I negozi is a book in which Swiss-Japanese graphic artist Aoi Huber Kono meticulously illustrates the facades of 16 stores, effectively summarising the most characteristic features of each in a project that has its roots going back to 1974. Some facades may still exist, but who can say for how long?
There are places that exist only in memory, some of them so bizarre that they seem instead to be the figment of the imagination. If we are all accustomed to going to the bakery or the fish market, what happened instead to the confectionery, the dairy, the milliner or the haberdashery? Perhaps someday we will tell our children, as if it were a legend, that toys were not always crammed into the aisles of a shopping mall but that there were stores in which to spend hours looking at them all, magical places to be taken to after visiting the doctor, or perhaps your grandparents. Or that once upon a time, when the world was a little less interconnected and much more diverse, there were no places in which to find everything from celery to tires: there were stores.
The title on the cover is a result of the collaboration between husband and wife: Max Huber made the curtain strips with coloured cutouts and composed the lettering, Aoi embellished it with her punctuated hemming.
Lazy Dog, 16pp, 23cm x 16cm, illustrated hardcover, first edition 2022
