Festival Art Souterrain

Since its creation in 2013, bruno—the pseudonym of Andrea Codolo and Giacomo Covacich—has become a central player in the world of graphic design and publishing. Based in Venice, the project combines a graphic design studio, a bookstore and, since 2014, a publishing house that releases artists’ books, critical essays and exhibition catalogues. Over the past ten years, the editorial activity has become a central pillar of their work, making publishing a veritable experimental laboratory where graphic design and reflection feed off each other.

Designed and Published by is an exhibition that presents bruno’s publishing career through more than seventy works. The exhibition opens on 13 March 2025 at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Montréal, as part of the 2025 edition of the Festival Art Souterrain, taking on this year the theme of habitat.

As curator Eric Millette points out about this exhibition dedicated to bruno publishing house, “the notion of habitat is not limited to walls or physical characteristics, it also extends to the psyche and the immaterial.”

Over seventy books exhibited at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Montréal reveal different ways of inhabiting the page, outlines a path in which publishing and graphic design constantly interact and influence each other.

Taking its inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in which the writer evokes the concept of genius loci (spirit of place) to refer to the intangible essence that can reside in a space and give it a unique identity, the exhibition explores the idea that habitat can be found in abstract, symbolic and imaginary spaces. The habitat unfolds like a narrative territory where the free spaces of the layout become a zone of appropriation, interpretation and expression.

The exhibition invites visitors to “inhabit” the pages of the publishing house’s inspiring works. It will remain open to the public until May 23, 2025. It will be an opportunity to discover, visually and thematically, the diversity of projects that have shaped Bruno’s unique and original identity.

The Italian Institute of Culture in Montreal (cultural section of the Italian Consulate General in Montreal), an official body of the Italian government, has as its aim the promotion of Italian language and culture in Quebec through the organisation of cultural events fostering the diffusion of ideas in the arts and sciences.