The Weight of the Concrete explores the legacy of the Turinese artist and publisher Ezio Gribaudo (1929–2022), examining his multifaceted oeuvre at the confluence of image and language. This publication, named after I Peso del Concreto (1968)—a seminal work that featured Gribaudo’s early graphic creations alongside an anthology of concrete poetry edited by the poet Adriano Spatola (1941–88) places Gribaudo’s work in conversation with approximately forty artists and poets from different generations, all of whom similarly engage with explorations of text, form, and visual expression.

With contributions from Anni Albers, Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Irma Blank, Al Cartio, Paula Claire, CAConrad, Natalie Czech, Betty Danon, Constance DeJong, Mirtha Dermisache, Johanna Drucker, Bryana Fritz, Ilse Garnier, Liliane Giraudon, Susan Howe, Alison Knowles, Katalin Ladik, Liliane Lin, Hanne Lippard, Sara Magenheimer, Françoise Maircy, Nadia Marcus, Giulia Niccolai, Alice Notley, Ewa Partum, sadé powell, N. H. Pritchard, Cia Rinne, Neide Dias de Sá, Giovanna Sandri, Mary Ellen Solt, Alice Theobald, Colleen Thibaudeau, Patrizia Vicinelli, Pascal Vonlanthen, Hannah Weiner and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt.

Edited by Tom Engels and Lilou Vidal. Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Ezio Gribaudo: The Weight of the Concrete, held at Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, 18 September, 2023–2 February, 2024, and Museion-Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen, 23 March–1 September, 2024.

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages, and they coedited SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books). They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Tucson, Arizona, as well as in Spain and Portugal.

This series of 23 new (Soma)tic poetry rituals and resulting poems by CAConrad create what we can refer to as an “extreme present” set to reveal the creative viability of everything around us. Poetry rituals such as riding escalators and showing photographs of himself to strangers asking, “Excuse me, have you seen this person?” In another he pollinates flowers for security cameras, exclaiming, “I’M A POLLINATOR, I’M A POLLINATOR!” One was written with a ghost, another by stargazing to build his own constellations. (Soma)tic rituals are a practice of unorthodox steps aimed at breaking us out of the quotidian and into a more political and physical spiritual consciousness of The New Wilderness.

Winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Poetry. After his boyfriend Earth’s murder, CAConrad was looking for a (Soma)tic poetry ritual to overcome his depression. This new book of 18 rituals and their resulting poems contains that success, along with other political actions and exercises that testify to poetry’s ability to reconnect us and help put an end to our alienation from the planet.

Since their 2005 inception, CAConrad’s (Soma)tic exercises have been summoning the whole spectrum of human experience in the name of poetry. A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon collects 27 new and previously published exercises and their emerging poems, incorporating unorthodox steps in the writing process from the tangible everyday to the cosmos of the imagination. Together they manifest as an urgent call for a connective, concentrated, and unfettered creativity.

Edited by Axel Wieder, with texts by Robert Glück, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, Pauline Oliveros, Adrienne Rich and contributions by Basma Alsharif, Erika Balsom, CAConrad, Adam Christensen, Beatrice Gibson, Mason Leaver-Yap, Eileen Myles, Irene Revell.

Deux Soeurs brings together a chorus of voices that explore representations of parenthood, friendship, and disobedience. The book acts as a reader to artist Beatrice Gibson’s films, I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead (2018) and Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters (2019), and includes material that informed Gibson’s working process, together with the artist’s texts and notes used in both films.

Designed by HIT.

You can listen to Beatrice Gibson’s podcast What’s Love Got To Do With It  here.