Mariella Bettineschi

The Archivio di Nuova Scrittura is a cultural association founded in 1988 in Milan, Italy by art collector Paolo Della Grazia. The archive preserves a large artistic and documentary heritage about any form of artistic expression featuring the use of both the word and the sign. Born from the encounter between Della Grazia and artist Ugo Carrega, in the 1990s the ANS became the main Italian research center on visual poetry, organizing exhibitions, meetings and other cultural events. In 1998 the Archivio di Nuova Scrittura was deposited in part at the Mart in Rovereto and in part at the Museion in Bozen. The artwork section of the ANS includes about 1,600 works by international artists at Mart and about 2,000 at Museion. The ANS archives preserve, apart from the internal archive of the association, the Fraccaro-Carrega fonds, containing the papers of collector Marco Fraccaro and visual poet Ugo Carrega. The library section, preserved at Mart, contains more than 18,000 volumes, among them 600 artist's books and hundreds of futurist first editions, and 600 art magazines including about 300 international artist's magazines.