Kerning 2015, workshop, Studio Battaglia, The artist’s book

At the beginning of the last Century polyhedric artists were used to visualize simple thoughts or sensations combining etching and letterpress and giving them the shape of a little book. Faenza was one of the most productive centers for artist books all over Europe because of its many pottery decorators, engravers and print makers.

You will have quick but really fully immersive experience in etching and letterpress, learning different techniques and procedures in order to make some copies of your own handmade book.

Enrico Versari and Alberto Zannoni will follow you step by step helping you to: develop your ideas from drawings into an engraved copper plate; transmute it in a printing plate thanks to an acid bath in aqua fortis – the term used by ancient alchemists to define the active ingredient able to govern the transformative process of the substance; reproduce it in series using a printing press by hands.

Then Damiano Bandini will help you to compose properly your text (140-character limit, just like a twit) using original Art Nouveau or Futurism woodcut block-prints made by local artists and Italian lead-types of the 40s, 50s and 60s.

This is a rare opportunity to see a printmaker using an old and noisy Heidelberg Platina or a really loud Nebiolo printing press; to smell the inky air of the same poky workshop, La Vecchia Stamperia, where that machine has been operating since 1920, providing the first town newspaper.