SB (soglia buio)

SB (soglia buio) is the editorial outcome of the Out of Focus workshop conducted during the Divago Festival 2024 residency in Genoa. Published by DITO Publishing, the volume was presented as part of the festival’s transient bookstore. The project translates the experiential and philosophical inquiries of the workshop into a tangible, material form, exploring the duality of threshold and darkness, concepts central to the research started with Nigredo and further developed during Out of Focus.

The design of SB (soglia buio) embodies this duality through the careful modulation of two interdependent elements: two conceptual frameworks, two paper types, two sheet dimensions, and two printing techniques. Photographs captured during the workshop form the visual core of the book, documenting the participants’ nocturnal traversals through Via del Campo and the former Jewish ghetto. In addition to images, the pages incorporate words generated collectively during the workshop: participants reflected on their personal definitions of “threshold” and “darkness,” contributing a set of terms that appear unconnected at first glance. Within the context of the book, these words interact with each other and with the images, stimulating new associations and opening up possibilities for concepts yet to be explored. The material was later edited and printed in indigo and risograph in collaboration with Troppa Trama, a Genoa-based graphic studio and collective supporting grassroots social and cultural projects.

SB (soglia buio) maintains a direct conceptual link to the installation at the deconsecrated church of San Marcellino, realized during Divago Festival from 26 to 29 September 2024. Just as the installation transformed the sacred interior into a nocturnal, fog-laden environment punctuated by faint light, soundscapes, and tactile engagement, the book immerses the reader in a similarly liminal space. The printed images evoke the blurred streets, the subtle peripheral visions, and the auditory traces that structured the workshop experience, inviting readers to inhabit, interpret, and navigate thresholds of perception at their own pace.

The publication acts as a bridge between ephemeral performative gestures and enduring material presence, offering a space in which darkness, threshold, and subjectivity coalesce. By foregrounding the relationship between the human body, spatial perception, and collective exploration, SB (soglia buio) transforms the workshop’s intimate, nocturnal experience into a reflective encounter, extending its philosophical, ecological, and aesthetic concerns into the realm of print. The book invites engagement, experimentation, and reinterpretation, perpetuating the dialogue between action, trace, and environment initiated in the Out of Focus workshop and continued within the immersive installation of San Marcellino.