Are you referring to Amore Mio with Achille Bonito Oliva? Yes, I knew Achille well too. How long did you carry on with the extroflections? I started with the Cenobio exhibition, as we were saying, and then carried on over time. I still test them out now, but not like I used to. The last extroflected works were the ones I did with Anna Canali, with Galleria d’Arte Struktura, towards the end of the 1980s. Then I did carry on working with extroflections, but in a different way, creating an oeuvre that I would say is more intimate and personal. How was the Cenobio exhibition received? It went down very well in Milan, I remember that Guido Ballo took his pupils from the Brera Academy. Germano Celant wrote the presentation of the exhibition for me. It was one of the last things he did before going over completely to Arte Povera. Then Celant organised the Amalfi experience, Arte Povera+Azioni Povere (Arte Povera-Poor Art+Poor Actions) where I went too. There were invited artists and also others, like me, Paolo Icaro, Gino Marotta or Daniel Buren, who did some spontaneous, personal actions in order to take part and support the event. I did not present my work, but took part by putting on some interventions with Marotta and Pistoletto. For example, I did a work with Pistoletto in the main piazza. If I’m not mistaken it was a sort of theatrical performance. The other action was with Richard Long, who put on a true performance out in the Amalfi landscape. When you came back to Italy did you keep the contacts you made in New York or did they get lost along the way? In Italy I didn’t constantly keep up the relationships with the artists that I had met in New York, so lots of those bonds got weaker and weaker and eventually disappeared. I have to say that the type of relationship I had with the American artists was in part different to what I had with the Italian artists. We went to galleries and exchanged views like before,
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but in a slightly different way. All the same, we swapped lots of ideas and I still have a very clear memory of it. The experience in New York was definitely useful for me. It opened up my horizons, giving me a different and more open vision. They were important years for my formation. I came across all sorts of things, both in artistic and political terms. Even if you don’t understand things right there and then, they leave a great mark, they settle in you, and then re-emerge in time. Once you came back to Italy, how did your relationships with the Milanese milieu develop? I had started to form bonds with the Milanese milieu before I left for New York, in particular with the Brera group. I sometimes went to Milan and hung out in the Brera area, at the Jamaica bar. I also kept in touch with many of the artists that I met in that period while I was in America. For example, I remember that Guido Ballo came to visit, and so did many others like him. Once I went to Philadelphia with Ballo, where we met Dorazio. At that time he still taught at the University of Philadelphia for one semester a year. During that stay with Ballo I went to visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art. So they were years with lots of ties and toing and fro-ing of ideas, with very different, intertwining experiences in a short time span. It must have been quite an interchange, what have you brought with you from that period? It was an amazing time. We worked together, thought in the same way, and we needed to swap ideas. It was not like now with the help we get from the Internet. The only way to have contacts and swap views was to meet, to speak. My extroflections come about from a particular artistic moment and a very precise phase in my career, and in part also from the comparison with Castellani and Bonalumi, but mine were nevertheless different from theirs. They were starting from a different tack. I’ve noticed that both on your and these artists’ parts there was a certain interest in Northern Europe, for example with your exhibition in