Born out of a reflection on the nature of images and their nocturnal vocation, Better in the Dark than His Rider is both a fable and a survival guide. The collected work by Francesco Merlini spans different years, possibly quite distant from one other; shot in all four continents, his pictures reveal the unique perspective of someone who, like a sleepwalker guided by ghosts, seeks for something nameless. The title is drawn, almost literally, from a 19th century manual of optics. The original sentence – “[…] much better in the dark than his rider” – refers to a horse’s night vision compared to a human’s.
The selected sequence of pictures unravels around the transitional stage between wakefulness and sleep, engaging with hypnagogia as a sensory yet dreamlike mode of semiconscious representation. Images make up mind’s psychic contents. If in dreams self-consciousness is suspended and images look real to the extent that we are sleeping, when dozing we can consciously guide them because partially aware that we are dreaming. Stated otherwise, in lucid dreams we know we are faced with the contents of our imagination, whose edges appear hallucinatory. Dreaming is a perpetual state we do experience both asleep and awake. Thanks to imagination, the dream matter turns into the mind’s real object again.

23,5×31 cm
Hard cover with embossing
Offset UV
80 pages
Paper:
Munken Lynx Rough 150 g/m²
Fedrigoni Sirio Nero 140 g/m²
Wibalin Natural Petal

L’Écureuil de James - Alice Brière-Haquet, Liuna Virardi
People Painting - Fabienne Radi
Avec ce qu'il resterait à dire - Anne Maurel
Strates & Archipels - Pierre Merle
il y avait une ville - Laeticia L'Heureux
Saveurs imprévues et secrètes - Gilbert Lascault
Tchat - Gary Colin
Critique & création - L.L. de Mars
Papier magazine n°06 - Coupe du monde
Promenade au pays de l'écriture - Armando Petrucci
Farandole - Jérémie Fischer
Marcel Proust en cinq minutes — Jackson B. Smith
Cruiser l'utopie – L'après et ailleurs de l'advenir queer - José Esteban Muñoz
Illusive prosody - Alex Beaurain
Dédale - Laurent Chardon
Heads Together – Weed and the Underground Press Syndicate - David Jacob Kramer
Pour une esthétique de l'émancipation - Isabelle Alfonsi
Bacon le Cannibale - Perrine Le Querrec
Photographic Fields - Joël Van Audenhaege
La Grande révolution - Une histoire de l'architecture féministe - Dolores Hayden
Dessins pour Rugir - Virginie Rochetti
La chasse Galerine - Jéréméy Piningre & Aëla Maï Cabel
Modern Instances, The Craft of Photography - Stephen Shore
Platteland - Simon Vansteenwinckel
Critique d'art n°56
Sights - Henry McCausland
Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms - Katy Deepwell (ed.)
Comment quitter la terre ? - Jill Gasparina, Christophe Kihm, Anne-Lyse Renon
Flynn zine # 1 - Flynn Maria Bergmann
Un peu comme voir dans la nuit - Leif Elggren + CD
Mökki n°2
Keywording (Post) Contemporary Art - Greta Rusttt
MENU メニュー - Wataru Tominaga
Goodbye - Hsia-Fei Chang, Sofia Eliza Bouratsis, Medhi Brit, Enrico Lunghi
Shanghai Cosmetic - Leslie Moquin 































