Da settembre 2022, la libreria Choisi e Spazio Choisi 2 si sono trasferiti in via San Salvatore a Paradiso (CH) e sono diventati Artphilein Bookstore.

Exhibition period: 25.11.2021 - 26.02.2022

PLOMO presents an exploration of the phenomenon of excessive violence in Caracas; it focuses on the value of the creative actions of people whose lives are determined by violence. Many academic works that aim to understand and “dialogue” with the phenomenon of violence in our country only result in an explanation of our social problems as a lack of personal capacity to adapt to external models, almost always European ones. These figures of authority usually declare that we live in violence either because we are too wild to adjust to the capitalist system—and its supposed notion of honest work—or because we are too immoral to maintain the high values ​​that Socialism demands. Our social reality, although affected by external forces, corresponds to its own internal logic. Any research work that sets out to understand this particularity has to begin by not allowing our reality to continue to be told through other people’s stories. Stories that almost always denigrate us, put us down in relation to some imposed scale of values, and do little to help us better understand our world.

PLOMO is part of a large network of actions undertaken by the author and his collaborators, which range from graffiti, art, research, and cultural criticism, all with the mission of the decolonization of the Caribbean cultural front.

PLOMO is an anthropological work under a semiotic lens, which is to say, an exploration of the ways of being human, taking into account the invisible power structures that connect all things, and how those forces become evident in our expressions and culture.

(Excerpts from Alexander Chaparro's essay)

Exhibition period: 18.10 - 14.11.2021

16 June - 10 September 2021

The new display at Spazio Choisi 02 –dedicated to Artphilein Editions –, presents Ugo La Pietra's artist's book, Viaggio sul Reno 1974.

This Rhine cruise was an artistic experience of Ugo La Pietra, conducted together with the Global Tools Communication Group, composed of Franco Vaccari, Gianni Pettena, and Guido Arra. With the trip/performance on the Rhine, the artists explored the theme of “communication” in a closed and segregated environment, such as that of a trip organized on a boat: from this limited context, marked by regular rhythms and by a reduction at the minimum terms of any influence from the outside world, the participants’ behavior, their interactions, the communication processes emerge.

The exhibition is enriched by a selection of rare artist's books in unique copies and the screening of the film “The reappropriation of the city" (Ed. Center Georges Pompidou, Paris 1977).

11 March - 30 April 2021

The Point and Shoot Series, is a 15-year long deep observation of those peculiar and common features that characterise the western “peripheral” landscape which is only apparently ordinary and standardised.

"Point and Shoot might literally sound like instruction for a handgun. Or rather, "look around you and shoot". At the heart of it there are thirty-six frames, -little more of a meter and a half of film-, and nothing else. The photographer has a single thought: to take photographs. It is poised between a "before", which has just come by, and a "after" which has yet to materialise, waiting for a shot that is already hanging in the air. Photography, in its purest form, is the reaction to this impulse. It is the bridge between what has been and what will be; a moment of grace on which is to the photographic act what a sock to a foot. With the advent of digital photography, the practice of point and shoot was to change into something very similar but opposite: the shoot and point. Looking around is no longer enough. You need the selfie, the control screen and the online feedback. Like or dislike? Keep or delete? Which memory will make it past binary code?"

Alberto Chollet
Journalist and television producer

19 November 2020 - 15 January 2021

From November 19th, the new display at Spazio Choisi 02 is dedicated to  the photo-book Gaia 2003 - 2018, by Tonatiuh Ambrosetti, published by Artphilein Editions.

The project investigates the conflict and the negotiation between humankind and nature. The artist's personal story - like in a diary - is juxtaposed with the images of the landscapes in which he grew up or in which he ventured in search of the power of nature.

"When I was still at school I titled my diploma work Nature does not exist and I soon clashed with the fact that human influence had already acted in every corner of the planet, even in those distant places where life is deemed particularly difficult, barely impossible."

24 September - 15 November 2020

On Thursday September 24th, Spazio Choisi 02 inaugurates a new display dedicated to Andrea Tonellotto's photo book, Just a Perfect Day, co-edited by Artphilein Editions and Heillandi Gallery, Lugano.
 
Just A Perfect Day is a photo book and also the dream of a perfect day.
Andrea Tonellotto's Polaroids photos bring together geometries, lines, materiality, and colour.
There are several references to literature, music, Metaphysical and Surrealist painting: a manifesto for our times, created with the caricatural graphic expression of the previous century.
(From Giuseppe Violetta's preface)

6 May - 13 September 2020

Spazio Choisi 02 is pleased to announce the opening of the new exhibition One Belt One Road by Marco D’Anna. The photographer presents his latest book, published by Artphilein Editions, in an installation designed specifically for the space, with photographs and special editions.

One Belt One Road reflects on a new Silk Route, investigated through a series of photographs of ‘landscapes’ of containers and an apparatus of texts about international shipping routes.

The project started off in a key moment of Marco D’Anna’s life, as he writes in the book:
years ago, during one of my journeys, I was on an Italian warship heading for the Gulf of Aden in Somalia, via the Suez Canal. We arrived by night at the anchorage, which is like a large parking lot where ships stop, form convoys and then cross the strait. We cast anchor too, and the following morning, just as dawn was breaking, I remember a sight: I saw cargo ships appear of a size I had never seen before in my life. They looked like spaceships coming out of the night – they were huge, one a scale I had never even seen in the Mediterranean. An apparition. It was like reading an Asimov novel or watching Star Wars: they were enormous, looming out of the semidarkness, and initially I couldn’t understand exactly what they were.

Nel nuovo Spazio Choisi #2 si terrà la presentazione del libro fotografico EROS di Bruno Cattani, pubblicato da Artphilein Editions, accompagnata da una selezione di immagini dell'omonima serie (courtesy Heillandi Gallery).