Embodied Words. Concrete & Visual Poetry in Italy and Belgium in the 60s and 70s (International Symposium. Italian Cultural Institute of Brussels. May 24-25, 2018)

International Symposium: "Embodied Words. Concrete and Visual Poetry in Italy and Belgium in the 60s and 70s," Italian Cultural Institute, Brussels May 24 – 25, 2018.

Stemming from Italian and Russian Futurism, German Dadaism, French Simultanéisme and Lettrism, the analytical reflection on language and the dialectical tension between words and images have deeply informed art and literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Fostering a total intermediality, whose trespassing dynamics integrates “theater, photography, music, painting, typography, cinematographic techniques, and every other aspect of culture, in a utopian ambition to return to origins” (A. Spatola, 1969), the international experiences of Concrete and Visual Poetry have critically re-elaborated the great history of the Avant-Garde, radicalizing the controversial relationship between verbal and figurative arts.
Conceived and organized by Maria Elena Minuto and Dalila Colucci, Embodied Words aims at reconstructing and evaluating a unique chronotope of the artistic and literary Neo-Avant-Garde, focusing on Italy and Belgium in the Sixties and Seventies, whose original exchanges led to the production of fundamental anthologies, art magazines, and livres d’artiste. Publications such as Poëzie in fusie. Visueel Konkreet Fonetisch (1968), Lotta Poetica (1971-75), Il Libro 1968-1971 (1971), and exhibitions like Sound Texts Concrete Poetry Visual Texts (1970) and Artist’s Books, cento libri d’artista cento (1978) are just a few examples of this rich corpus, still largely unexplored. How have these exceptional works radically renewed the semiology of the book and the substance of poetry? How did the intellectual contacts between the two countries spread and fueled the revolution of and on the artistic and literary language? What is it that connects and divides the theoretical and formal elaborations arising from such dynamics with respect to Pop Art, Fluxus’s experimentations, and Conceptual Art?
The contributions of art historians and literary critics, enhanced by the presence of some of the protagonists of that time, will thus focus on the entanglements and the specificities at the very core of Poetic Concretism and Visuality: the materiality of writing; the ability to read words and images as manifestations of a single thought; the pursuit of a metalinguistic dimension; the speculation on the relationships among art, literature, and ideology. From Paul De Vree’s De Tafelronde to the intersemiotic experiments carried out by Emilio Villa and Martino Oberto, from Alain Arias-Misson’s Poèmes publics to Vincenzo Agnetti’s de-écritures, this conference rediscovers a poetic and artistic universe of extraordinary reach, “to feel with ears and eyes” (A. Lora Totino, 1972).