ELSE, Occhio Acerbo, RADICI, 2020

Else was born in 2010 along with a book: Radici. A book created together with a group of foreign people recently arrived in Italy. A book that was an opportunity to share personal and collective stories but also to create an object together by learning a printing technique, screen printing, and the basic rules for making a book. The first thing that Fausta and Simone from Orecchio Acerbo, as founder of the group, invited us to do was to destroy with our hands books destined to “recovered paper” to see how they were made. Thus began our adventure as printers and publishers, backwards, opening, unraveling the pages of an illustrated book. Just as you do with the screen printing that first deconstructs and decomposes into different colors an image, and then sees it recomposed again in print one color at a time.

Today, ten years later, many things have changed, the people who belonged to the initial group have each found their own personal path in Italy and in Europe, someone has returned to the country of origin. The publishing house and the screen printing have continued on the way of that beginning publishing stories of which we feel the urgency and the necessity and using the screen printing as technique and convivial practice together with groups of children, young people and adults printing, writing, rereading small choral books.

In this 2020 Else celebrates 10 years since that unpredictable and adventurous beginning and, above all, celebrates a book in its fifth reprint, 2500 copies printed and bound by hand, by many hands. And we want to celebrate this small anniversary with the last 100 copies in a special edition accompanied by two serigraphs inside. 

Now that spring has arrived, in these dramatic days that project us into a future hard to imagine and on which we will have to become even more active and convinced of the need for radical changes of course, we think back to those trees, to those stories, to those hands that created the book with a feeling of utopia and hope for the future.

Else