Friday 22 May | 6:30 pm

Frittelli arte contemporanea | via Val di Marina 15, Firenze

Rosaria Lo Russo
reads
Nanni Balestrini, Ketty La Rocca, Lucia Marcucci
Eugenio Miccini, Luciano Ori, Lamberto Pignotti

To mark the closing of the exhibition *Nanni Balestrini. La rivolta illustrata*, Rosaria Lo Russo will give a reading dedicated to Nanni Balestrini and the poets of Gruppo 70: Ketty La Rocca, Lucia Marcucci, Eugenio Miccini, Luciano Ori and Lamberto Pignotti. The poems, written in the mid-1960s, are imbued with the experimental and visionary energy of the neo-avant-garde, bearing witness to a period when poetry stepped off the page to become action, happening, conflict and a collective voice.

In 1965, Nanni Balestrini took part in the Third Festival of Gruppo 70 in Florence, alongside poets of the calibre of Sanguineti and Pagliarani, at the height of one of the most electrifying periods of the Italian neo-avant-garde. The group’s happenings were, in fact, explosive collective events in which poetry, visual arts, music, theatre and mass media intermingled without hierarchy. In the Florence of those years, Gruppo 70 transformed poetry into a total, ‘technological’, urban and militant experience, dismantling the ideological mechanisms of consumer society, advertising and the nascent television.

Through distorted slogans, collages of commercial images, newspaper clippings and reworked media language, their happenings became an ironic and aggressive critique of capitalism and cultural homogenisation. 
The spectator was not left passive: they were drawn in, taken aback, and at times even provoked physically and verbally. On a poetic level, these actions also broke with the traditional form of the text. Poetry became simultaneous speech, sound montage, physical gesture, and improvisation.

For his part, Balestrini, an integral member of Gruppo 63, championed a concept of open, collective writing, permeated by the languages of industrial modernity, in which words were broken up, repeated and superimposed upon images, creating a rhythmic and disorienting effect. To draw a parallel between Nanni Balestrini and the poets of Gruppo 70 is to highlight a conception of poetry as a living, collective act. Despite their different paths, both, in fact, transform the text into montage, interference, and public voice.

"For me, this occasion holds a significance that goes beyond a mere artistic tribute: it is also an emotional return to a human and creative world that has been with me since childhood. My father was a friend of many of the artists and poets of Gruppo 70, a familiar and daily presence in our home. My bond with Nanni Balestrini was even deeper: together with Eugenio Miccini, he was among the first to recognise and encourage my poetic writing, becoming for me figures of reference and discovery. To rediscover those voices today, sixty years after the birth of Gruppo 70, also means rediscovering a personal memory intertwined with the history of one of the most radical experiences of the Italian avant-garde of the twentieth century".
Rosaria Lo Russo