'Una diversa futura globale gestione del mondo’: The Role of Poet Anna Oberto in Fostering the Feminine and International Ethos of the Italian Neo-Avant-Garde. One-day Symposium 'Ketty La Rocca and Women Artists of the Italian Neo-avant-garde,' Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London, November 11, 2025.

Women in the visual poetry field have been crucial for the development of European cultural transfers, engaging with gender issues in performative poetry and verbovisual writings, and playing a pivotal role in Italian visual poetry by documenting the struggles for divorce, feminist identity, and gender equality in a decade when the international neo-avant-garde was essentially male-dominated. Anna Bontempi’s manifesto 'Nuova Scrittura al femminile' [Manifesto of New Female Writing, 1975] and her correspondence with the Belgian poet, ceramist, and collagist Théodore Kœnig in the 1960s are some of the most significant examples in this regard.
This corpus of documents analyzed in this paper constitutes an essential reference point for understanding the transnational configurations and interartistic manifestations of Italian postwar visual poetics as well as being evidence of a political and sociocultural landscape that highlighted the importance of women’s emancipation, intercultural exchange, interdisciplinary collaboration among artists, and the circulation of their works on a global scale.
Anna Bontempi, founder with Martino Oberto – her husband – and Gabriele Stocchi of the ‘metacultural’ magazine 'Ana Eccetera' (Genoa, 1958-1971), was a key figure in the neo-avant-garde ‘visual writing movement’ with a particular theoretical and methodological approach to the theme of female agency in poetic language. She expanded the concept of poetry by working on the verbovisual, feminine, and transcultural dimension of the language beyond its lexical meaning and she advocated ‘for an ‘inter/action of languages’ through which to reach ‘a different future global management of the world.’
Written a year before the realization in 1974 of the work Anautopia per la città ideale (mixed-media on cardboard) and the book 'La Révolution du langage poétique' (1974) – in which Julia Kristeva applied the notion of ‘semiotic’ (‘maternal body’) and the notion of ‘symbolic’ (‘post-Oedipal phase’) to the analysis of language and subjectivity – Bontempi’s 'Manifesto of New Female Writing' addressed poetry, gender, political, and socio-cultural issues by proposing a poignant counternarrative to male-dominated society in the 1970s.
Much more than a private document, her correspondence with Théodore Kœnig encompasses the essence of the transnational phenomenon of visual poetry in the 1960s. The letters – both typed and handwritten or made with pencils, ink, newspaper clippings, scissors, and glue – offer a transversal perspective to a whole generation of visual poets, namely, the conception of poetry as not just ‘a total medium, to escape all limitations, to include theater, photography, music, painting, typography, cinematographic techniques,’ but also a cultural space in which different languages, experiences, and traditions converge and coexist.
The letters as well refer to the notion of 'poésie ouverte' developed by Henri Chopin in the early 1960s, mention one of the first examples of European electronic literature, which was 'Tape Mark 1' (1961) by Nanni Balestrini, and discuss the critical-historical anthology 'Poésie italienne de la nouvelle avant-garde 1961–1962' edited by Anna Bontempi and Martino Oberto ('Phantomas' nos. 45–49, 1964). For Anna Bontempi and Théodore Kœnig the interaction between verbal and graphic signs was the element through which poetry could free itself from ‘cultural conformism,’ thus favoring the intercultural relations between countries, and intensifying that dense network of relationships and mutual influences at the core of European postwar visual poetics.