Artists' Survival Kit

The ultimate ambition of this book-tool is to “disappear on the street”. Its pages collect words and stories of people whose right to exist and be visible in public spaces was forced to confront the concepts of “legality” and “justice”.

Considering the assumption that the law is a fluid parameter, which changes depending on where we are in the world, the historical period in which we live and the sort of privileges we enjoy, the law defines what is considered moral, licit, in other words, what is right. It distributes power and the perception of power in society, defining, categorizing, dividing and controlling.

WILL YOU MARRY ME? is a public lecture and an artist’s book by Sara Leghissa and Marzia Dalfini, investigating a specific portion of the spectrum of illegality, namely the relationship between illegal acts and public space. It explores how we can act disobedience before everyone’s eyes, suggesting possible forms of complicity and public resistance.

All the content was collected by the artist during meetings and conversations that took place in Prato, Milan, Ramallah, Marseille, Madrid, Nyon and Lausanne and with this book-tool their words become manifestos that the reader is invited to detach and relocate into the public space.

Designed by Marzia Dalfini. Published by NERO with the support of L’Altra.

Format: 42 x 29,7 cm
Pages: 28
Language: IT / EN
Year: 2021

Upside-down trees with roots reaching toward the cosmos, glasses, pitchers, transparent vessels, and bodies blending human and animal, male and female features populate Jacopo Pagin’s works. These figures reveal themselves in their decadent and symmetrical being, caught within a web of references centered on the evocative power of the gaze.

The first monograph dedicated to Jacopo Pagin, designed and edited by Ismaël Bennani and Orfée Grandhomme and featuring a critical contribution by Alessandra Franetovich, brings together over 200 drawings and paintings to explore the visionary, obsessive, and hypnotic qualities of the artist’s work and its profound connections with exotic, mediumistic, and new-age practices.

The book is co-published with Make Room, Los Angeles.

A portrait of the cohesive community of women artists in Frogtown, Los Angeles, including Ruby Neri, Hilary Pecis, Megan Reed, Lily Stockman, and Austyn Weiner.

The Glover Group: A Los Angeles Story narrates the journey of an extraordinary group of artists who have nurtured their unique artistic voices within the same studio complex in Frogtown, Los Angeles. The Glover Group includes Ruby Neri, Hilary Pecis, Megan Reed, Lily Stockman, and Austyn Weiner, a coincidental yet cohesive community of women artists sharing a unique bond through their interconnected workspace.

This catalog, designed to document their collaborative exhibition held at MASSIMODECARLO in Milan during July and August 2023, features interviews to the artists by Cecilia Alemani, Alison M. Gingeras, Justine Ludwig, Marta Papini, and Heidi Zuckerman, together with photographs by Tracy Nguyen.

Contributions by Ruby Neri & Alison M. Gingeras, Hilary Pecis & Cecilia Alemani, Megan Reed & Marta Papini, Lily Stockman & Heidi Zuckerman, Austyn Weiner & Justine Ludwig.

Antonio Obá: Rituals of Care traces the practice of the Brazilian artist since 2016, offering a broad survey of his recent work, dwelling on the recurring motifs and iconographic sources that feed the complex imagery of his painting. Extensively illustrated, the book returns the richness of Obá's paintings, with enlargements on some of the details woven into the pictorial texture that, in addition to showing his masterful technique, make certain elements of his visual vocabulary stand out.

The conversation between Andrea Bellini and Antonio Obá that opens the book offers the opportunity to learn, through the artist's voice, about the key passages of his research, and to examine his diverse cultural references—from the Baroque of Minas Gerais to traditional Chinese painting, from Rembrandt to the Catholic ex-votos—until we discover the Obá's civic vocation, of painting as a spiritual practice.

The two essays commissioned for the occasion analyze the complexity of these layered signifiers. Lorraine Mendes's essay "Every Boy Is a King" offers an in-depth analysis of Obá's religious syncretism. It suggests an interpretation of its layered symbols, particularly the sankofa and the deity Exú, both of which pay tribute to the artist's West African roots. Above and beyond the specific cultural contexts of this iconography, the author emphasizes the universal value of Obá's work, its evocative, transformative, dynamic power, which—like music or dance—knows no national boundaries or barriers.

Larry Ossei-Mensah's essay "Embodiment: The Art of Antonio Obá" investigates the complex cultural legacy that is intertwined with the artist's practice, connected to his Afro-Brazilian roots, to the social and political realities of the Black diaspora, and to Christian, Candomblé, and Umbanda traditions. In addition to examining the context in which Obá's work is rooted, the author situates it within a galaxy of artists who have focused on questions of identity, often using their own bodies as tools of social and cultural critique.

Completing the book is a chronology, compiled by Sara De Chiara, tracing the artist's formative years and exhibition history, accompanied by rich documentary materials.

Published on the occasion of Antonio Obá: Rituals of Care, the first mid-career survey in Europe dedicated to the Brazilian artist, curated by Andrea Bellini, at the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, in 2025.

Antonio Obá (born 1983 in Ceilândia, Brazil) lives and works in Brasília. His multifaceted practice encompasses painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, and performance. His œuvre interrogates and subverts historical representations, reappropriating spiritual practices and stigmas of racism. Obá endeavors to reclaim his African heritage in a societal framework that has historically sought to dilute Black culture. His works therefore confront the violence inflicted over centuries upon African-Brazilian traditions and communities with new narratives.

A text on speaking, listening and being understood made in conversation with iOS speech-to-text software.

The Salvage Editorial Collective on the Covid-19 crisis.

Including: ‘Mothering Against the World' by Sophie Lewis on ‘Momrades’, ‘The Bushes’ a new fiction by China Miéville, ‘Hookers and Other Angels’ photography from Juno Mac, ‘Prepared for the Worst’ by Richard Seymour on Disaster Nationalism, ‘Welfare State Populism and the “Left-Behind Left”’ by Kevin Ochieng Okoth, ‘A Glimmer of a Shell of a Husk’ by Maya Osborne; ‘The Phallic Road to Socialism’ by Sebastian Budgen; A newly translated interview with Daniel Guérin, ‘Nationalism After Coronavirus’ by Sivamohan Valluvan, ‘Striking in Striking Times: Capitalism’s Coronavirus Crisis’ by Gregor Gall, ‘Getting Dressed for a Pandemic’ by Camila Valle, ‘Out of the Iron Lung: A Miasma Theory of Coronavirus’ by Matthew Broomfield.

Poetry by Nisha Ramayya, this issue’s featured poet, and an interview with her conducted by Salvage poetry editor, Caitlín Doherty. Plus the return of the Salvage Editorial Collective perspectives pamphlet, and a postcard.

Salvage is a bi-annual journal of revolutionary arts and letters. Salvage is written by and for the desolated Left, by and for those sick of capitalism and its planetary death-drive, implacably opposed to the fascist reflux and all ‘national’ solutions to our crisis, committed to radical change, guarded against the encroachments of ‘woke’ capitalism and its sadistic dramaphagy, and impatient with the Left’s bad faith and bullshit.

Published June 2020

A Book for Disappearance explores themes of extinction and ecology through the lens of contemporary technology and using AI and image-generation platforms as collective tools. It grapples with the contradictions of living in this world full of worlds and full of crises, while revindicating processes of nomadic becoming, transcending fixed identities, and collective emergence. While disappearance may seem abstract or esoteric, it has tangible implications for both individual and collective action. In this book, the concept of disappearance emerges as an alternative, including a variety of short poetic and experimental texts on the multiple possibilities that surface from our engagement with AI alter-egos and a collective artistic exercise with image generation technologies.

Texts by Laura Tripaldi, Institute of Queer Ecologies, and Stacy Alaimo provide further food for thought, and invite readers into recondite explorations—of parasitic spaces and ghost bodies through materialist feminisms; of oak archives and the previous lives that forests can narrate to us; of acid oceans and the psychedelic trips they might afford.

This collection of essays celebrates the work of international feminist filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Featuring contributions from leading scholars, filmmakers, essayists and activists, On Feminist Films is the second volume in the South London Cultural Review series. Contributors include: Stuart Bell, Catherine Grant, So Mayer, Louisa Wei, Emma Wilson.