In the turbulent Italian political season of the 1970s, the intertwining of artistic creativity and political commitment generated some of the most interesting phenomena in the country’s cultural landscape. That historical phase saw the emergence of expressive practices that rejected the separation between art and life, between aesthetic creation and direct political action. The visual languages of the time were nourished by both the legacy of historical avant-gardes and the communicative urgency characteristic of extra-parliamentary movements, giving rise to graphic and artistic production that reflected the social tensions of the period in often experimental forms.
Nanni Balestrini, “Una lunga primavera”, installation view at AF Arte Contemporanea, Bologna, courtesy AF Arte Contemporanea
Numerous Italian artists expressed a political sensibility through their work. Enrico Baj, with his satirical compositions denouncing military power and war, used collages and assemblages to criticize established authority. Mario Schifano interpreted popular culture and mass society images from a political perspective, blending painting and other media. Artists like Franco Angeli and Tano Festa, on the other hand, addressed social themes through a visual language that contaminated Pop Art and new figuration. The “Maodadaist” Collective A/traverso, which developed within the Bologna university environment and the editorial staff of Radio Alice, experimented in their counter-information magazine founded in 1975 with alternative forms of communication that mixed visual and textual language in a subversive key to rework political content with avant-garde artistic methods. In photography, artists like Carla Cerati and Uliano Lucas documented social struggles and protest movements with a perspective that combined aesthetic value and civic testimony. The AF Arte Contemporanea gallery in Bologna hosts an exhibition, curated by Marco Scotini, which represents a significant piece for understanding the relationship between art and political militancy in that period: a collection of collages that Nanni Balestrini created in the 1970s using the pages of “Potere Operaio” (magazine of the political group of the same name, of which he was a founding member) and “Potere Operaio del lunedì,” magazines that marked the history of Italian Operaism and Autonomy.
Nanni Balestrini, “Una lunga primavera”, installation view at AF Arte Contemporanea, Bologna, courtesy AF Arte Contemporanea
Balestrini’s relationship with the journalistic medium constitutes a central element of his artistic research. Throughout his life, the artist worked with newspaper and magazine clippings, creating series of collages that often took their names from the publications themselves: from “Espresso” (1965) to “Paese Sera” (1965), from “Il Mondo” (1965) to “Reporter” (1979). In parallel, his commitment as a cultural animator saw him as a protagonist in the creation of magazines that left a profound mark: from the monthly literary organ of Group 63, “Quindici,” to the cultural periodical “Alfabeta,” which characterized Italian publishing in the 1980s. The Bologna exhibition presents two distinct cycles of collages, linked to the two publications of the Potere Operaio movement. The first cycle, begun in 1969 and presented at the Rome Quadriennale in 1972, uses pages from the newspaper founded in Balestrini’s own home on Via dei Banchi Vecchi in Rome, with the contribution of prominent figures such as Toni Negri, Franco Piperno, Giairo Daghini, Oreste Scalzone, Sergio Bologna, and Lapo Berti. The graphics of this publication, designed by Giovanni Anceschi with Fabio Bonzi, were distinguished by a compressed form, with reduced spacing between characters and a uniformity of body that rejected hierarchies of importance between news items. The second cycle, presented in Italy after a partial exhibition at CIMA in New York in 2024, is taken from “Potere Operaio del lunedì,” a weekly sheet that came out from the end of 1971, characterized by Piergiorgio Maoloni’s graphics inspired by constructivist avant-gardes.
Nanni Balestrini, “GIAP”, 1970s, collage on paper, 41.5 x 57 cm, courtesy AF Arte Contemporanea
The two cycles of collages present notable formal differences. In the case of “Potere Operaio,” the montage follows that developed experimentally using an IBM calculator in the early “Chronograms” in the early 1960s: a cloud structure in which the cut text lines are arranged in a flag pattern justified in the center, applied on a white background. Often there appears a symmetry axis that divides the text into two opposing blocks, creating a semantic and typographic hiatus between the word “Potere” and the word “Operaio”. From these compact blocks emerge key words with a larger typographic body compared to the others (“general strike,” “hard struggle,” “revolution de mai”), but fragmented in space, interrupting the reading flow. The text strips appear interlocked, forced to meet and clash, generating intense visual and semantic tension. The collages taken from “Potere Operaio del lunedì” present a different structure instead, with the addition of red color to black and white. In these works, the background consists of the newspaper’s text columns, reconfigured in an alternative layout. A distinctive element is the use of photography, which is also found in some of Balestrini’s publications from those years, such as “Vivere a Milano” (created with photographer Aldo Bonasia) and “Blackout” (1980). The graphics play an important role here, with red circles that recur in each collage creating recognizable configurations, sometimes similar to bombs from which a flow of letters emerges. One of the collages presents in the center a photograph by Tano D’Amico (taken from issue 6 of April 2, 1972) showing workers waiting for a bus. Balestrini includes this image within compressed text, playing with different fonts and thicknesses, in which fragments such as “In the factories’ crisis/to force us to/work in the name of profit” and “The workers have taken the/field They will pay dearly they will pay” can be read.
Nanni Balestrini, “Il Rifiuto è Politico”, anni ’70, collage su carta, courtesy AF Arte Contemporanea
The entire series of “Potere Operaio del lunedì” develops articulated compositional structures, with geometric patterns, spirals of letters, radial compositions that evoke megaphones, photographic juxtapositions, with evident references to the collages of constructivist avant-gardes. The possibility of seeing this series exhibited, which remained hidden for decades also as a consequence of Balestrini’s self-exile after the arrests on April 7, 1979[1], not only deepens the knowledge of the artist’s work and more generally of the particular artistic conjunction to which his works from those years belong, but also offers stimuli for reflection on the present: on the relationship between visual communication and political commitment in the digital era, on the current fragmentation of public discourse and on the possibility of art to give form to collective social tensions in an era marked by individualism. Enriching the exhibition path is a wall-sized photograph by Tano D’Amico depicting hundreds of celebrating young people in Piazza Maggiore, in front of San Petronio, in the symbolic year 1977, which becomes a sort of display for some of Balestrini’s collages, positioned as if they were protest signs held by the photographed people.
[1] In 1979, following the wave of arrests that led to the controversial “April 7 Trial” against the alleged leaders of subversive organizations, Nanni Balestrini avoided imprisonment by taking refuge in France and then in Germany. In 1984, having been found not guilty, he returned to Italy.
Info:
Nanni Balestrini. Una lunga primavera (A Long Spring)
curated by Marco Scotini
06/02 – 30/05/2025
AF Arte Contemporanea
Via dei Bersaglieri, 5/E – Bologna
www.af-artecontemporanea.it
Actor and performer, he loves visual arts in all their manifestations.
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