200 originals, publications and documents.

Concrete poetry was an international artistic phenomenon that emerged in Latin America and Europe in the 1950s. Like the concrete painters, the concrete poets worked with an abstract conception of language: instead of making literary use of words, they explored their visual, spatial, verbal and kinetic possibilities, creating visual, sonorous and even sculptural and videographic poems.

One of the pioneers and main exponents of concrete poetry was the Noigandres group, created in São Paolo (Brazil) in 1952 by the poets Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari. Organized around the magazine of the same name, Noigandres, the group expanded with the integration of other Brazilian artists, a process that culminated in a national exhibition of poetry and concrete painting in 1956.

A decade later, Brazil witnessed the birth of a new poetic movement. Poema/Processo, launched in 1967, emerged as an evolution of the concrete poetry of Wlademir Dias Pino. It emphasized the processual nature of poetic creation and was markedly political in character.

Archivo Lafuente houses the Iván Cardoso collection (Rio de Janeiro, 1952), a multidisciplinary Brazilian creator who actively participated in the avant-garde artistic movements of his country. Due to Cardoso’s close relationship with the Noigandres, the collection gathers numerous publications by the poets of the group, including the only original of Poetamenos (1951-53) by Augusto de Campos, a seminal work of Brazilian concrete poetry. The complete collections of the magazines Invenção, Através and Qorpo estranho must also be mentioned, as must the joint works of Augusto de Campos and Julio Plaza (Objetos, 1969; Poemobiles, 1974; Reduchamp, 1976), and creators such as Ferreira Gullar, Fortes de Almeida, José Lino Grunewald, Spanudis and Pedro Xisto.

The Cardoso collection also contains materials from Poema/Processo, from works by poets such as Wlademir Dias Pino, Álvaro de Sá and Neide de Sá to a complete collection of the magazine Ponto and the magazine-envelope Processo, as well as copies of Etapa and Projeto. Finally, it is worth noting Cardoso’s collaboration with Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari in the creation of the magazine Navilouca (1974), linked to Brazilian counterculture and Tropicalism. Archivo Lafuente possesses numerous original materials used in its production.