CONTEMPORARY ARTS ARCHIVE
The interdisciplianry archive on contemporary arts at Connecting Cultures - in its new site in an old restored water mill on the outskirts of Milan - is dedicated to the visual arts, photography, architecture, urban planning, design, landscape design, with a particular interest for site specific art projects and local culture. The archive is addressed to a specialized audience: university students, artists, researchers: books and documents cover the history of last fifty years in different branches of visual arts.
>>> CATALOGUE
THE COLLECTION
The archive includes 5.000 volumes, from 1960, some of them are english or french editions, every month are increased of about 100 volumes.
The section of Visual Arts includes catalogues of exhibitions in USA and Europe, from Art of Assemblage (Seitz, MOMA 1961) to Cybernetic Serendipity (Reichardt 1969) and from This is tomorrow (ICA, Londra, 1958) to nowadays.
The essay-writing section includes essays by the most important critics and theorists of the XIX century, from Harold Rosemberg to Clement Greenberg, Marshall McLuhan, Roloand Barthes, Georges Didi-Huberman, Hans Belting, Harald Szeemann, Rosalind Krauss, Meyer Shapiro, to the most resent critics like Homi Bhaba, Stuart Hall, Sarat Mahraj, as well as antologies about the most remarkable aspects of the philosophical, aesthetical and sociological debate from the second postwar.
The photography section contains monographies, anthologies and critical studies about photography all over the world, with a special attention to the italian situation and the territory research.
The architecture section includes monographies, documents and historical essays about the activity of the most important architects of XIX century, Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, to the most recent essays on contemporary italian and international architecture.
The architecture and urbanistic section includes a good selection of essays about “Art and Territory”, and a special regard for contemporary urbanistic and sociology. There are a lot of books of economic, sociologic and socio-geographical analysis on the theme of territory transformation in the globalisation era.
One of the most important instrument for the analysis of the territory is the section dedicated to the photographical atlas of cities, and to the essays of critics like Bernardo Secchi, Manfredo Tafuri, Bruno Zevi, Vittorio Gregotti and others.
Moreover the centre is interested in the documentation of artistical projects by italian artists and collective working in the public: from Multiplicity to Gruppo A12, from the work of a.titolo to Stalker, Artway of Thinking, Alberto Garutti, Cesare Pietroiusti and others.
The centre is updated on the most recent and innovative purposes and it offers to the audience the last numbers of italian and international rewiews. For visual arts: Artforum (Usa), Art Monthly (Uk), Arte e Critica (It), Exibart on paper (It), Flash Art (It), Il Giornale dell'Arte (It), Mousse (It), Nextexit (It), Third Text (Uk), Work in progress (It). For photography: Colors (It), Zoom (It). For architecture, urbanistic and design: Domus (It), Abitare (It). Moreover the centre distributes Urban and it keeps and catalogues every number of the culturale pages of Sole 24 Ore.
