Roberto Kusterle, Cartacei, 2020

Cartacei is the title of Roberto Kusterle’s artist’s book. ‘Cartacei’ is a work that restores a certain balance between the computer and the digital. The book derives from long and passionate research and collection by the artist of ancient books, documents and archives, restoration laboratory papers, recovery papers, all characterized by non-purity, lack of or incorrect conservation. The book is designed as a folder containing images in single sheets, reminiscent of a drawer or box of souvenirs, old photographs or other types of documents. Each photograph is handled by Kusterle manually using different paper aging techniques. Each book is unique, but also every single page of it. In each folder, all the images are then wrapped in a piece of recycled paper, the same that the artist used to create the background of the photographs in the series. Finally, each folder and each image are characterized by the use of stamps for titling and numbering, recalling the world of paper archives from which the research took inspiration.