RORHOF is an independent publishing house founded in 2014 with a focus on art and visual culture. The main research clusters are xenophobia, migration, ecology and the politics of representation.

Long-term collaborations with local communities and institutions are formally sculpted as artist’s books that the platform’s press supports in articulating as workshops and installations in public and private spaces.

Rorhof’s catalogue is a reflection of the platform’s research projects. The editorial process is dependent on the social undertakings initiated each time with different communities or prompted by institutional partnerships. The design process represents the final stage of year-long investigations that can develop as workshops, teaching modules, residencies, archival investigations or documentary mappings. The publication process is different for each book, which is conceived as an artworks in its own right. 

Rorhof’s present configuration is the result of a long-term collaboration between artist Nicolò Degiorgis with producers Michele Degiorgis and Eleonora Matteazzi, graphic designer Walter Hutton and researcher Allegra Baggio Corradi.

Schemes are active for students seeking to gain experience in the running of a small-scale independent artist’s press. Past partner academies include the University of Bolzano, the KABK - Royal Academy of Arts Den Haag, the Rietveld Academy Amsterdam and CfP Bauer Milan.

Regularly, members of the communities involved in the platform’s social projects take part in the final phases of book production, including inmates on their social service, migrants and students. The press pursues its social objectives by drawing on its internal resources, voluntary work, service users and stakeholder organisations with the aim of solidarity and sustainability. Rorhof is keen on including in its activity members of the local, national and international communities that join the research paths opened by the publishing practice without any discrimination of age, religion or identity, and to integrate protected or disadvantaged categories in the processes of cultural and artistic production.

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HISTORY

RORHOF draws its name from the farmhouse founded in 1468 by Michel im Rorhof in Gries, Bolzano-Bozen. It used to be a tradition in South Tyrol, the northernmost Italian region, that families lived and worked on the same premises and that their farming activities fed into a circular and self-sustainable economy. A wide array of grape derivatives were farmed, transformed and sold at the property. Today, an ample range of thoughts and things are ideated, designed and carried out on the same premises and principles, especially that of self-production. The farmstead still acts as a powerhouse where several produce are born and bread, and from where they depart.