessarily lingering on it.
