"Writing, Drawing, Speaking, Performing. Arrigo Lora Totino and the Body of Poetry" (International Symposium, Performative Poetry: Theories and Practices. Comparative Perspectives. Universidade de Lisboa, School of Arts and Humanities. October 29-31, 2018. Organized by S. Camacho, M. Carvalho, V. Conte, V. Montesi, P. Patrix, M. Traquino)

Clothed in a colourful cardboard costume with a cylindrical shaman’s hat and oversized scissors hands gloves, in 1916, at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Hugo Ball recited his outstanding phonetic poem Karawane. This was one of the earliest and most compelling Dada-performances of a poetic work in that day and age. Over the following decades, the intense season of Poetic Concretism and Visuality critically reworked and re-enacted the Avant-Garde performance strategies, radicalising the lively corporality and acoustic dimension of poetry.

Guided by this tenet and without losing sight of Fluxus and ZERO intermedia poetry actions, the purpose of my paper is to assess the seminal role played by Italian artist and poet Arrigo Lora Totino (Turin, 1928-2016) in fostering the intersection between “verbi-voco-visual explorations” (M. McLuhan, 1967) and performance art.

From 1968, together with artist Piero Fogliati, inventor of the Idromegafono, Liquimofono a fiato, Tritaparole, and Mozzaparole (a series of different rotating horns in which the voice is sounded through water, wine, or glycerine oil), he gave performances of Poesia Liquida and Poesia Ginnica as well as a series of “declamazioni mimiche” of Avant-Garde texts, from Italian and Russian Futurism, German Dadaism, French Surréalisme, Simultanéisme, and Lettrism. By creating a dialectical tension between movement and words, sound and images, body and space, Totino’s work raises a number of focal questions: What is the critical and ground-breaking impact of his oral performances, Liquid and Gymnastic Poetry in the broader context of Concrete and Visual Poetry? In what ways did they animate “verbicovisual” research (D. S. Houédard, 1963), inter-artistic practices, and cross-disciplinary inquiries? Why did they continue to inspire artists, poets, and writers more than forty years after they first appeared, and how did they perform the words?

Combining a selected corpus of artists’ books, typewritten sheets, and ephemera, my analysis aims to shed light on this extraordinary concretist, visual and performance artist who explored, questioned, and exalted the gestural and optophonetic nature of language: “un pouvoir qui l’excède, le pouvoir d’être vu et pas seulement lu-entendu; le pouvoir de figurer et pas seulement se signifier” (Lyotard, Discours, Figure, 1971).