Alain Arias-Misson

In A Madrid Public Poem by Arias- Misson traces the public poem created in Madrid in 1968 and reused by the artist in 2010, as shown in this installation. Arias- Misson carries the phrase meaning “In Madrid” while walking around the city and recomposes it in different ways according to the place, for example to form the word “weapon” when in front of the Parliament (Franco was the president at the time), the word “arid” in front of a church, or the word “dada” in front of a literary cafe. The public poem is an action that takes place in public spaces: it finds its collocation in the jungle of urban signals by taking parts of them to be reused as semantic and syntactic materials.

Alain Arias-Misson lives and works in Paris and Venice, Italy. Born in Belgium, he emigrated with his family to New York. He studied at Harvard University and began experimenting with sound poetry in the 1950s. He later moved to Spain, where he initiated the movement of experimental Spanish poetry. In 1967, he published the first visual poems on the famous Anthology of Concrete Poetry by Emmett Williams and in 1974, published his first novel of “super- fiction”, a literary form he invented in which the story is narrated through photomontages. At the same time, he collaborated with the magazines founded by Paul De Vree and Sarenco. In the 1970s he created “public poems”, poetic and playful interventions in urban spaces, and which he produced in several European cities. He participated in various artistic events such as the Lyon Biennial in 1993 and the Venice Biennale in 2005.