{"id":24998,"date":"2022-04-05T16:23:48","date_gmt":"2022-04-05T14:23:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/museoomero.it\/?page_id=24998"},"modified":"2022-04-05T16:23:50","modified_gmt":"2022-04-05T14:23:50","slug":"tactile-poetry-with-emilio-isgro-and-lamberto-pignotti-by-andrea-socrati","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/museoomero.it\/en\/media\/aisthesis-discover-art-through-all-the-senses\/aisthesis-number-19-march-2022\/tactile-poetry-with-emilio-isgro-and-lamberto-pignotti-by-andrea-socrati\/","title":{"rendered":"Tactile poetry with Emilio Isgr\u00f2 and Lamberto Pignotti. By Andrea S\u00f2crati"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Andrea S\u00f2crati \u2013 Special Projects, Museo Omero<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To mark National Braille Day and International Mother Language Day (21 February), promoted by UNESCO and celebrated worldwide, the Museo Omero, the state-owned tactile museum for contemporary arts, multisensoriality and interculturalism (TACTUS) mounted a special exhibition devoted to tactile poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The venture evolved from research conducted by the writer on the subject of art and multisensoriality. By prioritizing the sense of touch, the intention was to build on the experimentation of the Neo-avant-garde movements of the 1960s into what was called \u201cvisual poetry\u201d, \u201ctotal poetry\u201d, \u201cexperimental poetry\u201d. The \u201ctactile poetry\u201d project has had the endorsement and active support of two major exponents: Emilio Isgr\u00f2 and Lamberto Pignotti.
Both are pre-eminent figures on the contemporary art scene and both, in their different ways, have made decisive contributions to the innovation, even the renewal, of literary and poetic language in the post-war period. It was a period marked by new dynamics – consequent on the rapid emergence of mass societies and new technologies – which inevitably led to new relations and new aesthetic horizons. These were horizons which prefigured artistic contamination, combining poetry, painting, collage, music, technology, design, photography, performance, while at the same time reaching out to multisensory and synesthetic experiences. And this was the context providing the impetus for research work which led to the \u201ctactile poetry\u201d project.
Isgr\u00f2 carried out his first erasures in encyclopedias and books; they were to be understood as a sign of coming rebirth, in other words erasing something so as to pave the way for a future which would need reconstructing. As Isgr\u00f2 himself explains, \u201cwords and erasures are the same thing; we see because sometimes we don\u2019t see \u2013 as a surplus of words makes us insensitive to their meaning, so a surplus of images makes us blind\u201d.
As early as 1944, after assimilating the lessons of the Avant-garde, Pignotti began experimenting with verbo-visual art. In the early 1960s he conceived and provided a theoretical basis for the early forms of \u201ctechnological poetry\u201d and \u201cvisual poetry\u201d, and for the \u201cGruppo 70\u201d along with other artists and critics. Pursuing his determination to move towards a contamination of artistic expressions, he combined and amalgamated different languages and codes, always prioritizing the five senses. This led to the plastic \u201cobject-books\u201d, the poems to touch, to drink, to eat, the \u201cchewing poems\u201d, and naturally the \u201cvisual poems\u201d in the form of collages or manipulations of news, fashion or advertising photos, and such like. Words and letters of the alphabet are always subjected to aesthetic modification in different artistic modes. We can find examples in the ancient world with the Latin \u201ccarmina figurata\u201d (\u201cshaped songs\u201d), later in the typographic poems of St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9, in the Calligrammes of Guillaume Apollinaire, and then in the \u201ctavole parolibere\u201d (\u201cwords-in-freedom\u201d) of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
The leader of the Futurist Movement, in his 1921 Manifesto entitled \u201cIl Tattilismo\u201d (\u201cTactilism\u201d) devotes the eleventh paragraph to \u201ctactile tablets for words-in freedom improvisations\u201d, where the \u201ctactilist\u201d, passing his hand over the tablets, \u201cwill express aloud the various tactile sensations\u201d and \u201chis improvisation shall be worded in freedom, i.e. unfettered by rhythms, parody, symtax\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, my aesthetic project is focused entirely on tactile values, which can be expressed in different ways, and with them the Braille code whose letters and numbers are formed by a combination of six raised dots and therefore have their own three-dimensional plastic value. It is not only not shared by ordinary alphabets but entails decoding with the aid of the hands and not the eyes. Like the letters and words of normal alphabets, Braille dots and their structural combinations form signs and shapes which can be appreciated aesthetically both by the hand and eye, but above all they act, through the medium of touch, on our skin. If the two-dimensional point made with a pencil or the fine tip of a brush forms the basis of the grammer of visual language, of seeing, it is the raised dot which underpins the grammar of tactile language, the language of bodily feeling. In this sense we cannot forego mentioning recent neuroscientific research which highlights the close connection between the production and perception of language and the motor system. The term for this is \u201cembodied language\u201d which opens up interesting prospects for revised approaches to language education where gesture, action and learning go hand in hand, as foreseen by Maria Montessori.
Finally, if visual poetry made use of a new compositional element, i.e. space, to enhance the figural structuring of the page, \u201ctactile poetry\u201d contributes another fundamental component: the support, the page itself. The support which accommodates the tactile poem is made of different materials which will inevitably come into play in the tactile enjoyment of the work and will therefore themselves educe feelings and intuitions.
The tactile poem in the exhibition, entitled \u201cThe Tree\u201d, consists of fourteen \u201cverse-tablets\u201d, each in a different material, which contain the image of a tree created with raised dots, the basic unit of Braille – fourteen verse-tablets, like a typical sonnet, with tactile rhymes alternating according to the ABAB rhyme scheme for the two quatrains and CDC for the two tercets. The rhymes are defined by the tactile characteristics and assonances of the different materials on which the tablets are printed. It will be up to the hands to discover the shape of the tree and glean the varied tactile sensations which the different materials evoke (including auditory sensations from the sound of the hands passing over the poem), thus conjuring up in every visitor memories, emotions, thoughts, and engaging each in a rare and intimate aesthetic experience. It is an experience which originates in the perceptual and cognitive modes by which the blind apprehend reality, uniting touch and kinesthesia to give rise to that dynamic perception which Rudolph Arnheim held to be the bedrock of aesthetic perception.
The first \u201ctactile poetry\u201d exhibited in the Design Collection room of the Museo Omero features the tangible presence of two leading exponents, in the form of two specially created works. Emilio Isgr\u00f2 created the first \u201ctactile erasure\u201d for the occasion, a sort of calligram where the words give shape to an image which, precisely because of the embossed erasures, can also be apprehended through the medium of touch. To underline the prominence of tactile values in his work, Isgr\u00f2 inserts a text in Braille, an operation not merely of a typographical and aesthetic nature but one which has a bearing on the content, providing the reading hands with insights into the sense and meaning of the work.
In his work, Lamberto Pignotti evokes the main organ of touch, the hand, by using an ordinary plastic glove of the kind found in the fruit and vegetable departments of supermarkets. The artist traces the outline of the glove with a red marker pen and adds the words \u201ctouch poem\u201d with a black felt-tip. The letters making up the word \u201ctouch\u201d are each distributed so as to encounter one of the five fingertips. The use of the supermarket glove undoubtedly prompts reflections on the anthropological aspects of mass consumption, the standardization of behaviour, the disenchantment resulting from routine, the Heideggerian anonymity which leaves little or no space for creative thought and art. But above all, as far as we are concerned, as Pignotti himself says,\u201cthe glove erases and prevents us from touching what the hand grasps\u201d, making the point that from childhood onwards our upbringing prepares us to keep our distance from the world. Finally, the \u201cerasure\u201d of the glove\u2019s uniformity through the intervention of the artist inevitably draws our attention back to it. It is a distinctive act which becomes a metaphor for the oblivion which has visited our sense of touch, of gesture; at the same time it reminds us of our carnal identity \u2013 feeling deeply through the bowels, the muscles, the tendons – in an age which tends to dematerialize experience by propelling us into an ever more virtual reality.
\u201cTactile poetry\u201d is born. We await future developments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrea S\u00f2crati \u2013 Special Projects, Museo Omero To mark National Braille Day and International Mother Language Day (21 February), promoted by UNESCO and celebrated worldwide, the Museo Omero, the state-owned tactile museum for contemporary arts, multisensoriality and interculturalism (TACTUS) mounted a special exhibition devoted to tactile poetry. The venture evolved from research conducted by the […] Continua a leggere: Tactile poetry with Emilio Isgr\u00f2 and Lamberto Pignotti. By Andrea S\u00f2crati<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":24991,"menu_order":179,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-24998","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTactile poetry with Emilio Isgr\u00f2 and Lamberto Pignotti. 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