for you waits barbed wire, wasp, asp, white

Between 1967 and 1969, Vito Acconci founded the poetry magazine 0 to 9 together with New York poet Bernadette Mayer. The publication ran for six issues and included a wide selection of poems and writings, placing works by major writers and poets such as Robert Walser, Raymond Queneau, and Guillaume Apollinaire next to those of artists, performers, and playwrights like Jasper Johns, Lawrence Weiner, Yvonne Rainer, and Adrian Piper, among others. 0 to 9 was also the first magazine to feature Sol LeWitt’s Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, among other seminal contributions. Only a few hundred copies were printed of each issue (around 300-400), and sales could never fully cover printing costs. The venture lasted only a few years, acting as a prelude to Acconci’s shift from the written page to performance. Today, copies of the magazine are virtually impossible to find.

In the very first issue of 0 to 9, Vito Hannibal Acconci – at the time a poet of Italian-Abruzzese origins who had just relocated to New York, a discreet and introverted presence in avant-garde circles, obsessed with Irish Catholicism and poetry while always rejecting his Italian roots so clearly inscribed in his given name – included Edoardo Sanguineti’s poem Alphabetum.

Before that, Alphabetum was already a curious, fragmented composition: a collage of disjointed images and verbal fragments, unconcerned with the traditional rules of poetic form. It had first appeared in 1960 in Documento Sud. Rassegna di arte e di cultura di avanguardia, a journal of visual culture rooted in art, poetry, and experimental research, and one of the most fascinating editorial ventures of the avant-garde years in southern Italy – maybe even in Italy as a whole. Founded in 1959 by Luca (Luigi Castellano) with the collaboration, in almost every issue, of Guido Biasi and Stelio Maria Martini, Documento Sud is where these stories first intersect, tracing a subtle thread between Vito Acconci – the first artist one encounters in this exhibition after climbing the first flight of stairs of the Palazzo – and the city of Naples. Not long after the editorial adventure of 0 to 9 ended, Sanguineti would also teach at the University of Salerno.

Vito Acconci, Edoardo Sanguineti, Naples, Gruppo 58, the New York underground scene of experimental poetry, theater, and art, together with the writers and poets of Gruppo 63, all become increasingly interwoven in a dense network of short circuits across genres and languages – intersecting word and image through verbo-visual poetry, performance, actions, and new media such as video, television, and telecommunications, tapping into the climate of experimentation that spread internationally during those years.

The exhibition title, ti attende il filo spinato, la vespa, la vipera, il nichel (“for you waits barbed wire, wasp, asp, white”), is drawn from the opening line of Alphabetum: a fragmented fresco of disconnected images and abrupt leaps, in which Sanguineti describes “il bel paese”, Italy, to his son Federico. It is an Italy in flux, full of contradictions, progress, and uncertain destinies. In its own way, the poem acts as a “prologue” to contemporary times and the uncertainty we inhabit – yet it is imbued with a free compositional spirit of associations, references, and suggestions that, by rebelling against the norms of prose and even poetry, compose an imaginary collage of elements taken from reality. This compositional spirit – free, associative, and, as it has often been described, ecphrastic – flows between poetry and image, verbo-visual practice, reaching its ultimate shape through the collaborative work of other artists and writers (such as Baj, Scialoja, among others). It goes without saying, it also informs the present exhibition. Some may notice that the Italian and English titles of the show differ: the Italian follows the first verse of the poem as published in Documento Sud in 1960, while the English follows Robert Viscusi’s translation as it appeared in 0 to 9. I felt it was important to preserve this shift, this feeling of getting “lost in translation” across time and the life of the poem.

In bringing together, through an equally free and not-overly-disciplined association of ideas, a period that I see as foundational for the city of Naples – namely the 1960s and 70s, marked by the experimental creative energy of avant-garde theater, visual art, and poetry, as well as the city’s history of galleries and artistic initiatives – I have sought to select works from the Collezione Morra Greco that reflect this multidisciplinary, hybrid, and unruly character. Works that move across what are conventionally called “genres” – whether it is drawing, watercolor, installation, performance, multiples, photography, documents, or even invitations – and across themes and motifs, shifting thought and language along the lines of the idioms pertaining to theater, music, literature, publishing, and, of course, visual arts.

The artists in the exhibition span, one might say, across different but interconnected conceptual clusters: Vito Acconci – performance, theater, poetry; Henrik Olesen – language, the archive, identity politics; Roberto Cuoghi – transformation, self-performance, psychology; Markus Schinwald – again theater, the subconscious, prosthesis, the obscure, the invisible; Paloma Varga Weisz – the spiritual, the religious; Ian Kiaer – the invisible, the dematerialization of the artwork, the gesture; Július Koller – utopia, architecture; Pablo Bronstein – world-making; the Joy Malamente of Pino Pascali’s television adventure; and so on, through countless further connections and possible paths, all of which I have condensed into a visual map – dense and intentionally lacunary – accompanying this text.

At the same time, I wanted to underscore the significance and weight of these artists within the Collezione Morra Greco, and thus the subtle elegance and value of this collection’s attention to bodies of work that might appear “minor” within an artist’s trajectory – ephemeral, delicate aspects of contemporary art collecting that are less muscular and more incisive. These are approaches that demand a willingness to step away from collecting as symbolic accumulation and toward a more attentive practice of care and preservation – one that seems oriented less toward the symbolic legitimations of the present and more toward a future still to come.

Finally, we have also sought to reflect this ludic spirit of associations and freedom in the very structure of the exhibition, carrying these ideas into the institutional and structural plane of the Fondazione – into the practice of exhibition-making and the overall curatorial concept of the project. This exhibition is the result of a finely tuned and patient collaboration between all parts that sustain the skeleton of the Fondazione: educational, curatorial, installational, and spectatorial.

As an artist I deeply admire once told me: “Giulia, forget about categories – art, theater, gallery, museum. Enter poetry.” I often think of this phrase, and I leave it here as the closing of this text and the opening to the variation that will follow mine.

GG, GP

All the images Courtesy Collezione Morra Greco, Photo by Amedeo Benestante.

Project co-financed under FSC 2021/2027 resources, DGR 616 2024. Piano Strategico Cultura e Turismo 2024/2025 – Progetto Global Forum Mostre d’arte contemporanea EDI 2025.