Edizioni Conz

Arrigo Lora-Totino, Stelio Maria Martini, Eugenio Miccini, Various artists, La Livre I, La Livre, 1987, Watercolour, marker, ink, print on paperboard and paper, 35 × 25 × 7.5 cm, Edition of 13

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• Arrigo Lora-Totino was among the most prominent interpreters of Italian concrete and sound poetry. After initially focusing on painting in the late 1950s, he then turned to phonetic experimentation affiliated with poetry, visual art, and electronic music. Lora-Totino was committed to promoting the circulation of international poetic experimentation by patronizing many projects and activities. He was founder and editor of the journal Antipiugiù, published in four issues in Turin between 1961 and 1966. Initially devoted to traditional linear writing, the periodical opened progressively to concrete poetry. Collaborating with international authors such as Franz Mon and Ugo Carrera, the magazine published collective poems created through the intermingling of the writings of all correspondents. In 1966, he founded the monographic magazine Modulo, which featured painting, photography, and theater. A single issue was devoted to poerty, now acknowledged as the first anthology of international concrete poetry printed in Italy. With the composer Enore Zaffiri and the analytical painter Sandro de Alexandris, Lora-Totino co-founded Studio di Informazioni Estetica, which operated between 1966 and 1975. The association promoted conferences, events, and artists close to the field of poetry and electronic music. Works such as the book-object Logogrammi (1966) and the curious Liquimophone, an innovative tool used to compose “liquid poems,” are known for onomatopoeic play blended with sounds, movements, gestures, words, and typography. With the collaboration of the German curator Dietrich Mahlow, he presented the first exhibition of experimental poetry at the Biennale di Venezia in 1967. In 1978, he published Futura, a comprehensive historical anthology of phonetic and sound texts recorded on seven LPs, for Cramp Records. The collection includes recordings of pieces ranging from Futurism to Dada, from Lettrism to concretism. Similarly, in 1980, he edited a series of radiophonic episodes devoted to the history of sound poetry, broadcast weekly by Rai Radio 1, Italy’s first public radio station. Throughout his artistic career, Lora-Totino has taken part in numerous international exhibitions and published countless limited-edition books. Major retrospectives were held in 1996 at the Circolo degli Artisti and in 2015 at the Associazione Barriera, both in Turin. His works are included in numerous private and public collections, including the Donna Regina Museum in Naples and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
• Eugenio Miccini was regarded as the original father of Italian visual poetry, an artistic stance characterized by the prominence of the image over the typographic text: Words and images, signs and figures are integrated and presented on the same semantic level. Miccini studied Pedagogy at the University of Florence, where he became notable among the city’s intellectual circles. He taught contemporary art history at the fine arts academies of Verona and Ravenna while also serving as an expert on semiotics at the School of Architecture of the University of Florence. Miccini collaborated with Silvio Ramat and Lamberto Pignotti on the leftist magazine Quartiere, which propagated an approach to “technical poetry,” as hypothesized by Pignotti. In 1963, he co-founded “Gruppo 70,” which brought together musicians, poets, and avant-garde artists under the new experiments of visual poetry. Several events were held in Florence in 1963 and 1964, emphasizing the relationships between art and communication, technology, mixed media operations, and interdisciplinary art. Close to these experiments, in 1969, he founded the magazine Tèchne, promoting publications of artists’ books and volumes of experimental theater. The Pain of Absence and Three Compositions (Einaudi, 1963) and Sonnet minor (Vallecchi, 1964) are among the poetry collections Miccini published during those years. Miccini worked with mixed media, creating collages with newspaper cutouts, such as Garden Puzzle (1977), and objects, such as Software (1979), a book made of fabric and wood in a Plexiglas box, both of which are part of the Conz collection. He also worked with Sarenco, contributing to the magazine Lotta Poetica and collaborating with the “Gruppo di Nove” in 1973. In 1983, he founded the international group “Locomotives,” which brought together poets from France, Belgium, and the United States. Throughout his life, Miccini wrote and published over seventy volumes of fiction and nonfiction. Miccini’s works can be found in numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the BWA Museum in Lublin, as well as in galleries in Mantua, Bologna, Antwerp, and Tokyo, among others. His works were exhibited at four editions of the Biennale di Venezia (1972, 1980, 1986, 1993), as well as at the Quadriennale di Roma (1986), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1970), and the Palazzo Forti in Verona (1988).

Artworks (4)

• Arrigo Lora-Totino
  Ornament, 1986
• Jean Dupuy, Heinz Gappmayr, Bernard Heidsieck,…
  La Livre II, 1988
• Arrigo Lora-Totino
  Spazio Tempo, 1986
• Arrigo Lora-Totino, Stelio Maria Martini,…
  La Livre I, 1987