The book launch of How to Begin took place at ICA London. The publication yielded from the Ratti Foundation's XXIV CSAV – Artists' Research Laboratory, led by Christina Mackie in Como, Italy, in the summer of 2018.

Where to begin? How to begin? Creation can happen only out of what already exists. One begins wherever one is. The beginning of the book can be the middle of a sentence, which begins (has begun?) at the end of the book.

How to Begin took inspiration from these reflections, born from the daily encounters with Christina Mackie and the Sant'Elia kindergarten - an extraordinary building designed by Giuseppe Terragni in 1937 - that was the workspace for the entire duration of the workshop - to tackle the many different aspects of the deceptively simple question posed by its title. Books, like beginnings, flourish in the middle, at the page casually opened by the reader, far from the beginning and instead, from its implicit end. The first page of a book is a beginning but not the beginning. Beginnings are happy places where the ecstatic feeling that everything can still happen lives. We have tried to create a book with no beginning and no end.

How to Begin was conceived by Gregorio Magnani in collaboration with the participants and designed by Daly & Lyon. The publication gathers special projects by the participants, a semi-narrative thread stemmed from the workshop Methods for Beginning by Kate Briggs, and a series of mistranslations of the first tercet of Dante's Divine Comedy. They are completed with a wide selection of Terragni's preparatory drawings and photographs of his models for the kindergarten

XXIV CSAV: Yusef Audeh, Lorenzo Benedetti, Simon Belleau, Joe Brown, Paula Buskevica, Vincent Ceraudo, Omar Chowdhury, Inga Danysz, Gustavo Gomez Brechtel, Nicolas Gullotta, Zishi Han, Petra Hjartardà³ttir, Mourad Kouri, Christina Mackie, Gregorio Magnani, Vibeke Mascini, Anna Meschiari, Rebecca Moccia, Fathia Mohidin, Annie Ratti, Lisa Trogen Devgun, Andrea Zucchini.