A CONVERSATION WITH ERIK VIKLUND
For this edition of Take 10 Press Conversations, we sat down with Martha Micali and Klim Kutsevskyy, founders of DITO, an independent publishing house dedicated to photography and visual arts, founded in Rome in 2020. Reflecting on their book Dialogues on Becoming Matter, we talk about what it means to work alchemically, the materiality of the printed page, and the ways images can circulate, transform, and acquire new meanings. Their thoughts also touch on the open networks of relationships that emerge through publishing, offering a glimpse into DITO’s approach to making books as both artistic expressions and spaces for connection.
Alberto: I thought we could start by introducing your artistic practices. Perhaps you could introduce yourselves as individuals first, and talk about how you navigate the relationship between your own work and Dito.
Martha: That's an interesting question to start with, because for us these are two parallel but constantly intertwined paths. Our artistic practice is very much part of Dito's publishing activity. In fact, the publishing house itself came about as an expansion of those practices.
We both came from photography and had both worked as photographers. Our initial entry into the photographic world was also through work: not just artistic research and personal practice, but commissioned photography for other people. In my case, I had been doing this for some time before moving more towards art and photography publishing.
There were already some seeds of what would eventually become Dito. In that earlier period, I was making fanzines and self-published projects, things that allowed me to print and see my photographs and the work I was producing at the time take physical form. This was before 2019, around 2018.
When I met Klim, this practice, which was already divided between photography and independent publishing, gradually became much more structured. In fact, our dialogue initially began with the idea of making a book together. Our first real exchange was about the need to bring our respective works into relation with one another.
Then COVID came along, and suddenly we found ourselves with a lot of time to dedicate to thinking and imagining the future. During those months, everyday life was obviously moving at a different pace, with fewer immediate demands. We gradually realised that, being part of a wider community of photographers and artists whose work we were familiar with, we would also like to work on other people's projects, not just our own. As for our artistic and research practices, they've continued alongside Dito over the past five or six years, although naturally with different degrees of intensity at different times.
During the first few years, we were completely focused on building the publishing house: giving it an internal identity and structure, and really understanding what direction we wanted it to take and what kind of editorial line we wanted to develop. This required a great deal of our time and creative energy. After all, publishing is a creative activity as much as it is an organisational and practical one. But I think it's important to consider Dito itself as an output and an extension of our research practices: an exploration of visual art and how it can be translated into the editorial and book-making context.
Klim: Yes, because at heart we're both bibliophiles. We're genuinely obsessive about looking for books of all kinds. We love books as objects, their physical form, and the way they function as a means of communicating and sharing knowledge with the world.
In that sense, the birth of Dito also gave shape to a need we already had: the need to make books ourselves. Even before thinking about publishing other people's work, the idea of creating books was the main objective. Whether it was a book by one of us, by a friend, or by another artist whose work we liked, the desire was there. Starting from that initial idea of making a book together, and then gradually developing the other publications, we eventually arrived at this point, five years later, when we were finally able to make that original book. But we were more mature, more prepared, and perhaps more confident as authors.
Alberto: That's really interesting. It's clear that what drives you is not only your love of books, but also this initial desire to collaborate and to bring things into relation with one another. That's something I'd like to come back to later.
So the book you're talking about, Dialogues on Becoming Matter, has finally come to life after five years. And there's clearly a lot of material in it.
Your publications cover quite a range of artistic forms, so there's a distinctly multidisciplinary approach to what you do. But since we've arrived at this point, and since Dialogues on Becoming Matter has recently been donated to the library, perhaps you could tell us a little more about the book.
Klim: We think Dialogues on Becoming Matter is, in a way, a synthesis of everything we've experienced over these five years, both in our roles as authors and artists, and as publishers. These are two ambivalent positions that, in this case, also overlap.
We're self-publishing our own book, for example, and that's something quite specific to the visual arts. We think that, because we've trained ourselves to work both as publishers and as authors, we've reached a point where we can embrace this approach without diminishing our own position as artists.
Martha: Yes, what Klim said is absolutely true. In the visual arts, the book is widely used as one of the many tools available to artists. The history of art and the history of photography are full of examples of artists and authors who have worked in this way, using the book as a medium for their practice.
This is what makes our field quite unique. If a writer did the same thing and self-published their own novel, it would probably be very poorly received in the literary world. Fortunately, this isn't the case in the visual arts.
Working with a book means engaging with printing and crafty processes, and these are inevitably intertwined with artistic research. The tool itself becomes part of the practice.
More specifically, with Dialogues on Becoming Matter, we also wanted to make a kind of statement, almost a manifesto. That's why we deliberately chose to include a wide range of materials, both strictly photographic and those that come from the different ways we work with images.
Some of these images are the result of a very deliberate photographic process: I have a project in mind, I imagine certain images, and then I go out and make them. Others come about more spontaneously. We're travelling, visiting fairs or moving through different situations, we have a camera with us, and we take pictures. Those images emerge more fluidly, almost instinctively, as things happen.
We wanted to bring both kinds of material into the book, alongside all the stages of development and transformation that these images go through. For us, this process usually involves working with paper in one way or another.
In Klim's case, it's more closely connected to graphic design and the visual aspects of the work, as well as the use of archival images. In my case, it's more related to collage and other forms of visual and photographic manipulation, such as printing, scanning and reprinting. Although, of course, these are processes we both engage with.
Klim: A friend of ours once described Dialouges on Becoming Matter as an almanac of post-photography. At some point, he started leafing through it and saying things like, "I'd put this image in that particular thread, and this one over there, and that one somewhere else." So you end up with this whole thing, which brings together a number of different elements, but at the same time doesn't really define any of them.
Alberto: It also seems to reflect the fluidity of the process of working with images: printing them, bringing them to life, into the physical world, working on them, processing and reproducing them.
Martha: I think it's also about embracing certain forms of arbitrariness that are inherent to artistic processes. It's something that, I imagine, most of us working in this field experience. You might start with an idea, a direction or a particular intention, but then that inevitably becomes intertwined with everything else that happens along the way. In a way, the book also acknowledges this.
That's why we also decided to include some personal images that have absolutely nothing to do with our artistic research. Those pages form a kind of constellation of things that happened along the way. Some are directly connected to the processes of making books, while others aren't.
Alberto: There's a particular choice of papers, different kinds of materiality throughout the publication, and if I remember correctly, it's also hand-bound. How did that process work? Did you make around a hundred copies?
Martha: Something we wanted, in line with the overall spirit of the publication, was to include traces of the collaborations we've had over the years. In fact, every component of the book was made by someone we've entered into a working relationship with during these five years, whether through producing a particular book together or through a closer, more personal relationship.
The idea was to understand what we wanted to achieve and then identify the right people to make it happen, always within the context of the ecosystem we've built around our work.
The binding, for example, was done by Lotta Bindery, an independent bookbinder and a very dear friend of ours. Over the years – perhaps more so in the past than recently – we've worked together on book fairs and organised workshops that we developed and presented together. She's someone who has, in a way, grown alongside us. We've shared a relationship involving an exchange that has developed over time, both professionally and personally.
So it was really important to us that this book brought together not only the images we'd collected over five years, but also the skills and expertise of other people. We wanted to give those professional skills value, space and an opportunity to express themselves.
Sometimes that's not easy to do, because certain techniques are quite difficult to put into practice. The binding in this particular case is very complex and cannot be achieved through mechanical processes. For us, that made it the perfect solution.
Klim: This was true of the printing processes as well. The book brings together three different printing techniques, each carried out by people we've developed relationships with over the years. The screen printing on the cover, for example, was done by Sofia Bonelli.
We defined the structure of the volume around a set of measurements established from the beginning. The book is made up of ten signatures, each containing either 32 or 36 pages. This gave us the possibility of alternating the different papers and printing techniques in a way that created a particular rhythm, but also an anti-rhythm.
The idea was that, in every signature, you would encounter a different combination of printing techniques and different papers, placed in dialogue with one another, face to face.
Alberto: I really appreciate the fact that with Dito you experiment with the physical form of the book itself. I've seen for example that you also have published books with magnetic spines. There's also something else I've noticed, although perhaps it's just me: metals seem to recur quite often in your work, or at least a certain metallic quality, particularly silver.
Martha: There's an alchemic quality into what we do. And it’s also because of that that there are echoes of metallic textures in what we make.
Klim: Nature, human beings, and the relationship between humans and nature are always present.
I think metal is interesting because it's something that human beings have learned to manipulate, extract and transform, but I don't see this necessarily from a colonial perspective. Rather, I'm interested in the possibility of finding a kind of reciprocity between the elements and human beings.
This is also linked to mysticism somehow. The first authors we published were often people whose work had a genuinely mystical dimension, even on a physical level. Although it's not something we necessarily declare so explicitly.
Alberto: When I first met you at the Athens Art Book Fair in 2023, I bought that little booklet from you, “Il simbolo tace” (tradurre?), written by Andrea Caffarella. I found it quite interesting because the introduction text you wrote feels like a declaration of intent. Towards the end of one of the final paragraphs, you write: "We believe that the image should be the annulment of the ego that seeks possession."
Is there a kind of self-effacement, or suspension of the ego, in the way you work with images and engage in collaborations?
Martha: There are several different things contained in that sentence.
On one level, it relates quite directly to the act of making something as an artist or an author: having your own work, your own voice, your own particular way of doing things. That's absolutely not something we deny, either for ourselves or for other people.
But it's something that necessarily needs to be questioned when you enter into a relationship with another person, or with several people. So, on one level, the sentence is about a certain willingness that needs to be there from the beginning: a willingness to question yourself and to reconsider your own personal limits, which, of course, everyone has.
On another level, I think there's also a more specific reflection on what photography means to us.
Photography is inevitably a medium that expresses a kind of alchemy, and that alchemical dimension is present in its very origins, because photography itself was born out of alchemical processes.
Over the course of just 100 or 150 years, it has become something entirely accessible to everyone, both in terms of making images and looking at them. We're living in the age of Instagram. So, of course, an image that I produce is “mine” in a way, but it's also an image that can immediately be put out into the world and made available to others...
It’s the idea that photography only really makes sense when it enters circulation, when it's shared and passed through other people.
Alberto: In Il simbolo tace Andrea describes the iconography of the symbol representing ___. What interests you about this symbol?
Martha: Something that interested us greatly about that symbol was precisely the fact that, as it moved through different periods in human cultural history, it was transformed. Its meaning changed through different ways of looking at and interpreting it.
The symbol represents a child, an infant. From a philosophical perspective, this is a figure associated with purity and innocence: someone whose thinking hasn't yet been burdened or shaped by layers of acquired knowledge and conventions. The child is pointing the index finger towards himself and, through this gesture, is able to understand a whole that encompasses both light and darkness, death and life.
Within Egyptian cosmology, where we find the first traces of this deity, the child is pointing it’s index finger towards it’s mouth and, for the Egyptians, the universe was contained within the mouth.
This element underwent a profound transformation when the god moved from Egyptian to Roman culture. It was another perspective, one that contradicted the original meaning of the image, and the symbol changed completely. The position of the finger took a vertical direction in front of the mouth, and the gesture became eventually sign we still use today to express "silence."
So silence becomes, in a way, the symbol's current meaning. But that meaning could change again. At some point in human history, another culture might adopt the same symbol and give it a completely different interpretation. Perhaps it could become a gesture meaning, "Look at the sky," or something like that.
Alberto: I had one final question about collaboration. We've already touched on this to some extent, but you've produced several collaborative books, such as Lapilli and Cuticole, as well as collective books bringing together different artists.
What makes you want to create these kinds of books?
Martha: I think it's also a very practical question. Partly, it's about respecting our own nature and the way we work as two people. We tend to move forward together, and Dialogues on Becoming Matter brings this aspect of our practice into focus quite clearly. So perhaps we naturally tend to reproduce our own model.
We're also genuinely curious about what happens when different artists are brought into relation with one another. We like seeing how different things can communicate and how new connections or threads can emerge.
One of the most rewarding things for us is when artists who have published with us, and whose collaborations initially came about through us, eventually get to know one another and start working together independently. This has happened several times over the years.
Klim: In more mainstream language, you might call it building a community. And yes, that's partly what it is, although I don't think it's necessarily our only objective.
It's also about giving a voice to people who might have fewer opportunities to express themselves in other sectors or spaces. There are so many artists, publishers and graphic designers working today that it's increasingly difficult to stand out as an individual. Perhaps working together allows us to create a more unified presence, rather than focusing exclusively on each person as an isolated individual.
Alberto: That's really nice. I like the idea that you create something resembling a community through the people and artists you collaborate with, but I also like that you don't necessarily define it as a community. It becomes something else, in a way.
Klim: The idea of community tends to imply something closed and clearly defined. A community can be identified, labelled and circumscribed. What we're talking about here is perhaps more open: the creation of a network of relationships, shared stimuli and mutual appreciation.
Alberto: Do you have any projects coming up?
Martha: We have a new photographic book coming out called Ho sognato rocce bianche di luce. It's a fantastic photographic project by Lucia Caspani, and it will be her first book, her debut publication.
It's a collection of images she has made across different locations in Europe, although the research is concentrated in four areas: the Iberian Peninsula, the Italian Alps, Tuscia and Egypt. She went in search of places connected to death rituals, to rites of passage between life and death, and between one state of being and another. These are often places with a strong archaeological significance: perhaps a rock formation that once served as a temple, or an inscription on a wall referring to rituals that were performed there.
She explored a whole series of places like these. The last stage of the project took her to Tuscia, where she came into contact with several Etruscan burial sites. She developed an incredible photographic series there, which is extremely evocative.
Alberto: That's wonderful. Best of luck with it! Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, and hope to see you in the near future.
Martha: That's an interesting question to start with, because for us these are two parallel but constantly intertwined paths. Our artistic practice is very much part of Dito's publishing activity. In fact, the publishing house itself came about as an expansion of those practices.
We both came from photography and had both worked as photographers. Our initial entry into the photographic world was also through work: not just artistic research and personal practice, but commissioned photography for other people. In my case, I had been doing this for some time before moving more towards art and photography publishing.
There were already some seeds of what would eventually become Dito. In that earlier period, I was making fanzines and self-published projects, things that allowed me to print and see my photographs and the work I was producing at the time take physical form. This was before 2019, around 2018.
When I met Klim, this practice, which was already divided between photography and independent publishing, gradually became much more structured. In fact, our dialogue initially began with the idea of making a book together. Our first real exchange was about the need to bring our respective works into relation with one another.
Then COVID came along, and suddenly we found ourselves with a lot of time to dedicate to thinking and imagining the future. During those months, everyday life was obviously moving at a different pace, with fewer immediate demands. We gradually realised that, being part of a wider community of photographers and artists whose work we were familiar with, we would also like to work on other people's projects, not just our own. As for our artistic and research practices, they've continued alongside Dito over the past five or six years, although naturally with different degrees of intensity at different times.
During the first few years, we were completely focused on building the publishing house: giving it an internal identity and structure, and really understanding what direction we wanted it to take and what kind of editorial line we wanted to develop. This required a great deal of our time and creative energy. After all, publishing is a creative activity as much as it is an organisational and practical one. But I think it's important to consider Dito itself as an output and an extension of our research practices: an exploration of visual art and how it can be translated into the editorial and book-making context.
Klim: Yes, because at heart we're both bibliophiles. We're genuinely obsessive about looking for books of all kinds. We love books as objects, their physical form, and the way they function as a means of communicating and sharing knowledge with the world.
In that sense, the birth of Dito also gave shape to a need we already had: the need to make books ourselves. Even before thinking about publishing other people's work, the idea of creating books was the main objective. Whether it was a book by one of us, by a friend, or by another artist whose work we liked, the desire was there. Starting from that initial idea of making a book together, and then gradually developing the other publications, we eventually arrived at this point, five years later, when we were finally able to make that original book. But we were more mature, more prepared, and perhaps more confident as authors.
Alberto: That's really interesting. It's clear that what drives you is not only your love of books, but also this initial desire to collaborate and to bring things into relation with one another. That's something I'd like to come back to later.
So the book you're talking about, Dialogues on Becoming Matter, has finally come to life after five years. And there's clearly a lot of material in it.
Your publications cover quite a range of artistic forms, so there's a distinctly multidisciplinary approach to what you do. But since we've arrived at this point, and since Dialogues on Becoming Matter has recently been donated to the library, perhaps you could tell us a little more about the book.
Klim: We think Dialogues on Becoming Matter is, in a way, a synthesis of everything we've experienced over these five years, both in our roles as authors and artists, and as publishers. These are two ambivalent positions that, in this case, also overlap.
We're self-publishing our own book, for example, and that's something quite specific to the visual arts. We think that, because we've trained ourselves to work both as publishers and as authors, we've reached a point where we can embrace this approach without diminishing our own position as artists.
Martha: Yes, what Klim said is absolutely true. In the visual arts, the book is widely used as one of the many tools available to artists. The history of art and the history of photography are full of examples of artists and authors who have worked in this way, using the book as a medium for their practice.
This is what makes our field quite unique. If a writer did the same thing and self-published their own novel, it would probably be very poorly received in the literary world. Fortunately, this isn't the case in the visual arts.
Working with a book means engaging with printing and crafty processes, and these are inevitably intertwined with artistic research. The tool itself becomes part of the practice.
More specifically, with Dialogues on Becoming Matter, we also wanted to make a kind of statement, almost a manifesto. That's why we deliberately chose to include a wide range of materials, both strictly photographic and those that come from the different ways we work with images.
Some of these images are the result of a very deliberate photographic process: I have a project in mind, I imagine certain images, and then I go out and make them. Others come about more spontaneously. We're travelling, visiting fairs or moving through different situations, we have a camera with us, and we take pictures. Those images emerge more fluidly, almost instinctively, as things happen.
We wanted to bring both kinds of material into the book, alongside all the stages of development and transformation that these images go through. For us, this process usually involves working with paper in one way or another.
In Klim's case, it's more closely connected to graphic design and the visual aspects of the work, as well as the use of archival images. In my case, it's more related to collage and other forms of visual and photographic manipulation, such as printing, scanning and reprinting. Although, of course, these are processes we both engage with.
Klim: A friend of ours once described Dialouges on Becoming Matter as an almanac of post-photography. At some point, he started leafing through it and saying things like, "I'd put this image in that particular thread, and this one over there, and that one somewhere else." So you end up with this whole thing, which brings together a number of different elements, but at the same time doesn't really define any of them.
Alberto: It also seems to reflect the fluidity of the process of working with images: printing them, bringing them to life, into the physical world, working on them, processing and reproducing them.
Martha: I think it's also about embracing certain forms of arbitrariness that are inherent to artistic processes. It's something that, I imagine, most of us working in this field experience. You might start with an idea, a direction or a particular intention, but then that inevitably becomes intertwined with everything else that happens along the way. In a way, the book also acknowledges this.
That's why we also decided to include some personal images that have absolutely nothing to do with our artistic research. Those pages form a kind of constellation of things that happened along the way. Some are directly connected to the processes of making books, while others aren't.
Alberto: There's a particular choice of papers, different kinds of materiality throughout the publication, and if I remember correctly, it's also hand-bound. How did that process work? Did you make around a hundred copies?
Martha: Something we wanted, in line with the overall spirit of the publication, was to include traces of the collaborations we've had over the years. In fact, every component of the book was made by someone we've entered into a working relationship with during these five years, whether through producing a particular book together or through a closer, more personal relationship.
The idea was to understand what we wanted to achieve and then identify the right people to make it happen, always within the context of the ecosystem we've built around our work.
The binding, for example, was done by Lotta Bindery, an independent bookbinder and a very dear friend of ours. Over the years – perhaps more so in the past than recently – we've worked together on book fairs and organised workshops that we developed and presented together. She's someone who has, in a way, grown alongside us. We've shared a relationship involving an exchange that has developed over time, both professionally and personally.
So it was really important to us that this book brought together not only the images we'd collected over five years, but also the skills and expertise of other people. We wanted to give those professional skills value, space and an opportunity to express themselves.
Sometimes that's not easy to do, because certain techniques are quite difficult to put into practice. The binding in this particular case is very complex and cannot be achieved through mechanical processes. For us, that made it the perfect solution.
Klim: This was true of the printing processes as well. The book brings together three different printing techniques, each carried out by people we've developed relationships with over the years. The screen printing on the cover, for example, was done by Sofia Bonelli.
We defined the structure of the volume around a set of measurements established from the beginning. The book is made up of ten signatures, each containing either 32 or 36 pages. This gave us the possibility of alternating the different papers and printing techniques in a way that created a particular rhythm, but also an anti-rhythm.
The idea was that, in every signature, you would encounter a different combination of printing techniques and different papers, placed in dialogue with one another, face to face.
Alberto: I really appreciate the fact that with Dito you experiment with the physical form of the book itself. I've seen for example that you also have published books with magnetic spines. There's also something else I've noticed, although perhaps it's just me: metals seem to recur quite often in your work, or at least a certain metallic quality, particularly silver.
Martha: There's an alchemic quality into what we do. And it’s also because of that that there are echoes of metallic textures in what we make.
Klim: Nature, human beings, and the relationship between humans and nature are always present.
I think metal is interesting because it's something that human beings have learned to manipulate, extract and transform, but I don't see this necessarily from a colonial perspective. Rather, I'm interested in the possibility of finding a kind of reciprocity between the elements and human beings.
This is also linked to mysticism somehow. The first authors we published were often people whose work had a genuinely mystical dimension, even on a physical level. Although it's not something we necessarily declare so explicitly.
Alberto: When I first met you at the Athens Art Book Fair in 2023, I bought that little booklet from you, “Il simbolo tace” (tradurre?), written by Andrea Caffarella. I found it quite interesting because the introduction text you wrote feels like a declaration of intent. Towards the end of one of the final paragraphs, you write: "We believe that the image should be the annulment of the ego that seeks possession."
Is there a kind of self-effacement, or suspension of the ego, in the way you work with images and engage in collaborations?
Martha: There are several different things contained in that sentence.
On one level, it relates quite directly to the act of making something as an artist or an author: having your own work, your own voice, your own particular way of doing things. That's absolutely not something we deny, either for ourselves or for other people.
But it's something that necessarily needs to be questioned when you enter into a relationship with another person, or with several people. So, on one level, the sentence is about a certain willingness that needs to be there from the beginning: a willingness to question yourself and to reconsider your own personal limits, which, of course, everyone has.
On another level, I think there's also a more specific reflection on what photography means to us.
Photography is inevitably a medium that expresses a kind of alchemy, and that alchemical dimension is present in its very origins, because photography itself was born out of alchemical processes.
Over the course of just 100 or 150 years, it has become something entirely accessible to everyone, both in terms of making images and looking at them. We're living in the age of Instagram. So, of course, an image that I produce is “mine” in a way, but it's also an image that can immediately be put out into the world and made available to others...
It’s the idea that photography only really makes sense when it enters circulation, when it's shared and passed through other people.
Alberto: In Il simbolo tace Andrea describes the iconography of the symbol representing ___. What interests you about this symbol?
Martha: Something that interested us greatly about that symbol was precisely the fact that, as it moved through different periods in human cultural history, it was transformed. Its meaning changed through different ways of looking at and interpreting it.
The symbol represents a child, an infant. From a philosophical perspective, this is a figure associated with purity and innocence: someone whose thinking hasn't yet been burdened or shaped by layers of acquired knowledge and conventions. The child is pointing the index finger towards himself and, through this gesture, is able to understand a whole that encompasses both light and darkness, death and life.
Within Egyptian cosmology, where we find the first traces of this deity, the child is pointing it’s index finger towards it’s mouth and, for the Egyptians, the universe was contained within the mouth.
This element underwent a profound transformation when the god moved from Egyptian to Roman culture. It was another perspective, one that contradicted the original meaning of the image, and the symbol changed completely. The position of the finger took a vertical direction in front of the mouth, and the gesture became eventually sign we still use today to express "silence."
So silence becomes, in a way, the symbol's current meaning. But that meaning could change again. At some point in human history, another culture might adopt the same symbol and give it a completely different interpretation. Perhaps it could become a gesture meaning, "Look at the sky," or something like that.
Alberto: I had one final question about collaboration. We've already touched on this to some extent, but you've produced several collaborative books, such as Lapilli and Cuticole, as well as collective books bringing together different artists.
What makes you want to create these kinds of books?
Martha: I think it's also a very practical question. Partly, it's about respecting our own nature and the way we work as two people. We tend to move forward together, and Dialogues on Becoming Matter brings this aspect of our practice into focus quite clearly. So perhaps we naturally tend to reproduce our own model.
We're also genuinely curious about what happens when different artists are brought into relation with one another. We like seeing how different things can communicate and how new connections or threads can emerge.
One of the most rewarding things for us is when artists who have published with us, and whose collaborations initially came about through us, eventually get to know one another and start working together independently. This has happened several times over the years.
Klim: In more mainstream language, you might call it building a community. And yes, that's partly what it is, although I don't think it's necessarily our only objective.
It's also about giving a voice to people who might have fewer opportunities to express themselves in other sectors or spaces. There are so many artists, publishers and graphic designers working today that it's increasingly difficult to stand out as an individual. Perhaps working together allows us to create a more unified presence, rather than focusing exclusively on each person as an isolated individual.
Alberto: That's really nice. I like the idea that you create something resembling a community through the people and artists you collaborate with, but I also like that you don't necessarily define it as a community. It becomes something else, in a way.
Klim: The idea of community tends to imply something closed and clearly defined. A community can be identified, labelled and circumscribed. What we're talking about here is perhaps more open: the creation of a network of relationships, shared stimuli and mutual appreciation.
Alberto: Do you have any projects coming up?
Martha: We have a new photographic book coming out called Ho sognato rocce bianche di luce. It's a fantastic photographic project by Lucia Caspani, and it will be her first book, her debut publication.
It's a collection of images she has made across different locations in Europe, although the research is concentrated in four areas: the Iberian Peninsula, the Italian Alps, Tuscia and Egypt. She went in search of places connected to death rituals, to rites of passage between life and death, and between one state of being and another. These are often places with a strong archaeological significance: perhaps a rock formation that once served as a temple, or an inscription on a wall referring to rituals that were performed there.
She explored a whole series of places like these. The last stage of the project took her to Tuscia, where she came into contact with several Etruscan burial sites. She developed an incredible photographic series there, which is extremely evocative.
Alberto: That's wonderful. Best of luck with it! Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, and hope to see you in the near future.
Martha & Klim: Thank you!