Auto-extremity

I altered some pages of my own PhD dissertation which was about “extreme texts in the Italian New Avant-Garde of the ’60s and ’70s,” thus creating, simultaneously, a mise en abyme and a “critical” void. Above: detail from “Auto-extremity.”

In 2016 I composed a few texts called Extremities, which were the deletion of preexistent texts, mostly historical experimental poetry (by Pound, Eliot, Girondo, etc.), with only the physical margins of the poems left visible. Stimulated by Divya Victor’s project I decided to work on an autobiographical “extremity”: I altered some pages of my own PhD dissertation which was about “extreme texts in the Italian New Avant-Garde of the ’60s and ’70s,” thus creating, simultaneously, a mise en abyme and a “critical” void. As in other works of mine, the concern is to turn operative the “literalization of the metaphor”— in this case the concept of “extreme/extremities” — although this time, involuntarily, unexpected echoes reverberated: the outline poems by Ulises Carrión and a sort of composition that I cannot help associating with Marcel Duchamp’s “infra-thin,” at least on an intuitive level.

Click here to view “Auto-extremity.”