This volume dedicated to Mauro Staccioli: gli anni di cemento 1968-1982 is not intended to be an edition accompanying an event or exhibition or a catalogue raisonné, but instead its aim is to provide the main elements in order to extend the knowledge of this first part of his oeuvre.

Andrea Alibrandi in the catalog

These works, which, together with a group of other ones, can be considered the initial core of Staccioli’s work in the tempest of the years of ’68-’69, strongly marked by the red-hot political and cultural climate, already contain the motions and demands inside and outside of their conception, crafting and shape. Staccioli, at the time only in his early thirties, already had a past of political activism behind him, as well as having taught art in Sardinia where he had also helped to found the “Gruppo di iniziativa” (Initiative Group) with other intellectuals. Tellingly, these works just mentioned and the others dating from before 1971 – three years that were significant in forming Staccioli’s vocabulary – are defined by the use of concrete and iron, in solid geometric shapes with spikes. It is almost as if they were in response to his immersion in the urban city contexts first of Lodi and then Milan, where the relationship between individual and the urban topological reality is marked by permanent tension and a coarse everyday encounter both in the places of production and in those of study, and in the simple everyday routine.

Bruno Corà, Mauro Staccioli: the years of concrete, in the catalog