Henry Martin: An Active Ear

In the first publication dedicated to the work of Afro-American writer, critic, curator and translator Henry Martin (Philadelphia, US 1942-South Tyrol, Italy 2022), Emanuele Guidi gathers a selection of texts by Martin, whose personal archive has been conserved by collector Egidio Marzona and his Archiv der Avantgarden (Archive of the Avant-Gardes) in Dresden. The book is conceived as research about Henry Martin's role in and contribution to the Italian, European and US cultural and artistic world, through a selection of his published and unpublished articles, essays, conversations, and personal correspondences from 1965 until his recent passing. The volume reconstructs the map of relationships and experiences in which Martin was actively involved and that makes him a rare interlocutor with different radical artistic movements across Europe and US, including Fluxus, Mail Art, Concrete Poetry, Arte Povera and Conceptual Art. His lifelong friendship with a variety of artists and intellectuals, his practice as translator, and his life choice of leaving the main centers to move permanently in the Italian Alps in 1971, are discussed by newly commissioned contributions which help in thinking Martin's life and work from a contemporary perspective at the intersection of ecology and a sustainable working culture.