In 2023 the ADI Design Museum in Milan commissioned Benedetta Casagrande to make an homage to Anty Pansera, the Italian writer and design historian. The resulting series, Paperworks, comes out of work in the studio and darkroom with the raw materials of writing and of design: paper and the sign. A small set of paper cut-outs is recombined and reconfigured from frame to frame, while punctuation marks—full stops, commas, semicolons, the letter “A”—and silhouettes of the artist’s body meet and interact on the photographic surface. The reconfiguration is the method: each plate restages the same vocabulary of shapes, so that meaning is arrived at through repetition and slight displacement rather than through a single decisive image.
Nazraeli Press issues the work as One Picture Book Two #47. The hardcover volume runs to 20 pages and carries six duotone plates, together with an original photograph signed by Casagrande; the edition is limited to 500 numbered copies. The duotone printing holds the contrast between cut paper, shadow and skin, and the brevity of the sequence keeps the reading pace exact. The signed photograph accompanies the book rather than simply reproducing it, extending the series’ paper-and-sign logic into the object the reader holds.
Casagrande, born in Milan in 1993, works as an artist, writer, curator and educator. Her practice has been described through Carolyn F. Strauss’s notion of slow research—slowness as a principle of observation and constant repositioning—an attempt to place human experience within wider webs of relations, time and space. Her first photobook, All Things Laid Dormant (Skinnerboox, 2024), was shortlisted for the Arles Authors Book Award and the Singapore International Photography Festival Book Award, and in 2024 she received the Luigi Ghirri Prize. Paperworks brings that attentiveness to a smaller, more concentrated form.
For a collector, the interest lies in the convergence of a museum commission, a tightly argued conceptual programme and a book conceived as a signed multiple. The numbered limitation and the accompanying photograph give the edition a place within Casagrande’s developing practice, while the six plates remain the core of the work: a compact demonstration of how paper, punctuation and the body can be made to speak to one another.
