About this Event
In addition to taking place in-person at RU, this program will be streamed online via Zoom at .
As part of RU’s series, we invite you to a presentation by RU resident curator .
“What Good Are Roots If You Can’t Take Them with You” brings together Palermo’s publishing practice and her recent research conducted at the American Academy in Rome as the 2026 Fondazione Sicilia Affiliated Artist. With Palermo Publishing as a starting point, the independent press she founded in 2022, Michela Palermo considers the book not simply as a container for images, but as a space where images, texts, gestures, and relationships encounter one another. Editing, sequencing, graphic design, reproduction, and circulation become part of a broader curatorial practice and a way of thinking through images.
During her fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, Palermo worked with artists’ books, independent publications, and archival materials from the Donata Pizzi Collection, dedicated to the work of Italian women photographers from the 1960s onwards.
Her research focused particularly on publications produced during the 1970s, a decade that marked a profound political, social, and cultural fault line in Italy. The expansion of feminist movements unfolded alongside struggles around divorce, reproductive rights, sexuality, labor, anti-authoritarian politics, and new forms of collective life, radically questioning established structures of family, gender, language, and representation.
Within this context, photography and publishing became important sites of experimentation: spaces in which personal experience could acquire political meaning, dominant visual codes could be contested, and alternative forms of subjectivity and collective expression could circulate beyond conventional institutional frameworks.
Palermo approached these publications not only as historical documents but as living editorial structures, examining their formats, bindings, sequences, margins, graphic choices, and modes of circulation. Central to her research was an attention to their indexical character: the material and historical traces that connect each publication to the specific conditions of its production, circulation, and authorship. Rather than subsuming individual works within fixed categories or imposing a new interpretive framework upon them, she traced a series of provisional and shifting constellations—language and gesture, feminist subjectivity, counter-archives, marginalized communities, and social bodies—within which works could be temporarily situated, compared, and brought into relation, while preserving the specificity of each artist’s position, voice, and authorship.
This presentation will move from a projected talk into an informal encounter with research materials displayed throughout the RU space, alongside publications from Palermo Publishing’s catalog available for viewers to browse and discuss. Borrowing its title from Gertrude Stein, “What Good Are Roots If You Can’t Take Them with You” asks how publishing might carry histories, images, and relationships across different places and times—allowing them to circulate and be reactivated without severing them from the conditions and contexts from which they emerged.
About:
is a photographer, visual researcher, book designer, and publisher working between Italy and New York. She is the founder and director of Palermo Publishing, an independent press established in 2022 and working at the intersection of photography, visual arts, artists’ books, and critical inquiry. Her practice approaches publishing as a form of curatorial research, with particular attention to image circulation, archives, and what she describes as the poetics of the margin. She is a 2026 curator-in-residence at Residency Unlimited and will present Palermo Publishing in the 2026 Printed Matter New York Art Book Fair scheduled for September 24–27 at MoMA PS1.
Event venue & nearby stays
Residency Unlimited, 360 Court Street, Brooklyn, United States
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