Alessandro Di Pietro: Ghostwriting Paul Thek

Mousse Publishing, 2024, softcover, 232 pages, 12.7 x 19.1 cm

Alessandro Di Pietro: Ghostwriting Paul Thek, edited by Cornelia Mattiacci and Peter Benson Miller, is conceived as a compendium of texts and notes generated for the artist Alessandro Di Pietro as he developed the exhibition project Ghostwriting Paul Thek: Time Capsules and Reliquaries. 

The traveling exhibition - which appeared at the Watermill Center, New York; CAN Centre d’Art Neuchâtel, Switzerland; Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy; and Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome - presented pieces conceived in dialogue with the work of the legendary US artist Paul Thek (1933–1988).

The texts, notes, and other original sources featured in the volume - ranging from essays to WhatsApp messages, diary entries, and newspaper pages - are presented in the languages in which they were contributed by the twenty-five authors involved (English or Italian). They re-create the intellectual context for the development of Thek’s/Di Pietro’s intertwined ideas, blurring fact and fiction and maintaining a certain ambiguity of authorship.

The publication’s sole reprint comes from Chris Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia (2000). The exhibition/publication project was the winner of the eleventh edition of the Italian Council (2022) call for proposals issued by the General Directorate for Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.