I often visit a hybrid place of culture and hospitality born from the creativity of a cultural manager and an environmental engineer – Superotium a few steps from the Archaeological State Museum of Naples. It is full of cultural seeds and hosts, all year round, artistic residences and experiences similar to its core business the owners scout throughout Italy and beyond.
Each time surprised once entering its cozy living room, last week I discovered a beautiful Florentine story, speaking English, that I wish to share with you.
It is an ideal that becomes an address (via dei Vagellai 18r Florence), a bookstore dealing with the contemporaneity of the last 15 years that is both a 360° cultural platform and a gourmet place where you can meet and chat not only around a book or a festival but also to drink and eat.
It is called BRAC. In addition to visual art, it does include all today languages: theater, architecture, photography, illustration and comics … It is also possible to just consult the volumes.
At Superotium they presented a new book in Italian and English – BRAC (Books Recipes Artists Cooking) published by Italian Corraini – which is a unique and special recipe book: a long selection of vegetarian and vegan dishes illustrated by artists each with their creative ‘specialties’.
The Neapolitan duo Bianco-Valente is a couple in life and work dedicating themselves above all to public art and community-based projects: three new works all born from projects conducted with citizens will be inaugurated on September 20 in important public places in Ercolano, including the Greek-Roman Excavations and the MAV museum.
The duo was given a sauce – nostalgia for the sea – illustrated with two ladles drowning in the pot because, when cooking, they always taste together. And the act of eating is often – as they reported – the emotional and rational space where discussions can be defused, where diversity can be creatively elaborated (even if you are not an artist) and where the frame of quality time that flees can be stopped.
Simona Da Pozzo – Venezuelan artist, now Italian and especially Neapolitan by adoption – was gifted with seitan that awakened in her specific ancient memories of sharing homes and culinary cultures but also her daily battle to save scarce resources such as drinking water.
She illustrated the recipe with an unpublished work from 2015: an uncanny photograph with a lunar and concrete flavor that portrays a Piedmontese water source. Due to its specific and unique chemical-physical properties, it is used by astronauts: Da Pozzo chose it precisely to translate her emotional and cultural relationship with the particularly water-draining recipe.
Da Pozzo works on public space and the identity of specific communities with a plurality of media ranging from sculpture to photography to performance.
Bianco Valente and Da Pozzo as well as all the other 84 featured artists have worked several times with the Florentine space: BRAC (Books Recipes Artists Cooking) is a manifesto and not just a beautiful coffee table book to proudly show off to book-addicted friends.
And BRAC is not just a bookshop. It is the story, the essence of an artistic and life project, born in 2009. Around books – thanks to a fortunate law Tuscany Regional Government promulgated in 2005 that allowed cultural spaces such as bookshops, cinemas, theatres to offer assisted food and drink service over the 25% of available space.
The restaurant supports culture, also take-away is possible and spices are the protagonists together with exclusively seasonal ingredients.
Scripta festival dedicated to art explained in words (curated by Pietro Gaglianò) and many others follow one another within its walls, such as Feat dedicated to writing for singer-songwriters (with StudioNovecento composed by Giacomo Laser, who also illustrates one of the recipes in the book, and Luca Sorgato with the collaboration of Ilaria Maria d’Urbano) and S/P/Read.Tradurre Voci curated by Rosaria Lo Russo dedicated to poetic translation: at the stove Sacha Sandro Olmi (with the important collaboration of his 29-year-old son) and at the front office Melisa di Nardo.
In BRAC (Books Recipes Artists Cooking), Lo Russo is the author of an extraordinary biography of Sandro (we won’t spoil anything): all his globetrotting lives since birth have magically converged in the meeting with Melisa, who before creating BRAC collaborated with the Italian Ministry of Culture and, by trade, is a librarian.
BRAC was actually born as a ghost kitchen for a popular venue that after many wanderings (including philosophical and religious ones) Sandro created in Florence (called Pop Cafè) and then became what it is today, the first bookshop specializing in super contemporary arts with a café and a restaurant attached. In 2009 there were few spaces of this kind while nowadays you can start to spot them in various Italian cities.
I’ll fix the introductory question ‘your life in a few lines’ because it would be a real shame to spoil the three wonderful introductions that readers will find in BRAC (Books Recipes Artists Cooking).
I’m curious to ask you about your life around the books that succeeded to bring together a librarian and an artist chef. T
wo favorite books, from each other, maybe the ones you recommended when you first met?
There are so many, these are two straightaway:
Sacha: Piersig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974); Vyasa Deva’s Bhaghavad-gita
Melisa: Serena Vitale’s The Deceased Hated Gossip, Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere
BRAC is a forward-thinking cultural center that supports itself with signature cuisine (responsible, sustainable and healthy): would it have been born anyway without that regional law?
Who knows?
Would it have been born anyway in Florence?
Florence was our field of action. So yes.
Are you able to dialogue with similar spaces that have been created in the meantime or with the institutions naturally appointed to welcome your productions?
Yes. Even if it is not always a given. Florence is a rather competitive city and collaborations are not often easy, but possible.
Where it has been, we have inaugurated fruitful collaborations.
What kind of reader frequents BRAC given that in addition to the poetry shelf you do not have fiction, news and investigation?
Our users read everything, they often rely on our selections. We share tacit feelings and visions.
Is the population of readers the same as those who attend your events?
Not necessarily. Most of them, yes.
Average age?
It is difficult to say. Our visitors are certainly aware readers.
How much does inflation weigh on the quantity of books sold lately?
Very little. Fortunately, inflation has not taken root in curiosity. At least not yet.
You also participate in events for schools and academies to help with reading and in general what do you think?
We welcome different realities for different reasons. Where the projects submitted to us capture us, we embrace them to the point of supporting them financially, if necessary. In turn, compatibly with our commitments, we try to attend and support the activities that are promoted in other places of interest to us.
Through projects such as Patto per la Lettura etc, we build together paths, proposals, events to bring people as close as possible to books. We think they are above all good opportunities for meeting and comparing.
Where do you see yourselves in ten years?
Immersed in nature, in the countryside or at the seaside, listening.
One thing – or if you want many more – that you have learned from life so far
Sacha: I haven’t made a summary yet
Melisa: Life has offered me so many experiences and so many teachings so far.
I have learned to stay in things with all of myself, to the point of vertigo; to not betray my abilities and my limits, to run and dance in time possibly with a smile (I laugh very little and I love dancing).
Cover picture: Melisa and Sacha on a carpet, courtesy Groomingphoto