Mousse Magazine & Publishing

This book is inspired by the pictures that Giordano Bonora, a young streetcar operator and aspiring photographer, took of Bologna’s small transgender community in 1980 (although it would be more correct to speak, in this case, of proto-Transgenderism). Reproduced here for the first time, these raw and gilded images reflect—during a period in Italy characterized by subversive movements and political revolts that were not just rooted in questions of identity—attempts made by T* people at a construction of the self outside the binary logic of the genotypically XY male/genotypically XX female. By people like Valérie—a woman’s face, a hairless chest with no breasts, a fleur-de-lis tattooed on the shoulder, and two pairs of pantyhose—for whom “gender” is not determined biologically but something to be embraced depending on the circumstances. A box containing a jigsaw puzzle with a picture that is constantly changing. Bundled with the photographs, a handful of texts set out to explain how the question of gender involves two cultural levels of sexual difference, the normative and the dissident.

Published on the occasion of Leimer’s 2019 solo exhibition at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) and designed by Other Means, Via San Gennaro features documentation of Leimer’s newly-commissioned large-scale sculptures and a video installation, continuing her long-standing interest in urban space, architecture, labor and globalization. The video component is a collaboration with filmmaker and puppeteer Tony de Nonno, who keeps the fading Sicilian Opera dei Pupi (Opera of the Puppets) tradition alive.

Published on the occasion of Lars Fredrikson’s retrospective exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain in Nice, organized in collaboration with the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco and the artist’s son, this book is the first monograph dedicated to the radical Swedish painter, draftsman, sculptor, and precursor of sound art (1926–1997). Over his long career the artist produced a vast and multidisciplinary corpus of works that aimed to question our perception — the borders between the visible and the invisible, presence and absence, inside and outside. The publication plays on the multiple rebounds and echoes in Fredrikson’s works, in particular his nonlinear approach to art, his bodily exploration of vibrations, and his constant aim to grasp the invisible waves and frequencies that surround us — to render palpable the unseen that is actually right before our eyes.

Published in 2019, GDM – Grand Dad’s Visitor Center is an homage to Laure Prouvost’s grandparents and takes its title from the artist’s first major solo exhibition in Italy, a Gesamtkunstwerk that brings together installations, videos and projections, sculptures and found objects. As the show held in 2017 at Pirelli HangarBicocca was conceived as a dreamlike universe, a labyrinthine all-compassing installation made of surreal and irregular architectures, the book aims to place the visitor/reader at the center of an immersive setting. Designed on a series of shifting layers, which challenge the linearity of contents with an apparently irregular flow, GDM – Grand Dad’s Visitor Center revolves around the endeavor or construction—of stories, of buildings—aiming to erode the distinction between history and fiction, knowledge and (seeming) nonsense.