"Alighiero e Boetti": the Artist and His Double

Renowned for his embroidered Mappe, the Italian Alighiero Boetti (1940–1994) is regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Although he was initially associated with the Italian Arte Povera movement, in 1969 Boetti started an autonomous artistic path in which he developed a highly playful poetic, by employing a variety of media spanning from drawing to mail art and from performance to photography. At the core of many of his artworks lies the need to question the conceptual, linguistic, and philosophical systems on which people base their understanding of the world, by playing with universal dichotomies. This interest led Boetti to explore the concept of duality through his collaborative works (such as the embroideries from the 1970s commissioned to unknown Afghan women), but most of all in a series of artworks in which the artist doubled himself. In fact, even before beginning his collaborative artistic practice, Boetti first discovered in himself the presence of a dichotomy, that is the presence of a “doubled self” that the artist embodied in Gemelli (1968), a postcard in which, thanks to a photomontage, “Alighiero” was shown holding hands with his twin “Boetti”; intended as a joke, it puzzled the art-loving public (echoing Duchamp’s creation of his alter ego, Rrose Sélavy) and was the first of many doublings. Moreover, in order to acknowledge the existence of his double, in 1972 the artist decided to change his signature to “Alighiero e Boetti”. Throughout his life, Alighiero Boetti investigated his identity by using his own body, starting a process of joyful self-invention which not only complemented his collaborative artistic projects, but also acted as a lighthearted questioning of the role of the author, an issue faced by many artists from the 1960s onwards.