MAMCO / Cabinet of Concrete Poetry

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October 12, 2016—January 29, 2017

Cabinet of Concrete Poetry
In collaboration with Zona Archives

About Concrete Poetry

Concrete Poetry designates a movement both artistic and literary, which emerged on the international scene during the 1950s. From Europe to Brazil, North America to Japan, a network of poets and artists have appropriated and reused the language experiments of the Dadaists, Futurists, Letterists, but also Apollinaire’s calligrams or Mallarmé’s Throw of a Dice, to offer visual poems where words, morphemes and letters constitute a material in themselves.

In his Manifesto for Concrete Poetry published in 1953, Swedish writer Öyvind Fahlström said that: “Poetry can be … created as structure. Not only as structure emphasizing the expression of an idea but also as concrete structure.” By working on the typography’s plasticity and the poem’s formatting, Eugen Gomringer’s reductionism, Seiichi Niikuni’s repetitions, Jiri Valoch’s fragmentations, and hermann de vries’s naturalist compositions, challenged the language’s meaning. These raw forms triggered this “tension of thing-words in space-tfime,” to use Augusto de Campos’s definition, where what the poem says has as much value as what it shows.

A sample of documents from the 1950s to the 1970s are presented in this exhibition—silkscreen prints, multiple, posters, photographs, books, and catalogues—, and testify of this profusion of media on which this movement travelled and the multiple events that were dedicated to this art form. They were entrusted to the MAMCOby Zona Archives who, led by Gabriele Detterer and Maurizio Nannucci, constituted a collection of more than thirty thousand documents on art and avant-garde practices, regularly presented in libraries and museums around the globe. This exhibition is the beginning of a closer collaboration with this extraordinary fund.