Arte Povera. Dialogues is a collective work that includes a series of interviews with eight international Poverist specialists: Bernard Blistène, Agata Boetti, Bruno Corà, Valérie Da Costa, Sébastien Delot, Marc Donnadieu, Elena Geuna and Sébastien Gokalp, following the exhibition at Tornabuoni Art in Paris. Each author not only provides an in-depth analysis, but also shares his or her personal connections with the movement and its artists, offering a unique perspective on Arte Povera and its place in the contemporary art world.

In 1967, Flash Art published “Arte Povera. Notes on a guerrilla war” a provocative text by the Italian art critic Germano Celant, which brought together the works of Turin-based artists who were pushing the boundaries of art and its institutions. Although they never signed a manifesto, many of the artists mentioned in the article continued to exhibit together under the banner of the movement theorized by Celant. And although some distanced themselves from the Poverist aesthetic over time, their practice continued to bear the influence of those formative years.

One of the traits that Arte Povera artists have in common is that they deconstruct things and do not privilege the material as an end in itself. It is likely that, among the artists of the movement, there is also a distinction between material and materiality. Arte povera artists, for example, do not have sculpture as their goal. Rather, they seek the process, the experience; rather, they have a critical look at aesthetic production. To borrow the word, they are rather ‘anaesthetic’. As in a certain way, moreover, Celant recognised in the intuition of his exhibition ‘IM spatio, image, space’ the search for a different dimension. Besides questioning the material, the primacy of experience, which seems absolutely fundamental, the duality between man and nature, there is the refutation of the concept of stability, the impermanence of things. This analytical and conceptual dimension is in Italy a way of positioning itself in relation to the dominance of a model that would come from America.