Alighiero Boetti was born in Torino in 1940. He studied business administration and mathematics before becoming an artist. Although he has been routinely associated with the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s, based largely on his choice of materials and general disdain for slick, industrial design, his art is more properly understood as Conceptual.
In 1972 he and his business partner, Gholam Dagastir, founded an artists’ commune in Kabul called One Hotel. There Boetti met with teams of Afghan weavers and embroiderers who executed his series of textile maps of the world. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 forced this production to move to Pakistan. The Arazzi series– square woven grids of 16- and 25-word Italian phrases–were executed in Peshawar in the 1980s and early ‘90s. The Arazzi reify the meaning of the Latin verb textere, or “to weave.” The cryptic phrases (“Ordine in disordine,” “Dare il tempo al tempo,” “Niente da vedere, niente da nascondere,) which recall mottos, koans, aphorisms and proverbs, often refer (or at least can be applied) to aspects of Boetti’s quirky aesthetic.
![Alberto Burri (Italian, 1915-1995), Rosso plastica [plastic red], 1963. Plastic, acrylic and combus](https://64.media.tumblr.com/6422f6de5f9fe0ca4440cf5cab780c97/ec8c9f73c8f11015-1f/s1280x1920/bde06fc6e6e18957feb03322413e7163183f1529.jpg "Alberto Burri (Italian, 1915-1995), Rosso plastica [plastic red], 1963. Plastic, acrylic and combus")
