Artforum Obituary of Visual Artist, Poet, and Novelist Nanni Balestrini (1935–2019)

We're saddened to hear that the poet (and visual artist, and novelist) Nanni Balestrini has died. He was 83. Artforum shared this news with readers: 

Nanni Balestrini, the radical Italian experimental visual artist, poet, and novelist known for recombinatory, revolutionary works that borrow from mass media, has died at age eighty-three. A key figure of the Italian literary Neoavanguardia (New Vanguard, or Gruppo 63) and part of the leftist Autonomia Operaia movement in the late 1960s and ’70s, Balestrini imparted the explosive politics of that era through collage and cutup processes focused on and made with collective language. His influential texts include the poetry book Blackout (1979), recently translated into English by Commune Editions, and his first novel Vogliamo tutto (We Want Everything, 1971), which was reissued by Verso in 2016. In addition to novels, poems, and collages, he also engaged in audiovisual work, as in Tristanoil (2012), a 2,400-hour video adaptation of his influential algorithmic novel Tristano (1966) first displayed in Documenta 13.

Born in Milan in 1935, Balestrini immersed himself in the city’s proletariat circles, becoming an editor and writer at numerous working class journals. In 1968, he cofounded Potere Operaio, a group committed to factory workers. Through his participation in avant-garde movements, like the Autonomia, that centered art in their activist interventions, Balestrini achieved national importance by dissolving public and private space in literature and visual art—categories that often bled together in Balestrini’s extensive oeuvre. In 1979, at the violent apogee of the internecine revolutions surging throughout Italy, Balestrini was arrested for alleged association with a leftist terrorist organization; unable to prove his membership, authorities released the artist, who fled to France, rumoredly by skiing down Mont Blanc. In his later years, he split his time between Rome and Paris. 

To learn more, visit Artforum.