The book, published on the occasion of Simon Starling’s exhibition The Inaccessible Poem at Fondazione Merz from 29 October 2011 to 15 January 2012, goes beyond the concept of a catalogue to become a sort of notebook, a place of relations between distant spheres and other, perhaps inaccessible, ones.

In the exhibition event in which the British artist took on the role of curator, Starling established a dialogue between the subjects that make up the exhibition, in perfect coherence with what he theorises, namely the need to create “constellations of ideas and to fix them in a reciprocal orbit”. There were therefore no works by just one artist, but a collection of works from totally different experiences, whose relationship lies precisely in the empirical way of approaching science and knowledge, of suggesting poetic deviations or ironic digressions: unaltered visions of a world that continues to show intelligence and offer perspectives. The exhibition project he conceived combined some of his works with works by Mario Merz, Sture Johannesson, James Nasmyth and James Carpenter, Faivovich & Goldberg. Simon Starling conceived the exhibition composition at the Fondazione Merz as an encounter between artists who seem very distant from each other in terms of origin and generation. And they really are. However, it is precisely this distance that appears to be the most uniting element. The relationship between all the subjects that made up the exhibition brings us back to what Starling defines as “orchestrated collisions”: a galaxy in which strange alchemies can take place, where different souls live and, through their own peculiarities, design new ways of operating the system of scientific knowledge or technological experimentation. Starling is critical of technology, encouraging a dismantling of its very rules that leads to a sort of shift with almost poetic overtones. From this point of view, there were many points of contact with the works of the artists in the exhibition, in particular with Mario Merz, with whom he shares not only this aspect but also the continuous desire for nomadism. The book is accompanied by texts by Maria Centonze, Guillermo Faivovich, Nicolas Goldberg, Jacob Lillemose, Hernan Pruden and Simon Starling with works by Faivovich & Goldberg, Sture Johannesson, Mario Merz, James Nasmyth, James Carpenter and Simon Starling.