the book as a total object:
an interview with Pietro corraini

— transcript

Robin (Intro)
I’m really pleased this week to publish an interview with Pietro Corraini of Corraini Edizioni. Corraini recently opened the Spazio Munari in Milan, a gallery and bookstore dedicated to the work of acclaimed designer and artist Bruno Munari, whose essay on children’s books I shared in the last episode.

Corraini began as an art gallery and, in collaboration with Munari, began publishing his workshops, like Drawing a Tree and Roses in the Salad in 1973. Pietro connects these workshops, which Corraini sometimes still runs, to the gentle revolution in Italian education in the 1960s and 70s. Corraini also publishes Munari’s back catalogue and you can find many of his books, as well as books by other artists and designers at Corraini.com. I will link to Corraini’s web site as well as their fantastic podcast, “Play to Learn”, in the shownotes. I hope you enjoy this conversation about the book as a space and the book as a total object with Corraini which I found very cheering and inspiring. Special thanks to Benedetta Lelli from the press office of Corraini, who joined us

 _________

Robin 

First of all, thank you so much for finding the time to speak with us. I'm really excited. So you’re in Milan right now, right? But Corraini is in Mantua, in Mantova? 

Pietro Corraini (PC) 

We have two places. One is the historical one in Mantua. It’s just turned 50 years old. It is here and is where my parents work and it is, let's say 15 years that we have this office in Milano where we have a space — a shop — that now is dedicated to Bruno Munari and his work, doing a few exhibitions with the unseen and exciting works by Munari. 

Robin 

I'm excited to ask you about that. I see that Benedetta has come, so. So I'm going to admit Benedetta. 

Salve, Benedetta 

Benedetta Lelli (BL)

Ciao, Robin 

Robin 

We were just chatting a bit about your location, and you're both in Milan right now.  

PC 

Sì  

Robin 

So Corraini was founded in 1973 by Pietro's parents Marzia and Maurizio, and it sounds like you're still leading workshops and public design events for Corraini that are inspired by Munari, as well as other collaborative efforts. What does a workshop with you look like? 

PC 

Well, since they are inspired by Munari they don't look like one to the other. So they are completely different [laughs]. But we met Munari a long time ago. As a first project my parents asked him about an exhibition and then little by little the collaboration grew and it became... to start this idea to do books together and print old books that was out of print, and do workshops. So basically what we do today is almost the same. Now we start our collaboration with artists, with authors, with the people that have a view of the world and have something to express and to say. And with them we try to find the best way to share this view and to share their idea on the world. Sometimes it’s a book, sometimes there's an exhibition, sometimes there's a workshop. We do workshops all the time with kids, with adults, universities, so different kinds of public. Different kind of target, but let me say that like we usually do the same workshop for children and for adults, so as as Munari was always saying, the difficult part is to be simple and to be easy without being too... to simplify too much, you know? Don't get rid of the complexity, but trying to way to make the things easy to understand. That's what we do. Our workshops usually are really messy with much freedom, but with the really strict rules. So it's a mixture of freedom and organization. So these revolve around the idea of having an idea and share the idea and the instrument and be as clean as it gets, but then give complete freedom to the people doing the work, because at the end it’s about giving the freedom to the people. All the Munari books and all the Munari works at the end is like starting to show you the world from a different perspective, no? Show you the world from a different point of view and to grow your own point of view, to build your own point of view and to be free to have your own point of view. 

Robin 

Yeah, the idea of following a simple rule seems to be a key to the workshop series. Like the Drawing a Tree where the simple rule is just simply that every subsequent piece is smaller than the one before. 

PC 

Si. One of the things that he was doing was — in Drawing a Tree — that to me is interesting for what you are saying, is that in a few of the huge happenings that he was doing inside the city, he asked people to build this huge tree and then at the end of the workshop they had to destroy the work because they don't have to care about the final composition, but they have to bring home the idea and the process. 

Robin 

Yeah, you know, I've run the tree workshop with a couple of classes of adult students working at that scale was really fun. So one of the reasons I was interested in speaking with you is the relationship that you're establishing between published books and dedicated spaces to hold those books. In the spring, I found that you created a library and bookshop for the Salone del Mobile, the Milan furniture fair, which was called Corraini Mobile. So for that project you were drawing connections between industrial design, publishing and light, which was the theme for that. And then just last month, you opened a new space for Munari's books: the Spazio Munari. So what is Corraini's interest in curating spaces for books? 

PC 

The company started as an art gallery, so artists like Munari and Somari, Pistoletto and others that were in between art, design, but it is not really easy to put an etichetta [label] on them, and it's not easy to catalogue these artists and put it in a shelf. So, Munari we put it between the designers, no? But we can put it also between the artists, also between the people doing didactics, and also in the bookstores where we sell our books. At the end, they finish having a Corraini space where they put all together because they don't fit in any other place. But to us the idea started a few years ago in this space in Milano. And we started to think about the bookshop, not just the library, the bookshop, as a curated space, as curated content. So we did a first exhibition with a group of three younger — well, then young, now, not too much [laughs] — Yeah, yeah, ah, architects, and it's called Parasite 2.0, and with it a bookstore that was called Desert Island, Books from the Wilderness. They put the idea of rebuilding contemporary world and modernity starting from scratch. So they designed the space that was a really interactive space where you can go in, move the furniture, break things, and reset everything. And they also choose the books that were inside the bookstore. So for us, the idea is that when you go in a bookstore, it's not like buying a book online or other places that don't have personality, let's say.

When you go in a bookstore, you kind of bring back the bookstore with you when you take the book. The same book that you buy in two different bookstores, for you, are not the same book, because the relationship between you and the book is different. And so also at the Salone del Mobile, we decided to make a project like that to make a selection of books. Also the space was designed by two architects called Formafantasma that designed the space with a new spirit that was not just a bookstore inside a fair, but was a space to read the book; was more looking more like a library than a bookstore, that built a new relationship with the people coming inside, buying the book, bringing the book home, having more time to look at the book and deciding if they wanted to buy there, or even not to buy anything. If an artist can be the author of a space when they do an installation, we brought this idea inside the book with Munari and other artists, that in a way they are the author of the complete book. They decide which paper to use, which size the book had to be. So, the book becomes a space and then we brought back the idea of being able to be author, not just of the book, but also of the bookstore. 

Robin 

You make such a good point that the book itself is also a space, it's an unfolding space, and you mentioned the difficulty of applying a label to Munari, and that's something that I've seen come up a lot in curatorial notes about Munari, that it's difficult to place him exactly in a classification. It’s more about his total output and Corraini represents perhaps that work that he did in the 70s. I was listening to the Play to Learn podcast that you put out, which is fantastic, and you curated episode 5 of that, which was really focused on his work with Gianni Rodari. What was it about that particular part of Munari's history that spoke to you? 

PC 

For starters, it was the one that I knew the least about, so I decided to study that. To have an excuse to study that. And we wrote the podcast with Benedetta [Lelli] — she's the creator of all the podcasts that that we do and. And that one for us was was really fun to do and also to discover new parallels in, in the world of design and world of education during the 70s. I think the collaboration between Rodari and Munari is the highest point of these two worlds colliding without knowing each other because really, many of the people doing this gentle revolution in education didn't know anything about design and many of the people doing the same in the design department didn't know a lot then about education. And the collaboration between Munari and Rodari is interesting because they were, in a way, the opposite of what was the common sense of what should be done for children at that moment. Rodari was writing nonsense histories, word jokes, working on grammatics, and making a revolution around the idea that fairy tales should be about imagination. He brought common people inside this idea of fairy tales. So...most of the time, the protagonists of Rodari’s story were the driver of the bus, the people coming back from the factory, or people inside the house, not princes and not a wolf or not the common ground of kids’  history. Also the stories didn't have a real clear meaning. They were a starting point for starting the imagination to look at the world in a different way. 

And to me, Munari is the same, so Munari is an open door to the imagination. Also the illustrations that he did for Rodari are sketches, road signs on paper are like a starting point for starting your own imagination. Starting maybe to draw on the book! So nothing was closed, nothing was teaching something, nothing was— or or at least directly teaching something. What is right? What is wrong? — And there is not a real moral in the story but is: give power to the children, give power to the people reading the book and give them complete freedom. They were really loved when they came out with the books. 

Robin 

At the very end of that podcast, you had a really beautiful summary where you talked about the relationship between them being based in experimentation and the idea of writing as being part of a toy-making process, or scribbling as being rooted in, uh, sort of like a visual representation of the process of designing and inventing. Sort of demystifying that process and making it open. And I'm interested in what you're saying about returning fairy tales to be about everyday people. Because my understanding is that fairy tales are very often grounded in folk tales, which were tales for everyday people that people shared orally, and that women entered into the publishing sphere, especially in Victorian England, that it became a little bit rigid. And I think he, he gets at that in his essay on “Children's Books” where he says it's fine, go ahead and have a story about a Prince, but it's not really going to mean very much to a child who— that's not their direct experience of the world. So he's, he seems to me, he's trying to focus people on the incredible qualities of the world around them. It's about provoking observation. Does that sound accurate to you? 

PC 

To me it sounds really accurate.  

Robin 

[Laughs] I can't say enough how much I really love that podcast, but the very ending of it was also— it just felt very magical and approachable. It was incredible. 

PC 

That was because Benedetta is good at it. 

Robin 

I'm really impressed. Are you going to do more? Are you going to do any more podcasts?  

PC 

We always try to do some more podcasts. We did a few, but completely different. Again, before we did one about a magazine was made in the 70s by Michele Provinciali that is called Imago, but that one is in German. 

Robin 

I noticed a lot of the podcasts about Munari, they're either in Italian or Spanish, so my hope is to add an an English one that I can direct my students towards. 

PC 

We're working on that. 

Robin 

Another one? 

PC  

Sì  

Robin 

I'm excited.  

OK, so I have two more questions. So some of the books you published are complex to print. They're playing with their material form or even playing with dematerializing the book as an object. Maybe using transparent papers like Nella nebbia di Milano, which in English is Circus in the Mist. I read a quote from your mother Marzia who said, “We are beloved and hated by printers.” [laughs] So are advances in printing technology making some of your more experimental projects easier to produce? What is production looking like these days? 

PC 

Ah, that is a complicated subject. I don't know how to answer this one because there are two different answers to this. Yes, new technology makes our books and some of the Munari books easier to print. But no, modern distribution, and systems and economy makes them harder to produce. 

Robin 

That sounds about right. It's like technology brings new potentials and removes them at the same time. Is that— 

PC 

Sì, I would say that, for example, the one that you are saying, Nella notte buia, that is In the Darkness of the Night in English, that is printed on three different papers, is easier because when Munari did it, it should be silkscreen printed and with two colors. Before you had to print the white, then you have to print on top other colors to print on the black paper. Nowadays there are colors that you can print, and be just printed on the black paper. That is easier. But the production system of books makes it harder to find someone that wants to do it: Have the knowledge to do it and have the patience to do it. 

Robin 

[Laughs] knowledge and patience are definitely requirements for book-making.  

I wanted to ask you, is it accurate to think of Corraini’s approach to Munari's books as publishing total objects? Is that still the appropriate way to think about them. 

PC 

Sì, well, say, that not just the Munari books. There are other books in our catalog that fit the definition and Paul Cox books, like in Intanto or other books by Suzy Lee , like Mirror. Most of books that are in our catalog are total objects. Most of the authors have total control over the process. So the object itself is a project. Also the binding is useful to tell a story sometimes, like in a Paul Cox book. So there is a total object. Well, it's a total book because you cannot use it to sit around, but it's a total something, yes. 

Robin 

I really want to thank you for your thoughtful answers and for the amazing work that you're doing. I really want to come visit the Spazio Munari very badly, and I've been practicing my Italian. But I haven't lived in Milan since the 90s, so... 

PC 

But Italian hasn't changed! 

Robin 

[laughs] I have to work harder, but voglio venire, voglio venire. 

PC 

Noi siamo qua 

BL

Grazie mille, Robin, fantastico 

Robin  

Grazie, grazie millie, ciao ciao! 

PC 

Grazie. Ciao ciao ciao 

Benedetto  

Buon Lavoro!