Angelo Merante

Angelo Merante has been a member of Inism since its foundation (1980), taking an active part both on a creative/productive level as well as on a theoretical one in promoting on an international scale the ideas contained in the first Inist manifesto. He has taken part in all the activities the movement has organised or promoted as well as organising and running two inist exhibitions himself which took place in January 1985 at the University of Poitiers (France). He is the cosignatory of the second Ini manifesto Apollinaria Signa (Sant'Apollinaire - Perugia, 1987) as well as of the manifesto La Videoinipoesia. Manifesto Inista (Rome - Sant'Apollinaire, 1990).

As a convinced promotor, like all inists, of the need to abolish every boundary that exists between the operative sectors in art and constantly preoccupied in reaching and stimulating all the senses of the spectator through a superimposition of levels of expression to be perceived simultaneously, he composes and recomposes original calligraphic patterns, placing side by side scriptural elements with everyday objects, which become for him "other words" of a unique and free language and a new aesthetic. He also works with verbal sounds deliberately deprived of any trace of meaning, transcribed on paper, painted on canvass or transferred onto unusual and original stands. Merante stands out both for his optical anagrammes and for his "inika sonorika" of which the theoretical text, read at the international conference of avan-garde art "Di qua e di là dalla parola. La Lettera e il Segno nelle "scritture" contemporanee", was published in the first number of Bérénice, quarterly journal of comparative studies a nd research on avant-garde literature and art (March 1993) a theme he was to take up again in Introduzione all'inika sonorika. Verso le nuove forme sonore nell'idea inista (Bérénice, II, 5 July 1994).

In its simplest form an optical anagramme is a series of letters laid out on a sheet of paper. These letters (which include the alphabets of languages of the present and the past as well as invented alphabets) are scientifically, or rather, skillfully jumbled, sometimes also with illustrations, so as to clearly present, through their being perceived simultaneously by the eye (hence the name of this artistic form), at least two textual interpretations. Thus the optical anagramme, by using a wider range of supports or technical solutions, naturally embraces poetry/painting on various levels and, like every abstract form, is a means of reaching a universal language. Abstract poetry - in the sense of it being a free orchestration of voices, noises, natural sounds or electronically synthesised, unknown words, written in the symbols of the International Phonetic Association - becomes Inika Sonorika, often recorded on a magnetic tape. Two of his compositions, Ompokema pt.2 and Fonitiko leSinjo, have been broad cast on Radio Nacional España - Radio 2, during the second and third Festival Internacional de Radio Art - F.I.R.A. 90 and F.I.R.A. 91. He is also the author of infinitesimal novels (Città. Introduzione a un nuovo concetto di romanzo, Rome, Nova Editrice, 1984 and the inist edoporic story Verso il verso, ma in direzione opposta, in Bérénice, II, 4 March 1994, may be mentioned here) as well as of numerous book objects and art books.