les cerises presents its third book New York City Babe by Antonio Rovaldi. les cerises is a publishing project of silent books by Angelika Burtscher, Agnese and Cecilia Canziani and Daniele Lupo. New York City Babe is a child’s height walk through the streets of New York, with music in the mind. It’s composed of a series of black and white photographs documenting all the things you can’t miss in town, such as squirrels, forks, footprints, graffiti, leaves and even bat umbrellas. Lupo Burtscher is responsible for the book design.
New York City Babe was made while the artist was developing a project on the outskirts of New York’s five boroughs and is similarly based on the practice of location, photographic documentation and editing as a narrative form, differing only by the point of view and spatial extension of the research. A pair of shoes in front of a wall, a wall drawing of a pair of legs, the feet of a passerby, a footprint on the sidewalk, a jacket on a wall, a stick, are the traces of a character that moves in the space of a few streets, caught by a gaze that transforms a neighbourhood into a scenario of all things wonderful and wonderous.
Antonio Rovaldi’s (*1975, an Italian artist based in Milan and New York) research focuses on the perception of landscape and distance through walking. Rovaldi works mainly with photography, video, sculpture, and drawing.
les cerises
les cerises is a publishing project of silent books commissioned to artists, designers, architects, who are invited to make a children’s book for the first time. The books are published as limited editions. Form, material and size are each time discussed with the author, so that they can be interpreted and narrated by children themselves – and by adults, too. The reader is asked to add their own words to the visual stories, thus making them every time different, ever-changing, new, and multilingual.
