NERO is an international publishing house devoted to art, criticism and contemporary culture. Founded in Rome in 2004, it publishes artists’ books, catalogs, editions and essays.

NERO explores present and future imaginaries beyond any field of specialization, format or code – as visual arts, music, philosophy, politics, aesthetics or fictional narrations – extensively investigating unconventional perspectives and provocative outlooks to decipher the essence of this ever changing reality.

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Heads of Content:
Valerio Mannucci, Lorenzo Micheli Gigotti

Creative Director:
Francesco de Figueiredo

Editor at large:
Luca Lo Pinto

Editors:
Michele Angiletta, Alessandra Castellazzi, Carlotta Colarieti, Clara Ciccioni, Carolina Feliziani, Tijana Mamula, Valerio Mattioli, Laura Tripaldi

News Editor:
Giulia Crispiani

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Elisa Chieruzzi, Lorenzo Curatola, Lola Giffard-Bouvier

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Linda Lazzaro

Distribution:
Davide Francalanci

Installation view “La Volpe salta veloce sul ghiro marrone ek gioca con lo zaino blu” exhibition at Studio Brigantino. Photo by Matteo Pasin

La Volpe

Salta sul ghiro marrone ek gioca con lo zaino blu

This impossibly titled exhibition is not even an exhibition but a palimpsest made up of paintings, objects, moving structures,  sounds, sculptures and a variety of events and activities taking place throughout the month of April. Words, letters, languages and the human body, as well as gloves and Q-tips, rhinos and silkscreen prints, are just some of the ingredients of  a combinatorial and musical game. 

Lorenzo D’Anteo, Alfabeto ad Olio. Courtesy the artist.
Lorenzo D’Anteo, Alfabeto ad Olio. Courtesy the artist.
Lorenzo D’Anteo, Alfabeto ad Olio. Courtesy the artist.
Lorenzo D’Anteo, Alfabeto ad Olio. Courtesy the artist.
Lorenzo D’Anteo, Alfabeto ad Olio. Courtesy the artist.

The pangram appears as a symphony of letters, a dance of consonants and vowels flowing in the harmony of that funny  combinatorial system we call the alphabet. Like an enchanting magician, the writer of a heteroliteral pangram captures  each letter once and only once, to compose a complete and accomplished sentence. Playing all the keys of the piano but  with a single touch: here is the savory and skillful art of combination. Linguistic enigma, precision of the limit, combinatorial  labyrinth, abyss of graphemes, score without repetition or duplication, gateway to the hidden dimensions of the universe of  signs, symbols, drawing and writing. Because then, to tell the truth, writing is different from speaking, and drawing a letter  turns it into an image or a sign or a symbol-imagine what happens when we start painting it. So what did a medieval scribe  actually do when copying a holy book? Did he write, paint, draw? Good question, John Lawrence Luke and Valentina answer in their own way, with their scrabble of letters gone mad, arranging them like cheerleaders with liturgical catafalques,  portraying them with Gothic splendor, belching them with the voice of the last white rhinoceros that was. Glossolalia carries  us away, cutting the air with ceremonial knives. And so: Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx. Jinxed wizards pluck ivy  from the big quilt. Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow. Here, in Milan, @brigantinos. 

(Pencil, Paint, Charcoal) by Luca Trevisani, Edizioni Brigantino e Lorenzo D’Anteo). Courtesy the artists.
 Installation view La Volpe salta veloce sul ghiro marrone ek gioca con lo zaino blu exhibition at Studio Brigantino. Photo by Matteo Pasin.
 Installation view La Volpe salta veloce sul ghiro marrone ek gioca con lo zaino blu exhibition at Studio Brigantino. Photo by Matteo Pasin.
 Installation view La Volpe salta veloce sul ghiro marrone ek gioca con lo zaino blu exhibition at Studio Brigantino. Photo by Matteo Pasin.

This is an exhibition by Luca Trevisani, Lorenzo D’Anteo, and Edizioni Brigantino, crossed by Michele Galluzzo, Michela De Mattei, Francesca Flora, Alessandro Bosetti, and Renato Grieco.

Installation view La Volpe salta veloce sul ghiro marrone ek gioca con lo zaino blu exhibition at Studio Brigantino. Photo by Matteo Pasin.
Installation view La Volpe salta veloce sul ghiro marrone ek gioca con lo zaino blu exhibition at Studio Brigantino. Photo by Matteo Pasin.

Michele Galluzzo is a graphic designer and researcher. After a bachelor’s degree in Communication Sciences from the  University of Salento and a master’s degree from ISIA Urbino, in 2018 he completed a doctorate in Design Sciences at  the Iuav University of Venice. From 2014 to 2017 he was a research assistant and graphic designer at the AIAP Graphic  Design Historical Archive in Milan. Since 2018 he has been part of the editorial staff of the international graphic design magazine Progetto Grafico. Since fall 2019 he has been curating the Instagram page @logo_irl and in 2020 founded—together with Franziska Weitgruber—the design/research duo Fantasia Type. Since October 2020 he is RTD at UniBZ  in Bolzano/Bozen. 

Extract from Brief Inventory of Animal Resistance, VOL.1 by Michela De Mattei. Courtesy the artist.
Extract from Brief Inventory of Animal Resistance, VOL.1 by Michela De Mattei. Courtesy the artist.

Michela De Mattei is currently based in Milan. She works across different formats and media, developing fictional  scenarios and unusual ecosystems in which animal-human affairs are often hijacked by technologies to question stan dards of authority and control, while addressing issues of animal agency and the changing dynamics of communication  systems. Recent exhibitions include: Retrofuturo, MACRO Rome (2024); Dive-In, Porto Design Biennale, Porto (2023);  Performative 02, MAXXI L’Aquila (2022); Aquaria – The illusion of a boxed sea, curated by Angela Rui, MAAT museum,  Lisbon (2021); Hypermaremma, Terme di Vulci (2021); The Dreamfish, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai (2019); Blushing, solo  show at Belmacz, London (2019); The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, Part 1: Language, curated by Filipa Ra mos and Lucia Pietroiusti, Serpentines Galleries/ZSL London Zoo (2018); Estée Lauder series, Italian Cultural Institute,  London (2018); Inscape Rooms, Istituto Svizzero, Roma (2017). 

Scores of the Francesca Flora’s performance at Studio Brigantino. April 14th, 2024.
Scores of the Francesca Flora’s performance at Studio Brigantino. April 14th, 2024.
Scores of the Francesca Flora’s performance at Studio Brigantino. April 14th, 2024.
Scores of the Francesca Flora’s performance at Studio Brigantino. April 14th, 2024.

Francesca Flora is a writer and performer deploying poetic language through her voice—and its machinic alterations—to  explore the affective and semiotic potentialities of poetic language, in relation to political dynamics embedded in the everyday.

Part 1-3: Music from Portraits de voix by Alessandro Bosetti with Neuevocalsolisten Stuttgart (Johanna Vargas, Truike van der Poel, Martin Nagy, Guillermo Anzorena, Andreas Fischer). Released by Kohlhaas records.
Part 2: Plane/Talea with audience participation.

Alessandro Bosetti, born in Milan and living in Marseille, is a composer and sound artist with a particular interest in the  musicality of language and in the voice, conceived as an autonomous object and an instrument of expression. His works  enacts a dialogue among language, voice, and sound within complex tonal and formal constructions, often crossed by  oblique irony. Bosetti creates surprising pieces and devices questioning aesthetic categories and listening postures. 

Xong is the name of the collection produced by Xing, a vinyl-only record label of works by both Italian and international  personalities linked to the variegated worlds of live performativity. The collection explores a geography of artists who  present this sonic field as a platform to expand their staged worlds. “The space of the record” is given focus and ampli fies their poetics as both a sonic and physical phenomenon. Xong is a unique project that draws out divergent under standings of the performative and live arts, beyond genre and intersecting between different practices. Xong collects a  series of original creations that constitute an expanded program. Each physical record is a numbered edition on white  vinyl hosting the solidification of the gesture. A wave upon wave, a series of “Music-Non-Music” to actualize both the  artists and listeners imagination. 

Kohlhaas is a label active since late 2013 that has developed an interest in sound research declined through a multitude  of styles, forms and languages. The catalog ranges from radical improvisation to electroacoustics, from sound poetry to  contemporary composition.

While in a hotel room in Zurich, with a fresh broken foot and a pout on my face, those scoundrels who are nobody other than Brigantino, called me all excited about having me doing a little something something. Being the good friends that they are, they know that we often read aloud in the house where I live down south. Without pretentiousness, ownership or talent. And in spite of themselves, they may have been caught up in this practice a few times. 

One reads aloud for the listener to take their eyes elsewhere. To let the reader’s voice move us away from the idea we had of the characters’ morphology; or perhaps for the opposite reason: for the words to insinuate their timbre into a friendly voice. A reading aloud to inhabit the space of the setting. Public this time.

We immediately knew that the text or texts to be selected would have to have something to do with the idea of disassembling.

I immediately knew it was time to share this text that has been with me for many years, which has been photocopied and distributed among friends all over the country because it became too rare long ago. A book as hard to find as it is to read out loud, in fact. It takes a lot of trick words and labyrinth phrases to throw the language off track and regain the real, you know?

“The Order of Things” is a compendium, or a palimpsest if you will, of the most varied objects observed in a world turned upside down, walked backwards, where science and truth are merged in the imagination and naiveté of a gaze, albeit one attentive to microscopic details. 

Jacque Brosse was a psychoanalyst, expert in botany and religions. “The Order of Things” is a mysterious atlas of irresistible charm, first published in 1958 with an introduction by Gaston Bachelard. 

This music was composed by me in the last weeks, while reading and re-reading again this gem.

Renato Grieco – kNN is a composer, musician from Naples, active in the field of musique concrète, acousmatic, sound art and radio-art. He is engaged on the themes of listening, recording, archiving, storytelling, voice and speech. He  questions space through production, recording, organization and dissemination of sounds. After starting out as a double  bass player, he ventured into composing music for fixed media, under the moniker kNN. Immersing himself in active  research, he experimented with the arrangement of one or more sound sources in a habitable context; he imagined  and designed objects or spaces for listening, both physical and virtual; he has spoken inside some objects; he listened  through other objects. His work has very little to do with the so-called ‘acoustic ecology’. He believes in absolute waste and carnival. He tries not to align with the hordes that place sound practices among scientific or purely theoretical  disciplines. He considers listening as a cognitive activity per se, affecting the intellect and the body with its semantics, humor and tragic nature.

Extract from Brief Inventory of Animal Resistance, VOL.1 by Michela De Mattei. Courtesy the artist.

10/4/24, 6–9pm 
Opening 

12/4/24, 7:30–9pm 
Talk by Michele Galluzzo w/ Rinoceronte Bianco 

14/4/24, 11:30am–3pm 
Book launch Brief Inventory of Animal Resistance, VOL.1 
by Michela De Mattei with a performance by Francesca Flora at 12:30am 

22/4/24, 7–9pm 
FasFari (LP) on Xong & Portraits de Voix (CD) on Kohlhaas records launch and live by Alessandro Bosetti
Sound reading of Renato Grieco 

Luca Trevisani is a visual artist. His multidisciplinary practice has been exhibited internationally in museums and insti tutions. Trevisani has published several books including The effort took its tools (Argobooks 2008), Luca Trevisani (Sil vana Editoriale 2009), The art of Folding for young and old (Cura Books 2012), Water Ikebana (Humboldt Books, 2014), Grand Hotel et des Palmes (Nero, 2015), Via Roma 398. Palermo (Humboldt Books, 2018). Trevisani research ranges between sculpture and video, and crosses borderline disciplines such as performing arts, graphics, design, experimen tal cinema and architecture, in a perpetual magnetic and mutant condition. In his works the historical characteristics of sculpture are questioned or even subverted, in an incessant investigation of matter and its narratives.
Lorenzo D’Anteo is a visual artist. His research starts from a deep reflection on craft and craft practice, understood  as the recovery of obsolete and disused working techniques, where the boundaries between craft, design and art con stantly hybridize and erase. Central to his research is the reference to work practices and linguistic canons that belong  to and deeply reflect the roots of a classical identity, where history and memory constitute the natural substratum from  which a practice based on “making” comes to life. A making understood as work and discipline of a creative act in which  material and conceptual aspects are never separated. In 2011 he is among the founders of the Btomic venue in La Spe zia, an alternative space that has hosted concerts, exhibitions, performances and theatrical productions. He made the  illustrations for The eyes can see what the mouth can not say, a six-monthly magazine founded by Jacopo Benassi and  Federico Pepe born to tell and document the activities of Btomic. 
Edizioni Brigantino was born in 2018 in Milan through the encounter between Valentina Lucchetti and Canedicoda. Together they experiment with modes of design and spatial organization for both domestic or installation environments. In their investigative research and practice they nurture an intuitive approach that is helpful to elaborate design logic and  realization processes that aim at autonomy and know-how.