Serretta
Percorsa vuol sentirsi la mia isola
A book made entirely through an artisanal papermaking process, starting with plants and vegetable fibres collected on the island of Alicudi. The project takes the form of an eight-page leporello, open horizontally on a plane, with at the beginning and at the end two stones to support the inside.
As for the body of the book, each sheet is produced with a different native plant, representative of the various levels of the island: starting from the sea, with seaweed, and progressively moving up the mountain, passing through prickly pears, capers, carobs, olives, strawberry trees, borage, heather, vines, ferns, etc., restoring a material asceticism as we cross the landscape page after page, step after step.
The choice of leporello reflects the physical movement of crossing the island, where each page becomes a fragment of landscape, a botanical and material trace to be read as a stage in a journey. In inhabiting the island like a diffuse library, the landscape becomes a book that unfolds in space just as the body moves in the environment: it is a physical, fragmentary, stratified reading. A slow, material gesture that expands the idea of publication, until it coincides with the very act of walking, collecting, observing.
In this sense, the library is no longer a closed, centralised place, but a fluid organism, in which knowledge does not lie on shelves, but on a fertile ground.
Giulia Paradell is a designer and librarian whose research explores publishing as an artistic and collective practice. Her work focuses on the book as a cultural, material and social object, experimenting with alternative publishing forms and practices that intertwine with gesture, body and landscape.
Through a gradual process of dematerialisation, her practice has led her to the manufacture of handmade paper as the primary element of creation - conceiving the book not only as a support for a content, but as a living material, shaped by landscape and time.
She is co-founder of Urbild Editions, an independent publishing house that explores the relationship between visual and sound practices, and of Isola Futura, a platform dedicated to the preservation of contemporary and traditional practices related to insularity.