Giuliana Prucca, Devenir minéral and Snaturamenti | a workbook by Flatform on displacement

At Leporello, for the first time in Rome, Giuliana Prucca will present her book Devenir minéral, published by L’éditeur du dimanche in Paris. This essay establishes critical and poetic connections among texts and works by various artists, writers, and thinkers—from Antonin Artaud to Jean Dubuffet, Jan Fabre, Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein, Gutaï, Joë Bousquet, Francis Ponge, Gaston Bachelard, Gilles Deleuze, and Aby Warburg—through the prism of the mineral element, encompassing stone, sand, dust, or earth. Challenging conventional art history, the essay embraces a critically inventive approach that celebrates anti-critique, disrupts traditional reading habits, and inhabits writing space differently, providing a physically engaging experience.

Giuliana Prucca wlll then shift her presentation’s focus on her latest project as a curator and publisher, Snaturamenti | a workbook by Flatform on displacement, co-published with Light Cone, a major distributor of experimental films in France and abroad. Flatform is a Milan-Berlin based collective artist that creates time-based works, film events, and installations, most of which revolve around landscape and biopolitics. Distributed by Light Cone and Video DataBank, Flatform’s films have competed in major festivals including Cannes, Rotterdam, Venice, Toronto, and have been shown worldwide in art venues such as Centre Pompidou, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Hirshhorn Museum, MAXXI Museum, Eye Filmmuseum, Garage Center for the Arts, Prada Foundation.

Snaturamenti | a workbook by Flatform on displacement represents the most mature example of the concept that underpins Giuliana Prucca’s publishing practice: shifting from one medium to another in order to question the status of the image, subverting the representational system, and reimagining the conventional form of the book, transforming it into a place for experimentation.
Transitional states—whether spatial or temporal, geographical or historical, phenomenological or climatic—and the notion of landscape as a complex network of connections between species form the basis of Flatform’s artistic and philosophical research practice, serving as the mechanism for the deconstruction and reconstruction of its films on the page.

The presentation will feature the screening of Flatform’s short film A Place to Come (2011) and showcase various aspects of the book Snaturamenti.

Based in Berlin and Paris, Giuliana Prucca is an independent curator, researcher, and writer as well as the founder and art director of the publishing house AVARIE. Holding a PhD in French and Visual Studies, she has authored several critical articles and essays, including the recent book Devenir minéral, granted by the Centre National du Livre and published by L’éditeur du dimanche, Paris, This work explores the theme of inorganic matter in art and literature, starting from the writings of Antonin Artaud. Translator of artists’ texts, she shares expertise in publishing practices and curates exhibitions encompassing photography, experimental film, performance, and printed matter at venues like Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles off, Fotoleggendo in Rome, The Others in Turin, in-between gallery in Paris, and Manifesta 12 off in Palermo. Since 2021, she has collaborated with the project space Labor Neunzehn on the Kamera series, a screening program and exhibition of moving images in dialogue with artists’ books, held in a former GDR building in Berlin.

Founded in 2012 in Paris, AVARIE is an independent publishing house, specializing in contemporary art books and exploring the relationship between texts and images. With an authorial and interdisciplinary approach, paying particular attention to the quality of contents and materials, AVARIE views books as spaces for research and creation in close collaboration with artists and graphic designers, at the outskirts of commercial production. Its publications were exhibited internationally and selected for the Author’s Book Award at Rencontres d’Arles, Prix Bob Calle du Livre d’artiste (Paris), Oggetto Libro (Milan), and were honored with the SMC Award by Printed Matter (NY/LA) in 2020.