RolandoMignani
Biography
Rolando Mignani (1937, Genoa, Italy – 2006, Genoa, Italy) was an Italian poet and visual artist known for his experimental contributions to verbo-visual poetry and his role in the vibrant Genoese avant-garde scene. Self-taught and deeply rooted in working-class culture, Mignani developed a practice that blended linguistic inquiry with symbolic, performative, and graphic elements. Born in the Rivarolo neighborhood of Genoa, Mignani worked in various manual professions, including at the city’s port and in foundries, experiences that informed his approach to language and materiality. Despite a lack of formal academic training, he began writing poetry as a teenager and became part of a radical cultural network centered around experimental literature and art. A crucial turning point came through his friendship with Ugo Carrega, a fellow Genoese poet and pioneer of visual poetry. Mignani became actively involved in Centro Tool, a space Carrega founded for interdisciplinary exchange between artists, writers, and theorists. Through this circle, he collaborated with other innovators such as Corrado D’Ottavi, Martino Oberto, and Rodolfo Vitone. In 1968, Mignani held his first exhibition alongside Carrega, presenting their so-called “symbiotic poems,” which played with linguistic fragmentation and typographic form. Throughout the 1970s, he co-founded Atelier Bizzarro, a platform for publishing experimental texts and visual research. Among the group’s most notable outputs were a series of poetic-visual books exploring sensory perception, semiotics, and symbolic systems. Mignani’s work remained defiantly independent, often engaged with both political commentary and abstract thought. He published in independent journals and participated in artist-run spaces, operating largely outside institutional frameworks. Later in life, he faced serious health issues following a stroke in 1988 but continued to produce drawings, sculptural pieces, and poetic texts. His final solo exhibition, PILGRIMage (2001), co-created with Paolo Argeri, took place at Leonardi V-Idea in Genoa and reflected his lifelong interest in poetic structure, inspired in part by E. E. Cummings. A posthumous retrospective of his work was held in 2011 at the Museo di Villa Croce, reaffirming his importance in the field of verbo-visual experimentation. Mignani’s legacy lies in his ability to bring philosophical depth and poetic sensitivity to a form that refused to separate image from word, thought from action.
