One of the few Italian women to take part in the Concrete Poetry movement, Giovanna Sandri was unquestionably the most experimental. Starting in the 1960s, her method challenged the traditionally linear nature of the poetic text, attributing an aesthetic value to its components – words, letters, syllables – that was equal to, or outweighed, their meaning. Drawing inspiration from advertising graphics, Sandri allowed the text to become a riddle or puzzle for the reader/viewer. It is no coincidence that Sandri entitled many of her works Costellazione, suggesting a parallel between poetry and stargazing. The freedom with which the artist steers, slices, shifts, slants, and bends each grapheme resembles the freedom of the Futurists’ parolibere (liberated words), but achieves results so extreme they are dizzying to look at, frustrating almost any attempt at linear reading. After her early published collection Capitolo zero (1968), and her many Costellazioni of the 1970s, Sandri’s work moved closer to Italian experiments in the field of Visual Poetry. But unlike colleagues who drew the visual elements of their poems from newspapers and magazines, the artist preferred the concreteness of dry transfer lettering, employing it to build monochrome, geometric images with clear-cut borders. Sandri’s work imbues the text with a physical quality that is unparalleled in both visual effect and content.
Stefano Mudu
