“For me the work of the embroidered Mappa is the maximum of beauty.”

—Alighiero e Boetti

Consuming the last two decades of his career, Alighiero e Boetti’s Mappe series represents the culmination of his innovative artistic practice. These highly conceptual works were based on a school atlas which Boetti altered in 1969, drawing colored national flags into geographical areas. The present work, embroidered by female Afghan weavers in 1989, is the exquisite result of painstaking effort and would have taken four embroiderers no less than one full year to execute. Due to this labor-intensive process, although the roughly 150 maps constituted Boetti’s most extensive serial project and followed a definite format, each work has unique dimensions, coloring, and lettering. The materiality of the embroidery reveals the international artistic sensibilities of Boetti—an avid traveller—and serves as a meditation on cultural and political dynamics.

In search of a “distant thing,” Boetti first visited Afghanistan in the spring of 1971 for a few months. He returned to south-central Asia twice a year in the 1970s, attracted to its remoteness from the codified Arte povera movement which prevailed in the Italian art scene. He also found in Afghanistan a vastly different and inspiring landscape: “I considered the journey from a purely personal and hedonistic point of view,” Boetti expressed. “I was fascinated by the desert…the bareness, the civilization of the desert.”ⁱ The cultural, artistic, and geographical difference he experienced there indelibly shaped his practice, and marked the beginning of a relationship between Boetti’s work and the Afghan people that endured until the artist’s death in 1994. Afghanistan was the site of the realization of many of his iconic works from these critical twenty years in his oeuvre, including the present Mappa.

When USSR troops occupied the country in 1979, Boetti’s travel—and art production—in Afghanistan came to a halt. While it had been an open country under reformist rule in the 1970s, the Soviet invasion made it inaccessible. The artist was able to reconnect with his weavers through an intermediary in the region; although many had been displaced to Pakistan, some remained in the Afghan district of Jaghori (where this Mappa was woven). Meanwhile, the “Years of Lead” saw political instability and social upheaval in Italy as the far-left and far-right launched a series of violent attacks. Amidst this tumultuous geopolitical climate both at home and afar, Boetti designed his embroideries from his Roman studio, sending his plans and receiving the final works via post. These works, including Mappa, represent a deeply collaborative relationship which transcended borders and cultures. Their significance in Boetti’s practice is underscored by the fact that the auction record for the artist is held by another 1989 work from the series.

The Mappe have arguably become Boetti’s best known series, and their widespread resonance lies in their reminder of the transience of territorial boundaries and national identity. Many regime chances have occurred since the execution of the present work: for example, the USSR has of course dissolved and broken into different countries, and several African and Asian nations have gained independence or changed flag design. Reflective of the global geopolitical shifts of the late 1980s, these images are cartographic projections of the world that were always intended to be fleeting. They trace not only official histories, but personal ones as well: looking back on the long tradition of Afghan weaving, Mappa also bears the small technical inconsistencies and individual signs of its manual production. Boetti was responsible for the meticulous conception of these works, but their realization was governed by chance, ancestral histories, and global politics. This delicate balance is also echoed in a similar work from the series executed in the same year, which is now held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

 “[The Mappe series] speaks of plurality, encounter and a dialogue between differences.”

—Luca Cerizza

Due to the jagged borders of countries, the flags appear abstracted and sometimes unrecognizable in Mappa: the threads point to the arbitrary boundaries of nationhood. Along the borders of Mappa poetically reads: “Contro tempo contro senso contro vento contro voglia contro verso contro tutto Alighier [sic]” (“Against time against sense against wind against desire against verse against everything”). This inscription can be interpreted as a passionate negation of the artificial divisions of the world, which often lead to displacement and segregation. Indeed, the fragmented geographical shapes, and the bold sea blue-green which surrounds them, must have held a significance for the Afghan embroiderers who were working in the land-locked country during an era of restricted travel. Navigating cultural and political divides through an engagement with local traditions in this way, Luca Cerizza said, “Boetti established a dialogue with the cultural context in which they were produced.”ⁱⁱ Mappa resulted from a collaboration with local craft-women which bridged the seemingly distant realms of high and folk art, transforming the conventional map into a living document of our time.

  

ⁱ Alighiero e Boetti, quoted in Nicolas Bourriaud, “Afghanistan,” Documents sur l'art contemporain, no. 1, October 1992, p. 50.

ⁱⁱ Luca Cerizza, Alighiero e Boetti: Mappa, London, 2008, p. 71.