[spectre] (fwd) CFP: Nanni Balestrini Study Day (New York, 12 Jun 24)

[Andreas Broeckmann LEU]

From: Nicola Lucchi
Date: Mar 4, 2024
Subject: CFP: Nanni Balestrini Study Day (New York, 12 Jun 24)

Center for Italian Modern Art, New York, Jun 12, 2024
Deadline: Apr 14, 2024

Keynote speaker: Prof. Gian Maria Annovi, University of Southern California

CIMA’s Winter-Spring 2024 exhibition, “Nanni Balestrini: Art as 
Political Action. One Thousand and one Voices”, curated by Marco 
Scotini, is the first retrospective exhibition in the United States of 
Nanni Balestrini (1935-2019), an Italian experimental visual artist, 
poet, and novelist known for his revolutionary artistic practice and 
passionate involvement in the social-political movements of the 1960s 
and 1970s.

The show focuses on two crucial decades in the career of Balestrini, the 
1960s and the 1970s. It includes over 70 works by the artist, along with 
a range of documentary material. The works from the 1960s illustrate a 
creative phase when Balestrini shared research interests with Luigi 
Nono, one of the most important 20th-century experimental composers, and 
when the neo-avant garde literary movement Gruppo 63 was also founded. 
The creative relationship between Balestrini and Nono lasted an entire 
decade, and the exhibition sheds light on the search for the 
disalienation of the word pursued by both, as well as on their use of 
technology as a way to seize and subvert the means of industrial 
production and explore their artistic potential. The final works in the 
exhibition date back to the late 1970s; some of them were conceived in 
connection with a poem dedicated to the New York City electricity 
blackout of 1977. Planned as an “action for voice” to be performed by 
Greek-Italian lyricist and vocal experimenter Demetrio Stratos in May 
1979, the work was never performed due to the premature death of Stratos 
and Balestrini’s indictment surrounding the political movement Autonomia 
Operaia. The exhibition also includes a reconstruction of Balestrini’s 
Tape Mark I (1961), one of the earliest examples of computer-generated 
art. A combinatory poem produced by an algorithm written in the Unix 
programming language on a massive IBM mainframe computer, Tape Mark I 
anticipates many of the contemporary questions surrounding Artificial 
Intelligence, and was featured in the 1962 edition of the Bompiani 
Literary Almanac, which was dedicated to “the application of computers 
to ethics and literature”, a theme of utmost relevance today. To provide 
context to Balestrini’s work, the show features a selection of early 
words-in-freedom works by Futurist artist Carlo Carrà, a form of 
avantgarde visual poetry that liberated words and letters from the 
conventions of grammar and syntax, making them part of visual and 
performative compositions. This technique was co-opted by the Italian 
Neoavanguardia in the 1960s, due to the revolutionary potential of the 
early Futurist movement.

Taking cue from the stimuli this exhibition offers and from current 
scholarship in the fields of History, Art History, Italian Studies, 
Gender Studies, and Media and Cultural Studies, the 2024 CIMA Research 
Fellows invite proposals for a conference that, departing from 
Balestrini’s example, examines the intricate relationships between art 
and activism during and beyond the Years of Lead. The all-day conference 
will take place at the Center for Italian Modern Art, on Wednesday, June 
12, 2024.

Some of the possible research subjects include (but are not limited to):
- The counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Italy and 
globally, examining their artistic, social, and political impacts.
- The role of art as a vehicle for political resistance and revolution.
- The workerist movement in Italy and its relationship to the visual 
arts and literature.
- Feminist artistic and/or theoretical approaches within the context of 
the social and cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
- The early days of computer art and its evolution into contemporary 
practices and debates.
- Relationships, parallels, and differences between Futurist 
words-in-freedom poetry and other experimental poetry forms 
(calligrammes, concrete and visual poetry, collage, word painting, etc.)
- Neoavanguardia and its international counterparts: aspects and 
interpretations of verbovisual experiments.
- The landscape of experimental music in postwar Italy and beyond.
- Monographic approaches to Balestrini and Nono’s work, across all media.
- The contemporary relevance of experimental artistic and political 
practices, considering their significance and evolution in modern society.

Please send an abstract (250–300 words), title, and a short biography 
(100–150 words) in English to info at italianmodernart.org with the subject 
line “Nanni Balestrini CFP” by Sunday, April 14, 2024. Please send the 
requested material in a single PDF document. Please do not send multiple 
attachments.


Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: Nanni Balestrini Study Day (New York, 12 Jun 24). In: ArtHist.net, 
Mar 4, 2024. <https://arthist.net/archive/41364>.