Filippo Marinetti Futurist Typography Exhibition Poster

A typographic exhibition poster imagining a 1995 London show dedicated to Filippo Marinetti's parole in libertà — the words-in-freedom experiments that produced some of the most extreme printed objects of the twentieth century.

The image is a page from Marinetti's metal book: Parole in libertà: olfattive, tattili, termiche, published in 1932. It is exactly what it sounds like. Fifteen sheets of poetry lithographed onto tin, designed by the Futurist artist Tullio d'Albisola (Tullio Mazzotti) and manufactured by Vincenzo Nosenzo — an industrialist in Savona who owned a tin-can factory and had developed and patented his own process of printing on metal, which he called "lito-latta." The sheets rotate on metal wire spindles attached to an aluminium spine. The edition was 101 copies, 50 for sale. A copy was acquired by the British Library in 2009 for £83,000. It is simultaneously a collection of poetry, an industrial artefact, and one of the most literal statements in the history of the book: that the machine age required a machine-age object.

The page shown here enacts Marinetti's typographic principles directly. "Sì" and "No" — yes and no, the most elemental binary in language — cascade diagonally across a divided ground in alternating weights and colours. Marinetti had been arguing since his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912) that the straight horizontal line of conventional typography was a form of submission — to tradition, to the academy, to the static past. The diagonal was the only direction that could honestly represent the speed and simultaneity of modern life. Parole in libertà was the fullest realisation of that argument: not just theory, but object.

The influence of these ideas ran through the Bauhaus, De Stijl, and the New Typography of the 1920s. By the 1990s, postmodern graphic designers working with newly fluid digital tools were returning to many of the same questions — the authority of the grid, the supposed neutrality of type, the politics of the horizontal line. Our poster imagines a spring 1995 exhibition at a fictional London School of Type Design, presenting the metal book pages as typographic works in their own right. The institutional restraint of the setting — modest right-aligned exhibition details, the clean body copy beneath — is in deliberate counterpoint to the anarchic energy of the work above it.

This is a designed poster, not a historical reproduction. It has been created as part of Art Poster Archive, a project focused on period-accurate exhibition graphics for artists and movements.

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