Tommaso Tozzi - Arte di Opposizione: Stili di vita, situazioni e documenti degli anni Ottanta

The 1980s were not only years of political and aesthetic normality. They were not only the years of Craxi's cultural hegemony and of the emergence of a pacified Italy ready to enrich itself after the ideological binge of the previous decade. At the same time, they were also years of great ferment and reckless experimentation — and this across many different fields, aesthetic as well as political: in graffiti and aerosol art culture, but also in avant-garde electronic cultures and in the nascent scene of alternative computing and social hacking. All of these were practices that, in various ways, would generously seed ideas and concrete solutions later taken up by subsequent movements, in some cases to the point of being absorbed even by official and academic circles. Rediscovering those countercultures more than twenty years on allows us to grant them an illuminating historical perspective, finally acknowledging in full the value they genuinely had. But that is not all. There is also a present-day historical contingency behind the publication of this book. In a moment that appears dominated by a new single mode of thought, revisiting episodes that bear obvious analogies with today allows us to look to the future with greater confidence. As someone once put it: "And yet it moves!"