Alessandro de Francesco: And Agglomerations, of Trees or

Author: Alessandro De Francesco

Translator: Max Norman

Publisher: Mousse Publishing (2022)

Alessandro De Francesco has been blurring the boundaries between poetry and artistic practice for over fifteen years. In his radical and increasingly influential work, the bare text, often in multiple languages, becomes an environment, a living organism, a set of relations, and a junction in spacetime where things appear. With conceptual complexity and emotional intensity, his dense writing explores in unexpected ways the relations between history and nature, thought and meaning, (mental) images and feelings, language and space. While his internationally exhibited projects span digital voice processing, virtual reality, printmaking, archive research, and community-oriented actions, the book and the text—like here with And Agglomerations, of Trees or E agglomerati, degli alberi o—are where the poet/artist’s work manifests itself in its deepest essence. With this dual- language book, masterfully produced by Marco Mazzi, finely translated from the Italian by Max Norman, and featuring a foreword by the leading literary theorist and political activist Judith Balso, Alessandro De Francesco takes poetry and contemporary art, to paraphrase Marcel Broodthaers, “hand in hand” towards new territories.