Riga 49: Gruppo 70

Riga 49 Gruppo 70
Curated by Raffaella Perna
Quodlibet
Italian
2026

Founded in Florence in May 1963, Gruppo 70 attracted a large group of artists from various disciplines (painting, literature, music, theatre), including Lamberto Pignotti, Eugenio Miccini, Ketty La Rocca, Lucia Marcucci, Giuseppe Chiari and Luciano Ori.
The new visual and technological poets of Gruppo 70 did not limit themselves to drawing on the iconography, linguistic forms and genres of mass culture, from comics to photo novels, journalism to advertising, but, following in the footsteps of the historical avant-garde, they disseminated their works through the channels of mass technological society. Pignotti proposes “that poetry be broadcast over stadium loudspeakers during championship matches or that painting exhibitions be placed along motorways” and emphasises the urgency of placing oneself outside the mechanisms of commodification of capitalist society through practices such as collage and verbal-visual montages, aware of the centrality of images in contemporary communication. The political nature of Gruppo 70's research is strongly asserted, with a view to explicit dissent and practices of “semiological guerrilla warfare”.
Gruppo 70 disbanded in 1968, but its members continued their verbal-visual research in the following decades, disseminating their work through magazines, newsletters and cultural centres such as the Gruppo di Poesia Visiva Internazionale (International Visual Poetry Group) and the Centro Téchne.
In keeping with the established structure of the Riga volumes, this volume includes an anthology of the Group's theoretical texts and a selection of the most significant texts published on the Group over the years. This is followed by a series of new essays written for the occasion, which examine the Group's artistic activity in the light of the major issues of the time and the perspective with which we approach them today, from gender identity to ecology, as well as aesthetic issues, performance, theatre, cinema, publishing and much more.