ABOUT

Real or false? Did these shows really exist? Syxty Sorriso & Altre Storie is the first volume dedicated to Antonio Syxty’s work as performance artist and director on the Milanese alternative scene, replete with images, drawings and texts from his archive. Embedded in the underground creativity of Milan’s only basement-theatre – the OutOff, a hotbed of experimentation in the late 1970s and early 1980s – Syxty was one of the most electrifying exponents of the so-called Italian New Spectacularity, a theatre that was defined as metropolitan, fast, catchy, post-ideological yet sentimental. The book is drawn from the printed archive of over 25 performances made between 1978 and 1982, and consists of drawings, collages, photographs and texts produced and collected by the artist over this time – yet the volume’s overview remains consciously incomplete. The pages chart and internal stream made of an alternation of full and empty spaces, where we simultaneously find aestheticism and concept. The opening is given by the unique result that Syxty extracts from the real; dozens of pages unfold the results of his creative process, by the end of which we are called to crash into the truthful falsity of flawlessly reproduced documents and of a photo-performative repertoire of the unhappened.