Alighiero Boetti

the artist
Acquired by the present owner in 1992

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is one loose thread to the top of the right edge.
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Mappa, executed in 1983, is an extraordinary example of Alighiero Boetti's celebrated eponymous body of work, which is regarded as the climactic achievement of the artist's career.  Embroidered with vibrant hues, Mappa is a joyful explosion of colours and shapes, where the serene pale expanse of the seas and oceans creates an elegant backdrop to a kaleidoscopic ensemble of the various countries' flags manipulated to fit within their borders.

The notion of territoriality and the structure of the map is a theme with which many artists have engaged. Enlisted to explain geography, delineate territory and describe one country's relationship with another, maps have been employed for centuries by cartographers and artists alike as propaganda tools and formats for political commentary. Boetti's first embroidered Mappa came ten years after Jasper Johns' Map of 1961. While Johns depicted colourful American States with undefined borders and stamp-like names, elevating the banal to the status of fine art, Boetti borrowed world maps in order to conceptually portray the evolution of the political scene during the Cold War.

In 1969, Boetti took a printed world map and patterned the countries with the hues of their respective flags, creating the first Mappa on paper, Planisfero Politico. As the artist has explained: "the world is made the way it is and I have not drawn it; the flags are those that exist anyway... Once the basic idea is there, the concept, then everything else is already chosen" (Alighiero Boetti cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Alighiero Boetti 1965-1994, 1996, p. 199). Fascinated by classifying alterations in political geography, which he interpreted as a human desire to demarcate the earth, Boetti would go on to expand the concept of Planisfero Politico into his world-renowned series of embroidered Maps.  This series would bear witness to every change that affected countries, their borders, and their flags and provides an extraordinary account of political geography from 1971 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, including the historic dissolution of the Soviet Union.  As observed by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Boetti's series of Mappe "act as a metaphor for the fluidity of human relationships and communities." (Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Arte Povera, London 1999, p. 85).

The present Mappa was designed by Boetti in 1983 in his studio in Trastevere in Rome and subsequently sent to Kabul, Afghanistan to be embroidered, as the artist had been unable to visit the country since the 1979 Soviet invasion.  As observed by Annemarie Sauzeau, the text included in the Mappe of 1983 poignantly represents the artist's challenge and protest against the military occupation that prohibited him from returning to his beloved Kabul (cited in: Jean-Christophe Ammann, Alighiero Boetti, Catalogo Generale, Vol. I, Milan 2009, p. 47).  In the present Mappa the aforementioned text "Alighiero e Boetti a Kabul Afghanistan nell 1983" is clearly legible along the top edge.  Opposite this text, the bottom edge is embroidered with the phrase segno e disegno, ordine e disordine, vice versa ('sign and design, order and disorder, vice versa') to underscore a binary allusion to the all-encompassing abstract laws of mathematics and language, evoking a sense of constant flux between two polarities – a negotiation that finds its visual counterpart in the ever-changing political and territorial boundaries delineated by the expansion/retraction of each flag with every new Mappa produced.  Moreover, the inclusion of the oppositional binary phrase ordine e disordine references one of Boetti's most important pictorial and semantic motifs from his career: "With ORDINE E DISORDINE Boetti had put his finger on the briefest formulas for one of the most important fundamental world truths: the harmony posed by dualism" an inquiry dating back to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus (Rolf Lauter, 'The Different Groups of Work', Exhibition Catalogue, Alighiero Boetti: Mattere al mondo il mondo, Eine Ausstellung des Museums fur Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, 1988, p. 101).  Herein lies the visual dichotomy within Mappa: the tectonic changes in Nature are conflated against the comparatively transitory politically imposed boundaries of Mankind.  As Jean Christopher Amman articulates, "In the Map, you see Nature but also how people have their dramatic influence, creating states and flags" (Jean Christophe Amman in: Exhibition Catalogue, Turin, Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Arte Povera in collection, 2000-01, p. 130). By laying bare the physiognomy of the earth, Boetti interrogates the supposed significance of human organization, or what Dan Fox describes as: "the inherent absurdity of imposing abstract human concepts upon the natural world, as if our efforts might reveal some Platonic essence in the landscape or in the passage of time." (Dan Fox, Alighiero e Boetti, London, 2000, pp. 105-06).

Charged with global political awareness, Mappa is infused with Boetti's natural sense of poetry and spontaneous inclination toward beauty. The present work embodies Boetti's artistic evolution beyond Arte Povera and his fascination with cultural 'otherness', which the artist filters through his conceptual understanding of fate and time. In the artist's own words, "I invent the world as it is, without inventing anything" (Alighiero Boetti cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Villeurbanne, Le Nouveau Musée, Alighiero e Boetti, 1986, p. 36)