Author Gianluigi Ricuperati collaborates with the celebrated illustrator to create a call and response conjoining literary history and potato prints
Author, curator and educator Gianluigi Ricuperati is a passionate advocate of multidisciplinary discourse. As the director of Domus Academy, an Italian design institution dedicated to creative scholarship, he hosts a biannual salon which leads conversations between some of the most innovative minds working in contemporary culture – from the Serpentine Gallery’s Hans Ulrich Obrist to design critic Alice Rawsthorn – and his network is duly flourishing with creative collaboration.
For his most recent project, Ricuperati has teamed up with Leanne Shapton, the Brooklyn-based artist and illustrator behind works from the 2012-published and utterly captivating Swimming Studies, to lengthy and luscious tome Women in Clothes, to envision a new series of images. Reflecting on Shapton’s ever-evolving oeuvre, Ricuperati offered a selection of quotations linked either in subject matter or in atmosphere to her previous works – Shapton’s series Native Trees of Canada, for example, called to his mind a line from German novelist Herta Müller’s My Homeland was an Appleseed – from which, in turn, Shapton created a beautifully evocative print out of a potato carving. The resulting collaboration functions something like an illustrated questionnaire, through which each artist responds to the other via their own preferred medium, be that literature or painting. Here we present the series, created especially for AnOther, pairing poignant lines with powerfully simple paintings.

Native Trees of Canada
"I was often alone in the countryside, and observing things helped me a lot. I had to be all day long in the valley, and each day was endlessly long. What else could I do?" – Herta Muller, My Homeland was an Appleseed

Fake Book Covers
"But did Archimboldi really soliloquize to himself? the baroness wondered as she turned down Calle Ghetto Vecchio, or was he addressing some else? And if so, who was that other person? A dead man? A German demon? [...] A monster that lived in the cellars of her house?" – Roberto Bolano, 2666

Swimming Studies
"He's amazed by the intermittent spring of these birthplace whose depth rises and falls at regular intervals throughout the day he tries to analyze the cause. Is it due to some hidden valve, some current of air that opens and closes the outlets of the spring ? Is it ebb and flow, like the sea, subject to the mysterious influence of some tide?" – Charles Sprawson, Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero

Important Artifacts
"Another commonly expressed sentiment is: 'We (or I) hope you are feeling well/will feel better soon/will get well soon/how are you feeling?'" – Lydia Davis, We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters From a Class of Fourth-Graders

Was She Pretty?
"Listen, I got this truly beautiful story", the man who cuts my hair says to me. 'Think about some new Dominique-Sanda-type unknown. Comprenez so far?" – Joan Didion, In Hollywood

Women in Clothes
"Will what I have written survive beyond the grave? Will there be anyone able to comprehend it in a world the very foundations of which are changes?" – W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn