Achille Bonito Oliva, Made in Mater

Rooted historically in Apollinaire’s calligrams, Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, and the Futurist parole in libertà, visual poetry in Italy found its experimental core between the 1950s and the 1970s, through an exploration of the boundary between verbal and iconic signs, between signifier and signified. Its aim was to move beyond the word itself, in search of a postmodern language capable of exploiting the montage of elements drawn directly from everyday life and from the reservoir of mass-media imagery.

Founded by Enrico Riccardo Sampietro, the publishing house Sampietro, active in Bologna from 1965 to 1968, responded to the concerns of several groups operating within this niche, positioning itself as an alternative to the mainstream publishing industry, both in terms of content and form.

Among its series, Il Dissenso, subtitled Schede di poesia d’avanguardia (“Avant-Garde Poetry Sheets”), stands out. Developed over ten volumes, four of which were collective publications, the series explored the crisis of language through an extremely experimental graphic design created by the Cuniberti-Mignani studio.

Published in 1967 as part of this series, Made in Mater takes the form of a red paper slipcase containing thirty-six loose cards (12 × 16.8 cm), printed on the recto only. Thirty-four of these cards feature avant-garde poems written by Achille Bonito Oliva (Caggiano, Salerno, 4 November 1939). Bonito Oliva is widely known as one of Italy’s most prominent critics and curators; far less well known, however, are his beginnings as a poet. Throughout his career, he maintained a nomadic relationship with several literary circles: the Gruppo 63, whose primary concern was the analysis of the written word; the Gruppo Operativo Sud 64, of which he was a leading theorist and where a strong connection to the Campanian territory played a central role; and the Gruppo 70, within which experiments in visual poetry took shape.

Bonito Oliva has consistently demonstrated a strong inclination toward the practice of boundary-crossing, whereby the limits between genres become permeable. In the early stages of his poetic research, he focused on decoding the language of the mass media through its recontextualization within the realm of culture. It should also be emphasized that the appropriation of advertising codes and visual communication was by no means unique to Bonito Oliva; rather, it formed part of a broader line of inquiry widely pursued within visual poetry. Artists such as Magdalo Mussio, Mirella Bentivoglio, and Lamberto Pignotti provide some of the most significant examples of the hybridization of advertising language, typography, mass communication, and artistic experimentation.

In Made in Mater, poetic discourse is fragmented and punctuated by structural frameworks that interrupt its conventional logical progression, generating juxtapositions of words that distance themselves from the modes of use and consumption imposed by the traditional culture industry, dwelling instead on meaning and its potential resonances. In the poet-critic’s own words, the collection “represented precisely the need to ‘create a difficulty for ordinary communication.’”