This talk examines the presence of cosmic imageries within Arte Povera, focusing on the work of Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Gilberto Zorio, Giulio Paolini, and Mario Merz in the late 1960s and 1970s. At the height of the first Space Age, these Italian artists engaged with imaginaries mediated through mass media, scientific discourse, and literary and cultural references, reframing, through personal approaches, the fascination and the cultural and epistemological questions generated by the transformations underway. Immersed in a cultural climate shaped by the Space Race and the Cold War, and the impact of Land Art, Arte Povera artists developed renewed relationships with nature and with the world beyond the artistic field. Their works reveal broader ontological and philosophical reflections on the relationship between the human, the natural, and the cosmic, while engaging with questions that would become central to later theories of planetarity and the Planetary Turn. Through an analysis of artworks, exhibitions, and writings from the late 1960s and 1970s, the talk explores how these artists reconfigured notions of nature, space, temporality, and the human position within larger cosmic systems. It proposes a transnational and retrospective reading of Arte Povera, considering how its cosmic imageries may offer an early articulation of concerns that have gained renewed relevance within contemporary planetary thought.
This research project is granted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (14th edition, 2025), which aims to promote Italian contemporary art worldwide.
About Alessandra Franetovich
Alessandra Franetovich is an Affiliate Fellow at New York University Abu Dhabi, a lecturer at NABA, Milan, and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Verona, and a curator at Cripta747, Turin. She holds a PhD in Contemporary Art History from the University of Florence, where she also carried out a postdoctoral research fellowship. Her research draws on transnational and horizontal approaches to art history, focusing on unofficial Soviet and post-Soviet art, Italian art after 1989, and cosmic imageries in artistic practices. In 2025, she was awarded an Italian Council grant for the research project Cosmic Imageries in Arte Povera from the Space Race to the Planetary Turn. She has received research grants and fellowships from Regione Toscana, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, and the V-A-C Foundation. In 2020, she received the Moscow Prize for Young Curators, promoted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Italian Ministry of Culture, which included a curatorial residency at the V-A-C Foundation in Moscow. In 2022, she received the Panorama dell’arte italiana del XXI secolo postdoctoral fellowship from Quadriennale di Roma. She is the author of L’arte italiana e il post-1989. Domeniche alla periferia dell’impero (postmedia books, 2025). Her writings have appeared in exhibition catalogues and journals including e-flux journal, Dune, Cosmic Bulletin, and Studi di Memofonte.
