alessandro de francesco books

This volume gathers Alessandro De Francesco’s essays and theoretical writings produced from 2015 to 2022. It follows the first volume Continuum: Writings on Poetry as Artistic Practice, reuniting essays written between 2007 and 2015.

The title of this new volume could only be Continuum 2, given that the underlying concept remains the same: to testify to the seamless continuity of the author’s commitment to poetry and art over the years, and to reaffirm at the same time, on a theoretical level, a model of creation and thinking as a continuous flow, not discretized, not quantized, but organic, liquid, without end or beginning; a kind of linguistic translation of the space-time in which every text, like every other object, is necessarily immersed.

Continuum 2 is a trilingual book, containing writings in English, French, and Italian, and it is particularly focused on two lines of inquiry: the author’s ongoing meditation on the poetic practice, and the first steps of his new investigation into seventeenth-century art, poetry, and forms of thought.

From the publisher's description: "LIKE THIS. Natural Intelligence As Seen by Art brings together a series of specific commissions by ten internationally renowned artists for der TANK, the exhibition space of the Institute Art Gender Nature at the heart of the FHNW Academy of Art and Design’s campus in Basel. Curated by Chus Martínez and supported by [N.A!] Project, the artistic projects conceived between 2016 and 2021 by Mathilde Rosier, Julieta Aranda, Cecilia Bengolea, Eduardo Navarro, Ingela Ihrman, Teresa Solar, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Raffaela Naldi Rossano, Alessandro De Francesco, and Gil Pellaton all share a common denominator: their interest in exploring the multilayered dimensions of our relationship with nature, and the slow but continuous change of the art system’s perception and engagement with the natural world."

Alessandro De Francesco, And agglomerations, of trees or / E agglomerati, degli alberi o, Milan: Mousse, 2022, 160 pp., € 18.

Alessandro De Francesco has been blurring the boundaries between poetry and artistic practice for over fifteen years. In his radical and increasingly influential work, the bare text, often in multiple languages, becomes an environment, a living organism, a set of relations, and a junction in spacetime where things appear. With conceptual complexity and emotional intensity, his dense writing explores in unexpected ways the relations between history and nature, thought and meaning, (mental) images and feelings, language and space. While his internationally exhibited projects span digital voice processing, virtual reality, printmaking, archive research, and community-oriented actions, the book and the text—like here with And Agglomerations, of Trees or E agglomerati, degli alberi o—are where the poet/artist’s work manifests itself in its deepest essence. With this dual- language book, masterfully produced by Marco Mazzi, finely translated from the Italian by Max Norman, and featuring a foreword by the leading literary theorist and political activist Judith Balso, Alessandro De Francesco takes poetry and contemporary art, to paraphrase Marcel Broodthaers, “hand in hand” towards new territories.