FLEE is a cultural platform dedicated to the documentation and enhancement of hybrid cultures, meaning Alan Marzo, Olivier Duport and Carl Åhnebrink operate as a record label, publishing house and exhibition organisers.

We were invited to design their second issue, an investigation on Tarantismo – one of the most intriguing ceremonies in south Italy. TARANTISMO: Odyssey of an Italian ritual pays tribute to Pizzica, an antique music used to heal people suffering from a mysterious disease involving frenetic rhythms and maniac dancing. This release contemplated a Book with an in depth research regarding the cultural phenomena of Tarantismo, plus a Vinyl record including both original and reworked tracks.

Working closely with FLEE's editorial team, we've started by designing the double LP, where the spider was an obvious graphic element to use in order to create a strong and recognisable cover. We've paired it with a simple monospace typographic back and a huge landscape inside image, where we've used a beautiful photograph by Chiara Samugheo featuring three woman laying after a ritual inside a chapel in the 50's, aiming to generate a narrative between cause (spider) and consequence (the poisoned women).

FLEE's releases contemplate a publication to go along with a record, and in this case, we've felt it should be a text book from the very moment we've read the first article drafts. Inside there is a combination of long essays, interviews, original and archive photography, biographies, descriptive texts from the sound artists and an article about an art piece specially commissioned for this issue, in two languages, Italian and English.

The book is mostly composed by long texts. We've coded the Italian texts in a serif typeface and the English in a grotesk, displaying the same monospaced font used in the record for titles and navigation markers. Imagery is distributed differently throughout the articles in each language as a tool to create rhythmic variations and avoid repetitions. Concerning the narrative, the book's main structure is very light and traditional, and uses black background sections in the beginning (preface + index), middle (sound artists bios and texts) and end (conceptual artist text + credits), as well as two interviews and two visual narrative sequences (using Samugheo's beautiful archive photographs of the ritual captured and originally published in the 1950's) in order to create different and unexpected moments in the publication.

Finally, we've decided to silkscreen print a very enigmatic photograph over a white canvas flexible hard cover, in which a phantasmagoric woman hypnotically glazes at the reader while holding a bouquet of flowers and a candle, adding origin (the possessed woman) to the aforementioned object narrative.