Based on an idea by Michele Lombardelli and Paola Nicolin, Piacenza-Los Angeles presents to the public the twenty-five art and poetry publications – and the respective documents, preparatory materials, original manuscripts, artist’s proofs, photographs, posters, postcards, notes and artworks – published by ML&NLF, the publishing house founded in 1991 between Castelvetro Piacentino and Los Angeles, by Michele Lombardelli (artist and musician, Cremona, 1968) and Paul Vangelisti (poet, San Francisco, 1945).

The chronicle of this venture is unveiled in its entirety for the first time. Apart from showing the outcome of a peculiar relationship between an artist and a poet with a passion for publishing, the idea is also to bring attention to the unusual, yet rich, network of encounters they created, bringing together a group of artists and poets from Southern California interested in visual poetry (Martha Ronk, Dennis Phillips, Robert Crosson, John Baldessari, Guy Bennet, and Standard Schaefer), and their Italian counterparts from Emilia-Romagna (William Xerra, Emilio Villa, Aldo Tagliaferri).

Built on common passions, these relationships, encounters, discoveries, battles, conflicts and conquests of spaces of expressive freedom have generated new and unusual cultural geographies.

Visual arts that feed on poetry, politics and social activism, literature, entrepreneurship, exact sciences and music find a magical balance in the form of the artist’s book, showing that different knowledges can coexist within the same framework of beauty. The history of the publishing house is a story of friendship, travel and encounters born around Piacenza ‘land of passage’, where many of these relationships became books.

Thanks to the close collaboration with Michele Lombardelli, we had access to the private archive of the artist, who collected the memory of this publishing experience as if it were an art project itself.

Michele Lombardelli’s hybrid role on the art scene is an expression of the restless nature of contemporary artistic practice. Editor, publisher, musician, artist, collector, and archivist: as the son of a printer who in the 70s opened his business in Castelvetro Piacentino, on the banks of the Po River, Lombardelli has always been surrounded by books.

It is in this context that Lombardelli met and worked with Vanni Scheiwiller, who from 1995 to 2009 accompanied his training in artist’s books between Milan and Los Angeles, where Lombardelli has been travelling since the late 1980s. Scheiwiller also encouraged him to become a publisher specialising in art and poetry, and his first release was a book of poems by Rino Cortiana with illustrations by Carlo Berté. During the last edition of the Milan Poetry festival directed by Gianni Sassi, Lombardelli met Paul Vangelisti, poet, editor of the Anthology of L.A. Poets (with Charles Bukowksy), and renowned translator of Italian experimental poets, such as Adriano Spatola and Antonio Porta. United by a shared friendship with William Xerra, Lombardelli and Vangelisti sealed their encounter by releasing the first book of a series entirely dedicated to poetry and art. With “Morso del suono” (1993) – a collection of poems by Vangelisti, Ballerini, Baraka, Clinton, and Philips, with a text by Tagliaferri and artworks by William Xerra – the series builds and unprecedented, yet prolific, bridge between Piacenza and Los Angeles, identifying a list of authors that in 2010 Arnoldo Mondadori Editore will include almost entirely in the anthology “Nuova poesia Americana-Los Angeles” [New American Poetry – Los Angeles].

This series is an example of how the book, in its most essential expression (limited edition, bilingual, in different formats depending on the content, without an ISBN code but regularly presented in contexts generating other relationships and projects), is an extraordinary instrument of free and unpredictable cultural production, and an opportunity to draw inspiration and reflect on what it means to publish an artist’s book today.

Alongside the archive material, the exhibition presents a selection of works by artists linked to Lombardelli’s publishing adventure, including a photo series created by Giovanna Silva for the last Desert Notebook release in 2008, and a playlist specially curated by Michele Lombardelli and Paul Vangelisti.

The public program accompanying the project opens new possible working hypotheses on artist publishing through meetings and debates with some of the protagonists of this story and well-known personalities from the world of culture, such as Ray Banhoff, Gianpiero Mughini, Paul Vangelisti, William Xerra, and more.