Reshaping National Identity through Primitivism in Italian Visual Countercultures

Martina Caruso

For this project I examined the Italian appropriation of the myth of the native in visual countercultures from the 1960s and 1970s. The Italian countercultural experiment and its relationship to Native Americanism emerged from a national preoccupation with “primitivism” rooted in Italy’s socio-political conditions. It was both deeply influenced by the hippie culture born on the West Coast of the United States and a product of a specifically Italian engagement with counterculture. My case studies refer to underground artists like Matteo Guarnaccia and Pablo Echaurren and the zines and illustrations they produced, as well as the way they worked within the media niche created by underground publications. I also examined the work of conceptual artists such as Eliseo Mattiacci and Luigi Ontani and the way their work related to the hippie fascination with indigenous myths. The project also excavated the more latent and unexplored connections linking the underground with established art movements such as arte povera. This exploration of an Italian counterculture was framed by overarching questions about the role postcolonialism and primitivism played in the formation of an Italian postwar identity.