The most beautiful Swiss books are (also) in Italian. For the third year running, a number of printing projects by Musumeci and Genoud have been included in the prestigious series The Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2022, organised annually by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture.
The awarded works are chosen by a selected jury.
This year, five works by Musumeci and Genoud have been awarded, an achievement for which we can justifiably feel proud and honoured.
The first book, “Ecce Homo”, by General Idea, is a great book that, from the outset, seeks to express physicality and vulnerability; the uneven edges and the soft cover reflect the content of the book itself, which is a collection of drawings by Jorge Zontal, a member of the New York collective who died of AIDS in 1994.
The second book to be awarded is the horizontal format work on “William Leavitt. Installations, Plays, Video 1970-2018” whose hardback and rough cover is a perfect introduction to the works presented. The composition of the images of interiors, combined with illustrations of theatrical and video productions, renders the book a kind of screenplay.
The third is the three-volume catalogue dedicated to the conceptual art of Simon Starling, “A–A’, B–B’”, which, with its grey cardboard case, aims to serve as a sculpture itself. The question “what is a book?” is examined by this work, which is knowingly playful and is destined to be a collector’s item.
Another catalogue awarded is the minimalist book presenting 800 paintings by the Zurich-born Andrea Muheim. “Andrea Muheim. Malerei als Selbstgespräch” is the title of the project, which comes in paperback format with a salmon-pink dust jacket, a mix of graphic novel and photographic book. The book ends with detailed technical notes and a historical-artistic essay.
The final work awarded is “#INGRID”, a photographic notebook that (successfully) seeks to represent an internet-based political initiative through the traditional format of the printed page. Duplicated pages, a sense of disorder, page numbers missing, and often poorly zoomed images express through the printed medium the visual flow that is typical of social media, contributing to the current debate on the concept of poor images.
