Matteo Bergamini, Veronica Santi, FRANCESCA ALINOVI, 2019

This book is a collection of articles, interviews, essays, and reviews by Francesca Alinovi, militant intellectual and reference figure in the Italian and international post-punk art scene. Appeared in newspapers, magazines and catalogs from 1976 to 1983, some texts are republished here for the first time, while others have been taken from the volume “L’arte mia”, which has remained, until today, the only homage to Alinovi’s critical work. To these are added unpublished writings (scanned, where possible, from original documents), some photos of the time and a recording during which Alinovi, a few days before his death, traces the salient stages of his career, divided between Italy and New York. The volume is divided into two parts, “Arte Mia” and “Arte di Frontiera”, two titles (or better, two slogans) coined by herself and which can summarize the style of writing, the themes and the artists that the critic and teacher loved and review. In the first part, therefore, his broader, national research has been highlighted, aimed mainly at Italian authors (performers, musicians, actors, artists, cartoonists, illustrators, architects and designers). “Arte di Frontiera” (physical and intellectual), which include Alinovi’s fascinating reportage on nascent art in New York, accompanied by his interviews with the main protagonists. We have included here the writings on Emphatism, a movement of which Alinovi is the author and protagonist, and which Ivo Bonacorsi elaborates on in a technical note functional to the historiographic understanding of this phenomenon, as short as it is intense.