Alighiero Boetti and the World Stitched by Other Hands

In the autumn of 1971 a world map began to take shape in Kabul, not on a drawing board but in the hands of Afghan embroiderers. Each country was filled with the colours and emblems of its own flag. Alighiero Boetti had drawn the outlines and fixed the rules. Others did the stitching, chose many of the details, and took as long as the work demanded. According to Bidoun, some maps were finished in a year and some took a decade. The last of them was collected by the artist’s son, Matteo, after Boetti’s death in 1994.

The series, Mappa, ran from 1971 to 1994 and became the work most people associate with Boetti. It is also the clearest statement of an idea that runs through everything he made: that an artist can set a system in motion and then let the world finish it.

Turin, Rome and a name split in two

Boetti was born in Turin in 1940 and moved to Rome in the early 1970s, Tate records. In the late 1960s he showed with the Italian artists grouped under the label Arte Povera, though he was wary of movements from the start. Tate’s list of his early works includes Stack (1966), Manifesto (1967), Dama (1967) and Little Coloured Sticks (1968), objects and statements from the years when he was testing what an artwork could be made of.

The Museo Reina Sofía singles out Lampada annuale, a wooden box holding a light bulb that switches on once a year for eleven seconds. Almost no one will ever see it lit. The piece is a joke about attention and a rule that runs on its own timetable, indifferent to its audience.

Around this time Boetti began to sign himself “Alighiero e Boetti”, Alighiero and Boetti, presenting himself as two people, a pair of twins. The doubling was more than a pun. It gave form to a habit of mind that split the making of a work between conception and execution, between the artist and someone else.

The One Hotel

Boetti first reached Afghanistan in the spring of 1971. Bidoun’s account, by Tom Francis, says the first stay lasted only a few months, that he came back in the autumn with his wife and son, and that he went on visiting twice a year. With his friend Gholam Dastaghir he opened the One Hotel in Kabul, a small bungalow with a garden whose guests included hippies and carpet traders. When Boetti was in town it served as his home and workplace.

Tate, which held a public discussion on Boetti and Afghanistan in May 2012, dates his visits from 1971 to 1979 and describes his work there with craftspeople making embroideries and rugs.

Mappa

Bidoun dates the first Mappa to that autumn. The principle never changed. Boetti supplied a flattened outline of the globe and an instruction that every nation be shown in its flag; the embroidering was left to Afghan weaving families. Because the maps were made over more than two decades, they recorded the world’s political changes as they happened. Borders shifted, flags were replaced, states appeared and vanished. A system set up in 1971 turned out to be a slow seismograph of geopolitics.

Two examples in public collections show the range. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art owns a Mappa dated 1979, worked in cotton embroidery floss, which it describes as conceived by Boetti and embroidered by Afghan women. LACMA purchased it with funds from The Broad Contemporary Art Museum Foundation to mark the museum’s 40th anniversary and showed it in 2012 in Common Places: Printing, Embroidery, and the Art of Global Mapping. A later Mappa, from 1989, belongs to the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi collection. The Guggenheim gives it as embroidery on canvas, 120 by 215 centimetres, with purple oceans, national borders and flags, and text in Farsi, Italian and English.

That text matters. Tate notes that many of the Persian inscriptions in his embroideries speak of exile.

Kabul to Peshawar

Exile became literal. Afghanistan’s government was overthrown in 1978 and Soviet troops arrived late in 1979, Bidoun recounts. Many weaving families fled to Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan, and production of the maps continued there from 1984. LACMA puts it more simply: the maps were made serially in Kabul until the Soviet invasion and afterwards in Afghan refugee camps in Peshawar. Tate likewise describes Boetti’s later collaboration with Afghan refugees in Peshawar.

So the Mappa project registers political change twice. The flags inside the map change with the world’s governments, and the place where the map was stitched changes with the fortunes of the people stitching it.

Rules, ballpoints and the alphabet

The embroideries were only one strand. Boetti’s Reina Sofía exhibition grouped them with Ordine e disordine (1973), woven hangings made of grids of coloured letters in different sizes, and with Viaggi postali, works built from the exchange of letters through the post, where the postal system itself becomes the medium. The Aerei (1978 to 1989) are large panels in ballpoint pen or watercolour showing skies crowded with aircraft.

The ballpoint works carried the same logic as the maps: a format fixed in advance, then filled through long, repetitive labour. The Thousand Longest Rivers in the World (1978) and The Hour Tree (1979), both listed by Tate, push the same impulse toward classification to the scale of the planet and the day.

The Reina Sofía describes the overall position as a rejection of the artist as an all-powerful creator. Boetti looked for dialogue with others and with non-Western traditions, fixed the concept and the method, and accepted that collaborators would shape the result.

Game Plan

That position was the backbone of Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan, the retrospective that travelled across three museums in a single year. It opened at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid on 5 October 2011 and ran to 5 February 2012, moved to Tate Modern from 28 February to 27 May 2012, and closed at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it ran from 1 July to 1 October 2012. The Reina Sofía lists the curators as Lynne Cooke, Mark Godfrey and Christian Rattemeyer. In London, Tate credits Mark Godfrey with Kasia Redzisz.

The title fits. Boetti’s works read best as games whose rules are visible and whose outcomes are not fully in his control: a light that burns for eleven seconds a year, a world drawn by people who had to leave their country, a man who signed his name as two.

He died in 1994 of pancreatic cancer, at 54, according to Bidoun. Among the last works Tate lists is Self-Portrait (1993), a life-size bronze. Embroiderers in Peshawar were still working on maps that would outlive him, and his son went to collect the final one.