“Readings” is an evolution, in the form of podcasts, of the editorial activity of Fondazione Prada, a sound anthology composed of critical essays and narrative texts commissioned by the foundation as part of its multidisciplinary projects.
“Readings” brings together a wide selection of excerpts from books published from 2012 to date. The first collection, destined to grow, includes more than 50 podcasts by historians, philosophers, curators and writers such as Nicolas Bourriaud, Massimo Cacciari, Germano Celant, Christoph Cox, Emilio Gentile, Alison Gingeras, Boris Groys, Udo Kittelmann, Rachel Kuschner, Christy Lange, Roxana Marcoci, Julia Robinson, Dieter Roelstraete, Jeffrey Schnapp, Salvatore Settis, Ali Smith, Lynn Spigel, and many others.
Podcasts are both in English and Italian.
The publications of Fondazione Prada are available in our online bookshop
LATEST EPISODE
31.Nadia Fusini
Ordo Amoris
This special episodes presents the essay by writer and literary critic Nadia Fusini develops some of the themes explored in “Love Stories. A Sentimental Survey by Francesco Vezzoli“, the project conceived by the artist and presented in 2020 on Fondazione Prada’s Instagram account.
Through the language of social media, Francesco Vezzoli investigated the collective imagination about feelings, identity and forms of love desire as they are discussed in the present.
1. Boris Groys
Art Topology: The Reproduction of Aura
The essay is part of the catalogue dedicated to the exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013“, curated by Germano Celant in dialogue with Thomas Demand and Rem Koolhaas. Presented in 2013 in Fondazione Prada’s Venice venue, the project reconstructed “Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form”, the exhibition conceived by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle in Bern in 1969 and and remembered for the curator’s radical approach to exhibition practice.
2.Lynn B. Spigel
Talk TV and the video countercultures
The essay is included in the publication accompanying the exhibition “TV 70: Francesco Vezzoli guarda la Rai“. Presented in Milan in 2017 by Fondazione Prada in collaboration with Rai, the project is a personal interpretation of the TV production of the 70s in the form of an intense visual journey. Italian public television is considered by Vezzoli as an engine of cultural, social and political change in a country in transition from the radicalism of the 60s to the hedonism of the 80s. The project analysed in particular the relations between media production and art, politics, women’s emancipation and entertainment.
3.Emilio Gentile
Italy 1918-1943
The essay is included in the book that accompanied the exhibition “Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918-1943“. Conceived by Germano Celant in 2018, the project installed in all the exhibition spaces of Fondazione Prada’s Milan venue explored the system of art and culture in Italy between the two world wars. The study of thousands of historical documents and photographs revealed the spatial, social and political context in which the artworks were created, staged, experienced and interpreted by the public over 25 crucial years of Italian history. The survey led to the selection of over 600 works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, posters, furnishings, architectural projects and models, created by more than 100 authors including artists Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, Felice Casorati, Giorgio de Chirico, Fortunato Depero, Filippo de Pisis, Arturo Martini, Fausto Melotti, Giorgio Morandi, Gino Severini, Mario Sironi, and Adolfo Wildt and the architects and designers Giovanni Muzio, Marcello Piacentini, Piero Portaluppi and Giuseppe Terragni.
4. Elvira Dyangani Ose
Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer
“Uneasy Dancer” is an expression Betye Saar has used to define both herself and her work. Several key elements lie at the center of her artistic practice: an interest in the metaphysical, the representation of feminine memory, and African-American identity which, in her work, takes on evocative and unusual forms. Through her confident usage of found objects, personal memorabilia and derogatory images that evoke denied or distorted narratives, Saar developed a powerful social critique that challenges racial and sexist stereotypes deeply rooted in American culture. The essay is part of the publication accompanying the exhibition “Uneasy Dancer” a comprehensive survey of work by Betye Saar (born in Los Angeles in 1926), held at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2016, curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose. This was the first exhibition of the American artist in Italy, and brought together over 80 works including installations, assemblages, collages and sculptures produced between 1966 and 2016.
5. Roxana Marcoci
Movies, Sculptural Theaters, and Roller Coasters
The essay is part of the publication accompanying the exhibition “Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin: Whether Line”. Presented at Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2019, the exhibition was the first output of a creative process begun in late 2016, investigating the perpetual promise of “new” terrain and the inherent instability of territorial appropriation.
Taking the idealized rurality endemic to back-to-the-land ideologies as a conceptual starting point, the project represents both a return and an escape. Relocating their studio operations to the countryside of Ohio for this work, Fitch and Trecartin conceived the framework for a new movie as a haunted map: a location with its own will and a constellation of permanent built. The artists contort these sites through dislocations of time and memory to explore the notion of borders and boundaries—existential, psychosocial, and physical.
6. Jeffrey Schnapp
The Spectacle factory
The essay is part of the publication accompanying the exhibition “Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943” conceived and curated by Germano Celant. Presented at Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2018, the project explored the world of art and culture in Italy in the interwar years. Based on documentary and photographic evidence of the time, it reconstructed the spatial, temporal, social and political contexts in which the works of art were created and exhibited, and the way in which they were interpreted and received by the public of the time.
7. Salvatore Settis
Supremely original: classical art as serial, iterative, portable
This text is an excerpt of the essay published in 2015 and titled “Serial / Portable Classic. The Greek Canon and its Mutations”. The volume accompanied two exhibitions. “Serial Classic“, co-curated by Salvatore Settis and Anna Anguissola in Milan, focused on classical sculpture and explored the ambivalent relationship between originality and imitation in Roman culture and its insistence on the circulation of multiples as an homage to Greek art. “Portable Classic”, co-curated by Salvatore Settis and Davide Gasparotto in Venice, explored the origins and functions of miniature reproductions of classical sculptures.
8. Christoph Cox
Seeing is not Hearing: Synaesthesia, Anaesthesia and the Audio-Visual
The essay is part of the publication accompanying the exhibition “Art or Sound”, curated by Germano Celant. Presented at Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2014, the projects explored the relationship between art and sound and the way it has developed from the 16th century to the present day. “Art or Sound” examined the iconic aspects of musical instruments, the role of the artist-musician, and the areas in which the visual arts and music have intermixed.
9. Alison Gingeras
CPLY: Story of a Bad Boy
The essay is part of the publication accompanying the exhibition “William N. Copley”. Presented at Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2016 and 2017, the show was organized in collaboration with The Menil Collection, Houston, and curated by Germano Celant. The project retraced the entire career of the American artist, collector, publisher, dealer and art patron – started in Los Angeles in the 1940s, developed in Paris and subsequently spanned across Europe and the United States.
10. Shumon Basar
The Eternal Return of the Primitive Hut
The essay is part of the publication accompanying the group exhibition “Machines à penser”, curated by Dieter Roelstraete. The project, presented in Venice in the 18th century spaces of Ca’ Corner della Regina in 2018, analyzed themes such as exile, escape and retreat, taking inspiration from the biography and the works of three major philosophers of the 20th century: Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. According to the curator, the physical or mental places where they spent their imposed or chosen isolation period, influenced and favored their intellectual production. Over the years, these three models of “machines for thinking” have become the object of interest and research for the contemporary artists taking part to the show, such as Leonor Antunes, Anselm Kiefer, Goshka Macuga, Mark Manders, Giulio Paolini, Susan Philipsz, and Gerhard Richter.
11. Germano Celant
Edward and Nancy Kienholz: the beauty of corruption
The essay is part of the publication accompanying the exhibition “Kienholz: Five Car Stud” presented in Milan by Fondazione Prada in 2016 and curated by Germano Celant. The exhibition brought together a selection of artworks realized between 1959 to 1994 by Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, including the well-known installation that gave the show its title. Five Car Stud was created by Edward Kienholz from 1969 to 1972, and first exhibited at documenta 5 in Kassel, curated by Harald Szeemann. A life-sized reproduction of a scene of racial violence, Five Car Stud is considered one of the American artist’s most significant works. The exhibition also presented 24 artworks including sculpture, assemblages and tableaux realized by the Kienholzes from 1959 to 1994, as well as documentation material on the history and making of Five Car Stud.
12. Rachel Kushner
The Mutiny on the Bounty
This text is part of the publication accompanying the exhibition “The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied,” a transmedia project originated from an ongoing, in-depth exchange between writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, artist Thomas Demand, stage and costume designer Anna Viebrock and curator Udo Kittelmann. The show, organised by Fondazione Prada in Ca’ Corner della Regina, Venice, unfolded on three storeys of the 18th century palazzo – the ground floor and the two main ones – and include photographic and film works, as well as spatial settings and loans from private and public collections.
The exhibition aimed to provide comprehensive insight into the respective production of Alexander Kluge, Thomas Demand and Anna Viebrock, whose artistic endeavours have always extended beyond the aesthetic and imaginative, and were conceived with political and historical intentions. All three artists revealed themselves as pathfinders and clue seekers, witnesses and chroniclers of times past and present.
13. Nicolas Bourriaud
Art, Cable and the Net: the Post-TV Situation
The essay is part of the publication accompanying the exhibition “TV 70: Francesco Vezzoli guarda la Rai”. Presented at Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2017 in collaboration with Rai, Italy’s national broadcasting company, the project is a personal interpretation of the television production in the 1970s in the form of an intense visual journey. The Italian public TV is considered by Vezzoli as a driving force for cultural, social and political change in a country in transition from the radicalness of the 1960s to the hedonism of the 1980s. In particular, the project analyzed the relationships between media production, women’s emancipation, art, politics and entertainment.
14. Maurizio Ferraris
The discobolus and the Brillo box
This essay has been published by Fondazione Prada in 2015 in the book “Serial / Portable Classic. The Greek Canon and its Mutations”. The volume accompanied two exhibitions. “Serial Classic“, co-curated by Salvatore Settis and Anna Anguissola in Milan, focused on classical sculpture and explored the ambivalent relationship between originality and imitation in Roman culture and its insistence on the circulation of multiples as an homage to Greek art.
“Portable Classic“, co-curated by Salvatore Settis and Davide Gasparotto in Venice, explored the origins and functions of miniature reproductions of classical sculptures.
15. Christy Lange
Bending toward Stealing
The is part of the publication accompanying the exhibition “L’image volée” (The stolen image), a group show curated by artist Thomas Demand, presented by Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2016. Demand’s idea for the exhibition is to explore the way we all rely on pre-existing models, and how artists have always referred to existing imagery to make their own. Questioning the boundaries between originality, conceptual inventiveness and the culture of the copy, the project focuses on theft, authorship, annexation and the creative potential of such pursuits.
16. Dieter Roelstraete
Make It Re: The Eternally Returning Object
The essay is part of the publication accompanying the exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013”, curated by Germano Celant in dialogue with Thomas Demand and Rem Koolhaas. Presented at Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2013, the project reconstructed “Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form”, the show curated by Harald Szeemann at the Bern Kunsthalle in 1969, which went down in history for the curator’s radical approach to exhibition practice. In a surprising remaking of the exhibition, the project restaged the show in the spaces of the 18th century palazzo Ca’ Corner della Regina, the Venice venue of the foundation, maintaining the original visual and formal relations and links between the works.
17. Gwen L. Allen
The Catalogue as an Exhibition Space in the 1960s and 1970s
The essay is part of the publication accompanying the exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013”, curated by Germano Celant in dialogue with Thomas Demand and Rem Koolhaas. Presented at Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2013, the project reconstructed “Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form”, the show curated by Harald Szeemann at the Bern Kunsthalle in 1969, which went down in history for the curator’s radical approach to exhibition practice. In a surprising remaking of the exhibition, the project restaged the show in the spaces of the 18th century palazzo Ca’ Corner della Regina, the Venice venue of the foundation, maintaining the original visual and formal relations and links between the works.
18. Julia Robinson
Multiple Manifestations: Nouveau Réalisme and Fluxus
The essay is part of the publication accompanying the exhibition “The Small Utopia”, organised by Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2012. The title of the show curated by Germano Celant was a reference to the dream of achieving the democratic dissemination of art through a multiplication of the work of art as object, in order to favor a different perception and use of it from the aesthetic and social standpoint. Covering a period of 75 years, from the beginning of the 20th century to 1975, the exhibition documented – with over six hundred works – an adventure in which all the principal artistic movements became caught up, from Italian Futurism to the Bauhaus, from Neoplasticism to Dada and Surrealism, from Nouveau Réalisme to Op Art and Fluxus, culminating in the explosion in multiplication triggered by Pop Art, promoter of a genuine ‘supermarket’ of the art object.
19. Beatriz Colomina
Little Magazines: Small Utopia
The essay is part of the publication accompanying the exhibition “The Small Utopia”, organised by Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2012. The title of the show curated by Germano Celant was a reference to the dream of achieving the democratic dissemination of art through a multiplication of the work of art as object, in order to favor a different perception and use of it from the aesthetic and social standpoint.
Covering a period of 75 years, from the beginning of the 20th century to 1975, the exhibition documented – with over six hundred works – an adventure in which all the principal artistic movements became caught up, from Italian Futurism to the Bauhaus, from Neoplasticism to Dada and Surrealism, from Nouveau Réalisme to Op Art and Fluxus, culminating in the explosion in multiplication triggered by Pop Art, promoter of a genuine ‘supermarket’ of the art object.
20. Elena Filipovic
On Goshka Macuga’s Irrational Epistemology
The text is part of the volume that accompanied the exhibition “Goshka Macuga: “To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll”, organized by Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2016. The project was conceived and designed by Polish artist Goshka Macuga, whose artistic practice is often referred to as taking on the roles of an artist, curator, collector, researcher and exhibition designer. Macuga works across a variety of media including sculpture, installation, photography, architecture and design.
The show brought together reflections on seminal issues such as time, beginnings and endings, collapse and renewal. Observing humanity’s concern with the conclusion of mankind, Macuga posed a fundamental question: how important is it to address the question of “the end” in the context of contemporary art practice?
21. Jordi Costa
Screened desire. A journey through the Almodovarian labyrinth
The essay is part of the publication “Soggettiva Pedro Almodóvar”, number 25 of the Quaderni series, which accompanied the film programme with the same title organized in 2019. Beside a number of Spanish movies selected by Almodóvar among his favorites, the programme included 9 movies shot by Almodóvar between 1983 and 2004, and the feature film Dolor y Gloria, which competed for the Palme d’or at the 72nd Festival de Cannes.
22. Germano Celant
A virtual journey in reality
The essay is part of the publication “Carne Y Arena” (Flesh and sand), number 12 of the Quaderni series, published in 2017. Conceived by Alejandro González Iñárritu and included in the Official Selection of the 70th Festival de Cannes, the project was presented in its extensive full version at Fondazione Prada in Milan.
Based on true accounts, the superficial lines between subject and bystander were blurred and bound together, allowing individuals to walk in a vast space and thoroughly live a fragment of the refugees’ personal journeys.
23. Laurie Anderson
Some backgrounds on Dal Vivo
The text is part of the publication “Laurie Anderson: Dal Vivo”, which accompanied the exhibition with the same title curated by Germano Celant in 1998.
It was a meditation on time and on the image concretized through the telematic transportation of the body of the detainee Santino Stefanini from the San Vittore prison space in Milan to the Foundation: Anderson highlighted the nexus between incarceration and incarnation, as testified to by the living yet inaccessible figure of Stefanini.
24. Theaster Gates
The Black Image Corporation
The text is part of the publication “The Black Image Corporation,” number 21 of the Quaderni series, published in 2018, which was released together with a box containing more than 350 images. The publication accompanied the exhibition held at Osservatorio, Fondazione Prada’s venue in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, Milan.
The project explored the fundamental legacy of Johnson Publishing Company archives, which feature more than 4 million images and have contributed to shape the aesthetic and cultural languages of the contemporary African American identity. Founded by John Johnson in 1942, his eponymous publishing company created two landmark publications for black American audiences: the monthly magazine Ebony and its weekly sister outlet Jet, whose publication was respectively initiated in 1945 and in 1951. Ebony and Jet were committed to depicting the complex realities black Americans faced in postwar USA. The magazines quickly became two of the major platforms for the representation and discussion of black culture, covering a broad range of events and personalities from historic milestones such as the March on Washington in 1963 and the first African-American astronaut to sports icons and show business celebrities.
25. Jeffrey Schnapp
Promiscuous Adjacencies
The essay is part of the publication “Love Stories”, number 29 of the Quaderni series, published in 2020 on the occasion of Francesco Vezzoli’s project of the same name. Curated by Eva Fabbris and presented on Fondazione Prada Instagram account, “Love Stories” explored the emotional, psychological and sentimental status of a wide online community through social media language; it defied the ephemeral and instantaneous nature of Instagram transforming it into a virtual place of social investigation, artistic reflection and intellectual provocation.
26. Dieter Roelstraete
After, behind, in and through
The essay is part of the publication “Recto Verso“, number 4 of the Quaderni series, published in 2015. Conceived by the Fondazione Prada’s Thought Council, the project was displayed in the Milanese venue and presented artworks that consciously foreground the hidden, concealed or forgotten phenomenon of “the back.”
27. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
The world ends not with a bang, but with a Whimper
The essay is part of the publication accompanying the exhibition “TV 70: Francesco Vezzoli guarda la Rai”. Presented at Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2017 in collaboration with Rai, Italy’s national broadcasting company, the project is a personal interpretation of the television production in the 1970s in the form of an intense visual journey. The Italian public TV is considered by Vezzoli as a driving force for cultural, social and political change in a country in transition from the radicalness of the 1960s to the hedonism of the 1980s. In particular, the project analyzed the relationships between media production, women’s emancipation, art, politics and entertainment.
28. Holly Rogers
Twisted Synaesthesia
The essay is part of the publication accompanying the exhibition “Art or Sound”, curated by Germano Celant. Presented at Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2014, the project explored the relationship between art and sound and the way it has developed from the 16th century to the present day. “Art or Sound” examined the iconic aspects of musical instruments, the role of the artist-musician, and the areas in which the visual arts and music have intermixed.
29. Mario Perniola
The ecstasy of everyday existence
The essay is part of the publication accompanying the exhibition “Tom Friedman”, a solo show curated by Germano Celant, presented in 2002 by Fondazione Prada in Milan.
By means of small actions of elementary formalization, the artist raised questions regarding the theme of the complexity and heterogeneity of objects, seeking unknown, secret parallels between them. Through a subtle process of mental and physical manipulation, in Friedman’s work spaghetti, hair, chewing-gum, pieces of paper, detergent, dust, toilet paper, bars of soap, and colored construction paper were transformed into new objects characterized by an anti-heroic attitude and, at the same time, by astonishing formal perfection.
30. Hanna Magauer
Get off the grid and stop/start painting
The essay is part of the publication accompanying the exhibition “Stop Painting”, a project curated by artist Peter Fischli, presented by Fondazione Prada in Venice, at Ca’ Cornèr della Regina. The exhibition narrates a series of specific ruptures within the history of painting in the last 150 years, intertwined with new conditions in society: each of them provoked a renewal in painting.
With these storylines, Fischli guides us throughout the kaleidoscope of the manifold problematizations of painting as a medium and an institution.