Today Ninth Day Twelfth Month of the Year 1000 Nine 100 Eighty-Eight, 1988, embroidery on fabric, 44 1/2 × 41 1/4 × 1 in. ( pages 32-49-86)
©Foto Massimo Listri
Alighiero Boetti (Turin 1940 – Rome 1994)
Alighiero Boetti began his practice in Turin with his solo exhibition debut in 1967 at the Galleria Christian Stein. Working as “Alighiero and Boetti” since 1971, in his practice he explored dual authorship, game play, systems and language. Using a variety of materials and techniques, including ballpoint pens, flags, postal stamps and textiles, Boetti broke from power structures and conventional artistic methods, employing modes of production that existed outside the formal fine arts. Boetti had a deep interest in authorship and artistic production. In 1972, he moved to Rome, where he continued to live and work until his death in 1994, though he often traveled. His travels had a significant impact on his work, resulting in the Mappe series of the 1970s and his longstanding collaborations with women in Afghanistan and Pakistan on his embroidered works. The collaboration led to the creation of the artist’s most famous series, which he would develop throughout his life, such as Mappe, Arazzi and Tutto. These works, like other major series, developed since the 1970s (such as Biros, the works made with ballpoint pen), and were all based on binary oppositions of concepts of order and disorder, individual and society, rules and variations, nature and artifice. A major retrospective dedicated to his work, Game Plan, was held in 2011 and 2012 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London and the Reina Sofia in Madrid. In addition to his inclusion in major Italian institutions, his works are in the collections of important venues around the world, including the Whitechapel Gallery, London (1999), Kunsthalle Basel (1978), Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (1977), and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1989).
Alighiero Boetti’s Arazzi (Tapestries) are based on the juxtaposition of order and disorder. They consist of a seemingly disordered combination of letters that compose phrases reflecting the artist’s thoughts and the tapestry’s moment of execution. The artist traveled extensively to Afghanistan and was intrigued by Sufism, the Islamic mystical practice that associated sacred meanings with geometry and calligraphy. He was inspired by his ancestor, Giovanni Battista Boetti, a Dominican missionary in Mosul in the 18th century who converted to Islam and became a Sufi mystic. By combining Italian and Farsi languages and collaborating with Afghan women to whom he assigned the execution of the embroideries, Boetti aimed to interweave Eastern and Western traditions into a universal order. This piece is part of a group of tapestries that the artist created in the late 1980s in collaboration with the Sufi master Berang Ramazan, whom he befriended in Peshawar, Pakistan, during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. (Magazzino Italian Art Foundation)