SI Reading Room | Costanza Candeloro and Licit Illicit Bookshop: No Plot, Just Street
Sep 30 2025 - Jan 04 2026
Swiss Institute (SI) is pleased to present No Plot, Just Street, a reading room installation by artist Costanza Candeloro in collaboration with Licit Illicit Bookshop, a mobile platform co-founded in 2020 with Francesca Ciccone.
The installation features a selection of over 50 radical, rare, and out-of-print titles sourced primarily from the US and Italy. These books, available for visitors to read on-site, engage with increasingly surveilled and marginalized bodies of knowledge, including feminist theory, queer and postcolonial studies, poetry, and related discourses. Responding to the recent growing wave of state censorship, particularly within the United States, the selection centers on books published by High Risk, a provocative anthology series that evolved into an independent publishing house in the 1990s. Founded by Ira Silverberg and Amy Scholder, High Risk was renowned for amplifying transgressive voices and fostering critical conversations around sexuality, identity, and dissent.
Alongside this selection, the installation includes works that engage with the historical iconography of women reading. Traditionally portrayed in private, domestic settings, where reading is confined away from the public sphere, Candeloro reimagines these poses by placing female readers in urban, crowded, and highly visible contexts. In doing so, she transforms the act of reading into a declarative gesture of presence. Rendered as three-dimensional installations reminiscent of commercial displays, these images aim to subvert conventional dynamics of exposure: what appears in the window is not a commodity, but a self-aware figure asserting her visibility.