A collective project on authorship and hierarchy

This book gathers together, like a bundle of sticks, some of the materials produced during this series of discussions, which took place around a circular table designed by Enzo Cucchi, and positioned in the garden of Villa Maraini, the Istituto Svizzero di Roma.
Drawings, dialogues, arguments, and notes—along with photos—have been selected, graphically re-adapted in black-and-white, and folded into a bundle of paper together with a guidebook with color images. They all guide the reader through the construction of “Cathedral”. “Cattedrale” springs from the need for debate around the value of painting today; the power of the image and imagination; and the value of art as a tool that transforms reality, capable of summing up meaning and of playing a leading role in contemporary society. An art that is still capable of being vulgar (i.e. of speaking a historical and collective language), outside the niche of the so-called art world, away from the shelter of fairs and the exhibition.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition “Cattedrale”, Istituto Svizzero di Roma, from December 1, 2013, to February 20, 2014.

The irony of modernist living utopias

This self-published volume presents on 28 pages one photo each of extremely worn-out pieces of furniture ─ some of them with improvised repairs ─ from Chandigarh. Most of them were designed by Le Corbusier, who conceived the planned Indian city in the 1950s, but for some of the pieces the attribution seems questionable. This illustrates the irony with which the legacy of modernist residential and living utopias is presented here. The furniture pieces appear extremely isolated from their context, even when they are partly obscured by other objects in front of them. As there are no captions or explanations, much room is left for interpretation: Is the publication criticizing the Western market for second-hand designer furniture, for which Chandigarh is a cheap source? Or is the book itself exploiting the paradoxical gesture of placing an aesthetic of poverty in a contemporary design context? Its material quality also has an ambivalent effect: on the one hand, the volume consists of handmade Indian paper; on the other, the furniture is given a fresh splendour through the use of a special printing process with varnish realized in Switzerland. The cover, also printed and laminated in Switzerland, was conceived by a designer in India.

Awarded by the “Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2014”.

An electronic world of pleasure, frustration and sadness

Lace Curtain is exploring an electronic world of pleasure, frustration and sadness. Bedroom dancers, synthetic singers, basement kicks in a romantic void. Influenced by the Germans, the Italians, pale British button pushers, glamorous alien pop futurists, Mid-Western sweat, NYC disco dreamers, undercover kings and queens escaping a dull grey world with rhythm and noise, sound and vision.

A snapshot of emerging artistic practices – drifting identity

Between 2012 and 2015, Maximage designs Les Urbaines’ evolving identity as a laboratory for experimentations with different means of production generating new aesthetics. Les Urbaines festival takes place each year for a week-end dedicated to emerging artistic practices, with some forty-odd projects happening free of charge between Lausanne and Renens.

FUZI Flash Tattoo Collection captures the bizarre world of the French graffiti artist turned tattooist across 145 pages of original drawings. Hilarious and mildly disturbing in equal measure.
A white cover collector version of the book was printed using a spirit duplicator and carbon paper, commonly used by tattooist to transfer tattoo on the skin. Printed in 50 copies this edition is numbered and sign by the artist.