* Limited Edition 300 Copies + 16 Pages Booklet * Axis Axis is pleased to release the audio format of one of the most important oeuvres in the field of Italian art and experimental poetry: Machiavelli 30 by Vincenzo Agnetti. Putting the last piece starting from the original work, conceived as a book and published by Guanda in 1978, Agnetti decided to recite the whole text in front of a portable tape recorder, and the 17’ audio in this vinyl is the output hitherto unpublished. The edition is curated by Luca Cerizza and contains also a sixteen pages stapled glossy booklet with essays by Germana Agnetti, Andrea Cortellessa and the editor himself, with complete original translation by Henry Martin.

“A large part of the use that Agnetti makes of language lies within the dialectic between means and messages conveyed by the mechanical means of recording, communication and dissemination in the nascent electronic era, at the time of his artistic maturation. [...] Agnetti’s awareness of the power of the word is the reason why his work seems to live in a constant contradiction. The nervous tension between undermining all linear and significant linguistic expression – also transmitted through the use of a language made hybrid by a machine or corrupted by rhetoric, bent by power into propaganda – is countered by a trust in the human possibilities of expression that uses language as a form of communication and resistance. From his experience in theatre, Agnetti knows that “the spoken word preserves what the written word loses”, and in some of his works he uses words that not only live in the fixed form of writing, but in being enounced and pronounced in ever changing ways as forms of rhetoric and power tools.”Luca Cerizza

Vincenzo Agnetti was born in Milan in 1926 and began his artistic career by attending Brera Academy and Piccolo Teatro school in Milan. He is considered as one of the pivotal figures in conceptual art and poetry Italian neo avant garde context, both in visual arts and literature.