The Artists Books from ACINQUE are Emotional Archives

7 months ago

A few steps from the Darsena, along Alzaia Naviglio Pavese, Studio NP14 opens its doors to an archive that grows through layers, encounters, and urban drifts. Last February 20 it inaugurated Open Studio ACINQUE Milano #1, a first exhibition moment dedicated to the Milan chapter of ACINQUE, a project born in Sicily in 2018 on the occasion of Palermo Italian Capital of Culture and now in constant expansion.

ACINQUE is an archive of artist books and limited-edition publications that uses the A5 format as a shared rule and starting point. A precise perimeter within which each author is free to move between photography, writing, drawing, and material interventions. Not a simple container of images and words, but a space for research that transforms the book into a territory and an affective archive.

Isabella Conticello, 88 Geometrie Variabili | ph. courtesy Federico Mauro

After the first call dedicated to Sicily, in 2023, the project landed in Milan. The city is traversed through different gazes: intimate, political, poetic, documentary. There is no single Milan, but a constellation of micro-narratives that return fragments of neighborhoods, marginal details, personal memories, and contemporary tensions. Open Studio ACINQUE Milano #1 represents the first public foray into this evolving collection.

The exhibition, curated by Balloon Project with texts by Laura Cantale, Sara Brianza, and Giuseppe Mendolia Calella, brings into dialogue a selection of books born from the Milan call with several volumes from the Sicilian archive. The comparison between the two contexts is not didactic but suggested: different languages, same formats, the same urgency to observe and translate a place through autonomous practices.

Martino Santori from DUE_74 – VIAGGIO MINIMO, 2021

Among the authors involved in the Milan chapter are, among others, Rebecca Agnes, Andrea Astolfi, Nausica Barletta, Gabriele Carrera, Mahnaz Ekhtiary, Pietro Puccio, Cristiano Rizzo, Francesca Rossi, Danilo Torre, and the collective FUORICAMPO. Heterogeneous presences that confirm the project’s choral nature.