Battles Vol.1 (Forthcoming in 2021)
Published by: Book Works; Commission: Co-Series; Edition: 1,000 copies; Designer: Santiago da Silva
Pedraglio’s second book with Book Works, takes battles as story-telling frame to focus on the small details and absurdities that characterise almost all of historical events and that end up changing the course of their action. Mixing into the historical stories, are personal accounts, trivial idiosyncratic events that become elevated to the same status as those that effect history.
Each story comes with a drawing, a ‘potential stage’ for re-enacting the battle. Each story, could be read as a script for a performance. Each performance could restage a battle, or simply a moment of everyday life that takes on in that moment the significance of a battle.
SPOKEN SCULPTURES (Notebook #1), 2018
Published by: Juan de la Cosa/John of the Thing; Design: Carla Valdivia Nakatani; Edition: 500 copies; Pages: 32
The Notebooks series gathers words, thoughts and narratives lying behind the making of an exhibition. For this booklet, Pedraglio publishes the scripts of 5 sculptures from his series Spoken Sculptures.
99 Battles and 1 war (an extract), 2016
Published by: Piano Nobile; Design: ; With a postface by Vincenzo Latronico Edition: 300 copies; Pages:
The book gathers ten of Pedraglio’s narrative poems paring them with 10 original woodcuts.
A man in a room spray-painting a fly… (or at least trying to…), 2014
Published by Book Works; Edition of: 1000; 352 pages; Black and white with four spot colour images; Designed by: James Langdon
Conceived as a carefully staged gathering of texts slowly composing a unique, layered narrative, the book develops around a main character presented, like literature, as a corpse to be reanimated ad absurdum. This main story is then interrupted, fragmented and diverted from by other tales, stage directions and possible ‘scenarios’ that operate as proposals for narrative changes.
The writing is woven together as a continuous interlocking prose. It utilises the mechanics of storytelling to reflect upon the relation between the perception of objects and the abstract working of our subjectivities as readers or writers.
Moving between and alluding to the different conditions of writing – whether film scripts, drama, letter writing, or mere notes for future projects – this is the first ‘novel’ by Francesco Pedraglio, presenting the possibility of a story within numerous other possible stories, and exploring the fault lines of communication between the text and the spoken performance.
