Nanni Balestrini was born in Milan in 1935. In addition to being a poet, he is a narrator, visual artist, and playwright. He is an experimenter of the connections that link words, texts, and images. With Pagliarani, Giuliani, Sanguineti, and Porta, he became part of the anthology I Novissimi (1961), which is a bit of a prelude to the neo-avant-garde and Gruppo ’63, of which Balestrini was naturally a part. He participated in the birth of important literary magazines, such as “Il Verri,” directed by Luciano Anceschi, “Quindici,” or “Alfabeta.” From the beginning, he was fascinated by the expressive potential of language, which, dissociated from its semantic value, becomes the object of poetry. By recombining pre-existing linguistic fragments, pieces of reality taken from films, books and all sorts of mediums, Balestrini creates a non-language, the zero degree of meaning, to give the public the possibility of generating their own. Among his poetic works are Come si agi- sce (1963), Le ballate della signorina Richmond (1977), Blackout (1981), Caosmogona (2010). Balestrini destroys and reconfigures languages, to reproduce the short circuit that occurs between external dynamism, mobile body and thought in movement. His vast production includes experimental poems (he was the first author to use the computer to compose a poem) and politically engaged novels concerning the struggles of the movement of the seventies such as Voglio tutto (We Want Everything) (1971), a novel-chronicle on the 1969 Fiat workers' uprising in Turin, written live by opening the microphone of the recorder during meetings, assemblies and demonstrations of the workers' movement. An epic narrator, Balestrini tells other stories within stories, often starting from a systematic reuse of written sources, without any discrimination of origin. Il Tristano (2007) is a multiple novel, printed in 2500 copies, each different from the other according to the rules of ars combinatoria, a remix of pre-existing sentences extracted from atlases, newspapers, romance novels and tourist guides remixed in order to obtain a narrative text. The diverse dynamism and uniqueness emerge with particular force in his film Tristanoil, presented at Documenta 13 in 2012 as the longest film in the world because it is virtually infinite in duration. In 2010 he contributed to the launch of the magazine “Alfabeta2”. In parallel with his literary production he has developed an intense research in the visual field, documented in the monograph Con gli occhi del linguaggio (2006). He has participated in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad, in 1993 at the Venice Biennale, later at Palazzo Grassi, again in Venice, and again at the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato; and with solo exhibitions at the Galleria Mazzoli in Modena, at the MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome), at the Morra Foundation in Naples, at the Mudima Foundation, at the Marconi Foundation in Milan, at the Museion in Bolzano, at the Museo Novecento in Milano.