Perché lo faccio perché. The poetic life of Giulia Niccolai

The exhibition“Perché lo faccio perché. La vita poetica di Giulia Niccolai“ tells the artistic story of the poet, translator and artist Giulia Niccolai (1934-2021) by retracing the main stages of her professional life through documents, photographs, texts, recordings and works coming from the Maurizio Spatola archive, from the Echaurren-Salaris Foundation, from the Italian Women’s Library of Bologna and from private archives.

Already a photographer in the 1950s, Giulia Niccolai established herself as a concrete, visual and sound poetess between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1980s, actively participating in key experiences of the renewal of the poetic language of the time.

Her poetic, visual and sound research of these years was distinguished by a particular use of nonsense, triggered by experiments of morphological concretism that ironically opened the language to new semantic links and verb-visual solutions. Lexical concretism was often associated with the use of simple objects assembled in the form of collages together with short lexical formulas.

In the exhibition, the archive itself became an object of examination, transforming itself from “keeper of traces of the past” to a device for the creation of memory, fed by different voices: from written and visual testimonies (documents, texts, photography) and oral testimonies collected during the period of research in the field, to possible activations in the artistic field.