Nanni Balestrini was one of the main protagonists of the Italian literary and social avant-garde movements after World War II. The combination of his literary and artistic sensibility led him to approach Visual Poetry, which saw him experiment with the artistic use of collage to recombine existing texts (newspapers, magazines, political slogans) in the search for the expression of a collective statement.
“Balestrini's visual poetry becomes the constant that accompanies words of different extraction, yet linked together by the collage: the need for an interdisciplinary trespassing that is not pure and simple, but necessary to found an aesthetic peripeteia linked to a process of knowledge. [...] in Balestrini there is a cognitive tension that is also directed towards the assumption of implications that go beyond the simple formal assumption, with a predilection towards the representation of content, albeit formally transfigured through linguistic elaboration.
The knowledge process elaborated by the artwork concerns not only the state of technical complexity but also internal drives and inner needs that belong to an idea of the world. Balestrini's maturity consists in the elaboration of forms that aggregate disparate elements given in pure association.
Achille Bonito Oliva
Balestrini's collagistic fury, which has lasted since the late 1950s, has produced a corpus of great coherence and with a very recognizable code, a sign that in this undue re-appropriation of other people's texts he has put something of his own into it, which is then the style - which for a poet is everything, and is made up of a lot of creative sweat.
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Balestrini proceeded, in his activity as a recycler, from the large to the small and from the small to the infinitesimal. At first he took whole texts, then he chopped them up, then he made collages of words alone, and finally of scraps of words and alphabetical letters. He descended from the universe of texts to that of typography. And one can see this very well in these latest works, so much more akin to the visual arts than to poetry, that one would be tempted not to read but only to look at these labyrinths and typographic rhizomes [...].
Umberto Eco