Marcel Broodthaers : Le Degré zéro de l'écriture. Public lecture. MASI Museum, Lugano. October 22, 2022.

Key figure of the European neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s, Belgian poet and artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) places language (poetic, visual, pictorial, cinematic) at the core of his intermedia artworks creating thermoformed texts, written objects and screen alphabets in which eagles smoke, pipes float across letters and museums do not exhibit works of art. In the same year that Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler published the essay "The Dematerialization of Art" and Sol LeWitt wrote the "Sentences on Conceptual Art", Broodthaers exhibited for the first time at the Librairie Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris (October 29, 1968) a selection of his "Poèmes industriels": a series of vacuum-formed plastic plaques defined by the artist as “treating the image as word and the word as image.” In the "Industrial Poems" the arrows indicate fictitious directions, the punctuation marks are distributed on the surface of the work without syntactic purposes and the pipes, the cubes and the parallelepipeds perform paradoxical dimensions of language by giving new conceptual identities to the relationship between verbal and figurative arts. The speech aims at reconstructing and examining the role of poetry in Broodthaers' intermedia work from a comparative and interdisciplinary approach: starting from the poetic writings of the 1960s, up to the analysis of the "Industrial Poems" (1968-1972).