Università degli Studi di Torino,
Dipartimento di Lingue e letterature straniere e culture moderne,
Centro Aldo Moro, Aula 2, 2° piano,
via S. Ottavio 18, 10124 Torino

The connections established at the beginning of the twentieth century between the visual arts and literature in Europe gave rise to one of the most important transformations historically in literary forms. Proposals like the free word poetry of Futurism and the calligrammatic practice of the French literary avantgarde find their precedents in previous typographical experimentation and in interartistic relations such as those established with music by the Symbolist movement. These would ultimately give rise to a new literary field that has continued to be productive until the present day. In parallel, the visual arts embraced typography alongside these new literary experiments to develop original visual forms. The aim of this conference is to study the ways in which these visual transformations of writing played out in the European literary field with a focus on three key phenomena in its history.

The first focal point is that of the historical avantgarde, inventors of free word poetry and the calligram, which would later be taken up in diverse manners and combinations, including parody, by subsequent avantgarde artists and movements, as the starting point for their own experimentation.

The second concerns that which has come to be defined as experimental literature and embraces all of the experiments that emerged and developed from the ground-breaking and innovative impulse of the historical avantgardes primarily during the 1950s and 1960s, but that continue to find continuity in contemporary practice. These include Lettrism, Concrete Poetry, Fluxus, Conceptualism, Visual Poetry, Object Poems etc. In this context, the conference proposes the study of the experimental productions that emerged at the intersection between writing and visuality from the 1950s to the present day.

The figure of Joan Brossa stands out as an international reference point within this second key period and will constitute the third focus of this conference. Brossa’s work emerged from connections with elements from the historical avantgarde which he transformed radically via his assumption of the concept of literary experimentation. Through this move, he was able to transform established notions of literature and art, through the different types of connections he established between the written and the visual fields, both in the explicit and implicit use of one within the other.