On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Jože Plečnik (1872–1957), a key figure of the Modernist movement in architecture and creator of numerous buildings and monuments around the city of Ljubljana, in 2022 Luca Lo Pinto and Olaf Nicolai curated an exhibition titled I Am Only the Housekeeper, but I Don’t Know… in the Slovenian architect’s former home. The publication retraces the contemporary interventions undertaken by the curatorial duo, who invited twenty-five internationally recognised Slovenian and foreign artists, allowing them to enter the house through their own works to commemorate Plečnik’s oeuvre and place its reading into a different and more contemporary context.

Works by John Armleder, H. C. Artmann, Nairy Baghramian, Avi Beracha, Pierre Bismuth, Monica Bonvicini, Pablo Bronstein, Michael Dean, Jason Dodge, Hansi Fuchs, Lena Grossmann, Ana Kučan, Janette Laverrière, Enzo Mari, Hana Miletić, Carsten Nicolai, Saša Pavček, Julie Peeters, Manfred Pernice, Florian Pumhösl, Fabio Quaranta, Ana Roš, Giovanna Silva, Mladen Stilinović, Diamond Stingily, Sophie Thun.

Photography by Giovanna Silva. Graphic design by Julie Peeters with Laura Martens.

Falce e martello: tre dei modi con cui un artista può contribuire alla lotta di classe (“Hammer and Sickle: three of the ways an artist can contribute to the class struggle”) by Enzo Mari was the catalogue that accompanied his exhibition at the Galleria Milano in 1973. Today, the exhibition is re-proposed, with the same display and in the same historical Milanese gallery; this anastatic reprint of the catalogue is enriched with photographs and documents from the archives of the Gallery and from the Mari Archive, along with an essay by Bianca Trevisan which retraces the planning itinerary undertaken by the Milanese artist and designer, and an essay by Riccardo Venturi outlining the historical, artistic and political debate that the project was part of, and which was accompanied by a film that sparked a degree of controversy at the time. A snapshot of that tinderbox which was 1970s Italy, and a reflection on the hammer and sickle: the most iconic symbol of the whole of the twentieth century.