Alighiero E Boetti

In 1968, the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti renamed himself Alighiero e("and") Boetti, effectively expressing the duality of his personality and his work--and,by extension, the dichotomies of society and culture and art and life. Boetti was a central figurein the arte povera movement, a group of Italian artists in the late 1960s who expressly distancedthemselves from commercialization and the slickness of Pop Art. These artists worked with a widerange of nonconventional materials--from wool and vegetables to silk and dirt. This illustratedstudy examines Boetti's 1988 work Map (or Mappa), one of the artist's series of woven tapestry mapsof the world. In the cartography of this Map, each country is depicted by its flag; itspre-postcommunist picture of the world shows the Soviet Union as a vast expanse of red in the uppereastern corner, projecting the last image of a long-failed socialist utopia. Opposed to "themyth of originality," Boetti saw his role as that of triggering a work of art rather thanexecuting it. Map (and the rest of the series) was based on a schema designed by Boetti's friend andcollaborator Rinaldo Rossi and embroidered by a team of craftswomen in Kabul, Aghanistan. Thefinished work, with its brightly colored, painstakingly woven national flags, transforms the rigidnorms of state division into a maze of colors. Map offers not just the beauty of a handcraftedcarpet but a movingly interwoven pattern of interdependence that the world too often fails torecognize. Pier Luigi Tazzi is a critic, lecturer, and curator, currently based in Capalle, Italy.Alighiero e Boetti (1940-1994) was a central figure of the arte povera movement of radical Italianartists in the 1960s.

Luca Cerizza is an art historian and curator based in Berlin.