This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Society, you’re a crazy breed by Botto&Bruno held at Fondazione Merz from 9th March to 19th June 2016. “The exhibition in the spaces of the Fondazione Merz is the new stage of an artistic journey that starts as always with the history of the place, drawing the infinite possibilities enclosed in it. It is a place subjected to radical changes that time and man have impressed on it either deliberately or through neglect, but which continues to be a container of life and energy. Within this context, the reading of the new world brings with it a thousand fragments of various objects, both recognisable and unrecognisable, which daily appear before our eyes like the ruins of a past that appears to us all the more a lost eden the more time passes. The photographs pervade the exhibition space to the point of creating a new dimension, like a city of the future in which the remains of a civilisation mingle with the present, defining new possibilities of life.

Starting from their own experience, Botto&Bruno have for years been bringing into play a personal vision of change, revealing the signs of a transformation that is already under way. Thousands of images collected everywhere, with almost nothing to differentiate between one place and another; coloured and deformed plastic, cement debris, rusty wrought iron, the parched earth that manages to gather nourishment even in these abandoned spaces and shows its strength through the flowering of native plants, the sort that are sometimes hard to cultivate.

Botto&Bruno have produced an accurate sounding, a powerful lens open and responsive to every detail, as though with a wish to give back to these abandoned objects, these violated places the dignity impressed on them when they were born”. (Maria Centonze)

This book reproduces the photographic documentation of the exhibition and it is enriched by texts by Beatrice Merz and Maria Centonze.