Salgemma Launch Tour december 2021 #2
In December, Salgemma went on a tour of Puglia, visiting various spaces and cities to tell the public about its new objectives and projects, together with invited guests who offered insights and visions on the project's near future. For those who were unable to attend the Launch Tour stages, Salgemma shares a brief account of the Lecce and Bari stages through the speeches and contents that emerged during the meetings!
The second stage of Salgemma's Launch Tour took place at VOGA, a project space in Bari, on 23 December 2021, with a focus on writing and publishing, trying to tell the story of the role of independent art publishing and artistic-curatorial practices that make use of the 'book device'. Through the interventions of the guests invited to this second stage, we tried to answer the question "How to start a process of writing a territory? How does publishing act as a critical space and a space for showing?"
We have thus explored the structure of our platform, which from this year will expand its online editorial staff. The aim is to organise new content within Salgemma's online magazine: in addition to our agenda, which tries to tell the story of ongoing research and mapping (spaces and projects, interviews, calls, emerging art) we are developing several thematic columns.
The magazine has already launched an archive of the exhibitions, but in the coming months there will be new sections: one dedicated to artists' studio visits and curatorship, a space dedicated to the comparison and knowledge of projects and research similar to ours on a national/international scale, a Salgemma portfolio (which describes our services, curated projects and training) and a space dedicated to publishing.
In addition to the writing work with the online editorial team, we also delved into a new passion of the Salgemma project, art publishing, devoting ample space to dialogue with guests and a display set up in the Voga spaces. We did so with the evening's guests: REPLICA - Archivio italiano del libro d'artista, Luigi Bagaglia, KABUL and the independent Apulian publishing house ZicZic.
REPLICA the Italian archive of the artist's book, is a project of the Milanese cultural association Casa Gialla, formally constituted in January 2019 under the patronage of the Municipality of Nova Milanese. Its founders - Lisa Andreani and Simona Squadrito - decided they wanted to divulge, raise awareness and bring the public closer to the artist's book, with the intention therefore of delving into an artistic language that is ambivalent and at the same time still little known, through the creation of an archive of contemporary art and a continuous exhibition activity to which study days and conferences dedicated to the theme can be linked.
We have partnered with Replica on our Salgemma project and are already considering collaborating on some shared content and projects soon!
During the evening it was also possible to browse the editions of KABUL and deepen the various activities of this project: Kabul is a magazine of contemporary arts and cultures (KABUL magazine), an independent publishing house (KABUL editions), a free digital translation archive (KABUL digital library), a non-profit cultural association (KABUL projects).KABUL has been working since 2016 to promote contemporary culture in Italy. Along with criticз, university docentз and field operative, it deals with popularizing topics and central research in the current international artistic and cultural debate.
KABUL is currently composed of Dario Giovanni Alì, Valeria Minaldi and Francesca Vason.
We also chatted during the evening with Silvia Tarantini and Lilia Angela Cavallo of ZicZic editions, a small independent publishing house that deals with self-published micro-publishing and whose main line of research and publication is the narration of places, landscapes and stories with new languages and handmade media. Ziczic aims to promote the culture of books, graphic and illustrated art, with particular attention to the world of typography and artisanal printing methods, through the programming of events, exhibitions, workshops and laboratories. With them we delved into the titles they have published in these first years of activity and the latest publication "Corale - Preci".
Finally, in a pre-recorded interview, we chatted with Luigi Bagaglia about his thesis project entitled “Costellazioni autoriali: l'editoria nella Paracuratela.”
The project relates the various approaches to independent publishing and the curatorial dimension, understood as a horizontal and non-hierarchical practice of discursive contemporary artistic production, bringing together a constellation of authors who contribute to shaping a project.
La ricerca di Bagaglia si concentra sull'analisi di forme di produzione, fruizione e distribuzione artistica in contesti periferici, interrogandosi sulle nozioni di accessibilità, autorialità, partecipazione e indipendenza. Since 2021 he has been co-founder of the curatorial collective Scena.
If you want to read the whole interview, you can do so here.
The Salgemma editorial team.
