Archivio 04

Archivio Series - Small books designed and packaged by the Archivio Vincenzo Agnetti with the aim of documenting the artist's work, highlighting the most visionary and contemporary aspects of his artistic research. Agnetti worked by crossing different disciplines: painting, sculpture, criticism, epistemology, technology, literature with a political and poetic sensitivity that has shaped his path. The relationship between work and research was crucial for the artist who combined critical and theoretical aspects with the poetry of his paintings. Therefore each volume starts off from the works exhibited in the preparations made in the “Machiavelli 30” Archive.

“Dimenticare a memoria” (Forget by heart) is the expression coined by Agnetti at the end of the 1960s, it means the assimilation and more or less conscious transformation into something else.
The first Libro dimenticato a memoria (Book forgotten by heart) is from 1969. The expression, which has stealthily entered our cultural panorama, is a seeming paradox, one of the many that have figured in Agnetti's artistic universe. As such, it succeeds in rendering in an intuitive but precise way the inseparable relationship between forgetfulness and memory, and the internal dialectic that holds the threads together.
The volume Memoria e Dimenticanza (April 2019) presents a series of works on this theme, starting with the Libro dimenticato a memoria, the feltri quasi dimenticati a memoria and some works from the tempo azione - istanti lavoro series, in addition to works on the relationship between memory and forgetfulness in the construction of subjectivity and in relation to time and history.

Texts from the Archives: Introduction, Looking at the Libro dimenticato a memoria / Texts by Vincenzo Agnetti / Critical essays by Bruno Corà, Elena Re, Francesco Tedeschi.