Emilio Isgrò

“When you erase the names of mountains or rivers, you take the world back to a state of pre- linguistic nature, when neither man nor speech existed. To a virtual state of freedom and peace, when man had not yet appeared on the planet with his selfishness generating wars, divisions and conflicts,” this is Emilio Isgrò comment about his maps. For sixty years now, through the gesture of erasure, Isgrò has used this gesture of subtraction not as an act of censorship but as a way of creating new spaces. Both in his maps and in his books, he blows up the conventions of borders and denominations. With his critique of the mediatized image, Isgrò’s erasures take on the sense of a linguistic sign that distances us from those words and symbols that homologate the world. Europa Q99 represents an early 20th century Europe whose toponymy has been obscured in that overcoming of borders and divisions that resonates with Altiero Spinelli’s ideals.

Emilio Isgrò (1937, Barcellona di Sicilia, Italy) lives and works in Milan. Isgrò is a renowned artist, poet, writer and filmmaker. He published his first book of poems in 1956 and in the 1960s made his first forms of erasures, approaching Visual Poetry and conceptual art. In 1973 he participated in Contemporanea, an exhibition curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. His solo and group exhibitions include: L’ora italiana, Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna (1986); The Artist and the Book in Twentieth- Century Italy, Museum of Modern Art, New York, (1992-1993) and Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, (1994); Var ve yok, Taksim Sanat Galerisi, İstanbul, (2010); L’Italia che dorme, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Rome, (2011); Seme dell’Altissimo, Expo Milano, (2015); Isgrò, Palazzo Reale/Gallerie d’Italia/Casa Manzoni, Milan (2016); and Emilio Isgrò, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, (2019). He has participated in the Venice Biennale d’Arte (1972, 1978, 1986, 1993), the Quadriennale in Rome, Italy (1986) and the São Paulo Biennale (1977).