Humboldt Books

Artist's Travels

 
The Artist's Travels series brings together the contributions of contemporary artists who, each in their own way, create or are the protagonists of books, drawing collections or catalogues, recounting their own personal research, rediscoveries and obsessions. Every book introduces us to a particular world, and gives us the experience of a journey—be it real or imaginary—and its consequences unfolding through artistic elaboration. On an ever more globalised planet, travel means leaving a mark, an underlining, on the maps of our era.
 
Giorgio Andreotta Calò - In girum imus nocte
2025
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Humboldt Books
forthcoming
A look back at the poetic, political and anthropological dimensions of the collective performance initiated by artist Giorgio Andreotta Calò around a mining plant in Sardinia.
Pier Paolo Calzolari - Casa ideale
2024
bilingual edition (English / French)
Humboldt Books
Retrospective monograph.
Rebecca Moccia - Ministry of Loneliness
2024
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Humboldt Books
currently out of stock
An artistic reflection on the political and social structures that shape the emotional state of loneliness and its perception in contemporary society.
Aradhana Seth - Sadak - Hand painted street signs in India
2023
English edition
Humboldt Books
Artist, photographer and filmmaker Aradhana Seth's photographic archive of painted signs in India: a visual itinerary through the historical-economic changes of Indian society over the years.
Lisa Ponti - Io sono un disegno
2023
bilingual edition (French / Italian)
Humboldt Books
The monograph dedicated to Italian artist, editor, critic and writer Lisa Ponti (1922–2019), daughter of the famous architect and designer Gio Ponti, who spanned a number of moments of twentieth century culture, constantly involved with the leading names of the Italian and international art scene.
Rä di Martino - Carmelo Bene - Là dove muore, canta
2023
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Humboldt Books
Carmelo Bene. Là dove muore, canta is the work of the artist Rä di Martino and she comes to terms with the memory of Carmelo Bene (1937–2002), through his archive materials.
 Invernomuto - Black Med
2022
English edition
Humboldt Books
The long term project of the Italian artistic duo around the trajectories of sound through the Mediterranean sea.
Michael Höpfner - From Here to Tibet - A conversation between two walking artists. March 2019 – July 2020
2022
English edition
Humboldt Books
Fulton and Höpfner's long-term correspondence on art, landscape, and the aesthetic and political dimensions of walking.
Tiane Doan na Champassak - Indo-Chine
2022
bilingual edition (English / French)
Humboldt Books
The photographic works of the artist Tiane Doan na Champassak's grandmother, Alsatian married to a Vietnamese in Baden Baden in 1913.
Jacopo Valentini - Concerning Dante - Autonomous Cell
2022
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Humboldt Books
A Dantean geography.
Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli - A Season in Slemani
2021
English edition
Humboldt Books
A series of artistic residencies in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Gabriele Basilico - Non recensiti
2021
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Humboldt Books
Gabriele Basilico's previoulsy unpublished photographs in the strip-tease theaters and nightclubs of Milan in the 1970s reveal a new dimension of his oeuvre.
Giorgio Andreotta Calò - Gloria
2021
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Humboldt Books
The text and photo diary of a forty-day journey on foot from Venice to L'Aquila, following the subterranean fracture where the European and African tectonic plates meet, in search of the symbolic dimension and the real effects of seismic waves.
Carlos Casas - Cemetery - Journeys to the Elephant Graveyard and Beyond
2021
English edition
Humboldt Books
Cemetery. Journeys to the Elephant Graveyard and Beyond compiles a selection of the visual and research materials accumulated during the development of the film and project Cemetery (2009–2019).
Nanna Debois Buhl - Cloud Behavior
2020
English edition
Humboldt Books
A study of clouds through photographs, drawings, essays, and interviews.
Nathalie du Pasquier - Campo di Marte
2020
English edition
Humboldt Books
currently out of stock
Artist's book.
Michele Lombardelli - California
2020
English edition
Humboldt Books
A collection of photographs and drawings retracing the founding Californian experience of the artist.
Jonas Mekas - Transcript 04 44\' 14\
2020
bilingual edition (English / Lithuanian)
Humboldt Books
Full transcript of Mekas's Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR: a five-hour-long film made up of footage from US television newscasts covering the independence of Lithuania and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Fog Friend Font - Ways of Doing Multilingual Sense (box set)
2020
English edition (texts in Inuktitut and other languages)
Humboldt Books
Box set comprising five books, a vinyl and a supplementary dust jacket, each highlighting different practices and transformative developments occurring in the realm of writing and speaking today as triggered by digital communication.
Antonio Rovaldi - The Sound of the Woodpecker Bill - New York City
2019
English edition
Humboldt Books
This publication documents a visual research on the perimeters of all five boroughs of New York, featuring a photographic portfolio, a set of maps and a series of texts.
Luca Vitone - Romanistan
2019
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Humboldt Books
Both a journal and a photographic report, this publication documents Luca Vitone's travel from Italy to India, in the footsteps of the first Roma migrations between the eighth and fourteenth centuries.
Lele Saveri - Hong Kong Barricades
2019
English edition
Humboldt Books
Images of the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong by Italian photographer Lele Saveri.
Antonio Grulli - Tel Aviv - Jerusalem Diary
2019
English edition
Humboldt Books
A travel diary / a screenplay.
Linda Fregni Nagler - Yama no Shashin
2018
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Humboldt Books
This publication presents a project by Linda Fregni Nagler about the photographic “School of Yokohama”, which emerged during the Meiji era in Japan. Over the past ten years, the artist has collected hand-colored photographs of this period representing Mount Fuji. She re-photographed them, printed them and colored them by hand, according to colorization method of that time.
Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli - Towards the Altar of a God Unknown - Liberian Notes
2018
English edition
Humboldt Books
Federico Lodoli and Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli went twice in Liberia to carry out a study on the war. This publication gathers their travel memoirs, interviews with Liberian warlords and a photographic reportage.
Paolo Gioli - Etruschi Polaroid 1984
2018
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Humboldt Books
This publication features an unpublished series of artworks by artist Paolo Gioli based on polaroid images of etruscan funerary sculptures set in the Italian city of Volterra. The volume is supplemented by a text on Volterra by novelist D. H. Lawrence, and an essay by historian of photography Roberta Valtorta.
Hilario Isola - Oh… My God! - Bamboo Scaffolding on Myanmar Pagoda
2017
English edition
Humboldt Books
This artist's book collects a photo series taken in spring 2017 in Myanmar, one of the Buddhism's sacred places, where one hundred or so temples have been destroyed by a recent earthquake. Now the pagodas affected by the earthquake, covered by thin bamboo structures, have taken original and unexpected forms, hanging between architecture and art, life and destruction. This temporary condition allowed Isola to catalogue, study and also to develop a sort of appropriation.
 Rita Canarezza & Pier Paolo Coro - San Marino - 30th September 1950
2017
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Humboldt Books
This publication documents a previously unreleased video project by Canarezza & Coro inspired by poet Eugenio Montale's unusual walk across the Italy-San Marino border to receive a Literature Prize in a context of tensions between the two States. The volume also includes fragments of forty-seven poems by Eugenio Montale, modified by the two artists.
Nanna Debois Buhl - Intervals and forms of stones of stars
2017
English edition
Humboldt Books
A biological investigation of a Nordic man-made beach landscape through a series of cameraless photographic registrations of the site's flora, fauna, and particles.
Michele Lombardelli - Los Angeles 1989 Tokyo 1991
2017
English edition
Humboldt Books
Los Angeles 1989 Tokyo 1991 brings together a collection of images from two of the most complex and undefinable metropolises on the face of the Earth, the social and urban form of which is ceaselessly reshaped by the minimal existence of millions of people in movement. Lombardelli's photographs are also cinematographic homages to the works of Wim Wenders and Yasujirō Ozu.
Gianni Pettena - The Curious Mr. Pettena - Rambling around USA – 1971-73
2017
English edition
Humboldt Books
The Curious Mr. Pettena recounts various steps along a journey, through cities and wide open natural spaces, undertaken by the anarchitect Gianni Pettena at the start of the 1970s across the United States.
Diego Perrone - War Games
2017
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Humboldt Books
Stemming from a project dedicated to the city of Genoa and in particular to its relationship with the sea, this photographic artist's book extends the site-specific glass sculpture designed by Perrone inside Villa del Principe's Hall of the Shipwreck.
 Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi - The Arrow of Time - Notes from a Russian Journey – 1989-1990
2017
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Humboldt Books
This publication reproduces the experimental filmmakers' notebooks from their journey in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s. Gianikian & Ricci Lucchi undertook this travel to gather the memories of the cinematographic literary and artistic Russian avant-garde of the '20s and '30s, seeking out survivors and listening to their life stories.
Michele Mari - Dreams
2017
English edition
Humboldt Books
In this publication, artist Gianfranco Baruchello and writer Michele Mari join forces to provide descriptions of their own dreams. Baruchello's illustrations and Mari's written notes unveil oneiric worlds made of symbols, recurring images, and obsessions, and address the question: just what are dreams made of?
Riccardo Giacconi - The Variational Status
2017
bilingual edition (English / French)
Humboldt Books
Artist and researcher Riccardo Giacconi investigates the relationship between a range of narrative forms (puppetry, street storytellers, flyers and pamphlets) and a series of pre-political acts of revolt staged between Italy and South America. This publication documents his research project and features a series of texts, notes, archives, illustrations, and interviews.
 Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff - Berlin, Zürich, Zürich, Berlin, Berlin, Berlin, Berlin, London
2016
English edition
Humboldt Books
This publication collects black and white photographs taken at apartment viewings in Berlin, London and Zürich in 2015. The images render a landscape of apartments, mostly empty, punctuated by potential buyers or renters projecting their own possible futures onto the spaces.
Rä di Martino - The Day He Swims Thru Marrakech
2016
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Humboldt Books
Photographic companion book to the film La controfigura (“The stand-in”) by Rä di Martino: the tale of a cinema troupe in Marrakech trying to shoot the remake of The Swimmer, the 1968 film with Burt Lancaster, based on a short story of the same name by John Cheever.
Emanuele Trevi - Ontani in Bali
2016
English edition
Humboldt Books
Writer Emanuele Trevi and photographer Giovanna Silva recount, each in their own manner, their journey with artist Luigi Ontani in Bali at the time of the preparation of the Ogoh Ogoh carnival procession. With original illustrations by Ontani.
Ettore Favini - Arrivederci
2016
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Humboldt Books
Arrivederci recalls the artist's personal journey in Sardinia to explore textile craftsmanship. Favini narrates the stories of each piece of fabric he gathered and used for his new body of work—from its origin to the exhibition display. The publication is enriched with photographic documentation and texts by curators and stylist Antonio Marras.
Donatella Bernardi - Into Your Solar Plexus
2016
English edition
Humboldt Books
This artist's book presents the sum of a multitude of journeys, people and stories collected and edited by Donatella Bernardi and stemming from her own family archives. The artist connects this whole documentation with works by Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair and her daughter Hala Schoukair, as well as with the Swiss Confederation Fine Art Collection.
Nanna Debois Buhl - Palm Tree Studies in South Tyrol and Beyond
2016
English edition
Humboldt Books
Botanical trajectories and symbolic dimensions of Merano's palm trees (artist's book).
Claudia Losi - How do I imagine being there?
2016
English edition
Humboldt Books
What language should be used to describe a place? This question is the starting point and the core question of Claudia Losi's project and namesake book, a collection of transversal contributions, from art to geography, from semiotics to psychology, which interrogates the way we perceive places and the role of our imagination in such a process.
Susan Philipsz - Follow Me
2015
English edition
Humboldt Books
Designed on the basis of a contemporary Baedeker, this book offers an original itinerary in the historic center of the city of Genoa. It is a city-guide that links different places and times, and that also moves from the habit of moving, investigated as a typical phenomenon of the Grand Tour—and that is the origin of the term “tourism”.
Carsten Höller - “Fara Fara” - A Film Not Made
2015
bilingual edition (English / French)
Humboldt Books
A photographic account of Carsten Höller's journeys to the Democratic Republic of the Congo for the purpose of a film about Fara Fara music.
Antonio Rovaldi - Orizzonte in Italia
2015
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Humboldt Books
Artist's book.
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