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Fluxus art in Vicenza
Find Yoko Ono, John Cage and Nam June Paik inside a working textile mill
A major Fluxus and experimental poetry collection lives among the looms of a textile company in the Vicenza countryside.
In the Vicenza countryside, a working textile mill holds one of Italy’s most important collections devoted to Fluxus and experimental poetry. More than 12,000 works, books, recordings, films, letters and editions grew out of Luigi Bonotto’s friendships with artists from the 1960s onwards. Yoko Ono, John Cage, Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys and George Maciunas appear here within the same industrial environment where fabrics are still produced for international fashion
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Marchetto da Trieste, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Know before you go
Fondazione Bonotto is housed within a working textile company. Visits should be arranged in advance and may depend on the Foundation’s current programme. Telephone +39 342 5282876 Email info@fondazionebonotto.org
About
About 30 km north of Vicenza, Fondazione Bonotto is still inside the textile mill where Luigi Bonotto built friendships with artists from the international Fluxus world. Before there was a foundation, there were people coming and going through the Bonotto house and factory. Yoko Ono sat down to play chess with Luigi Bonotto. Dick Higgins challenged him to arm wrestling. Others brought books, tapes, editions, letters and works. Over time, those visits left a physical record behind, and the textile mill became home to a collection built from proximity to the artists themselves. In 1965, Luigi Bonotto met Marcel Duchamp at a chess club in Milan and challenged him to a game. It lasted fewer than fifteen moves. Years later, Bonotto would still cite that encounter among the experiences that shifted his attention from painting towards the ideas, gestures and objects that would lead him to John Cage and Fluxus.
→ THE COLLECTION IS STILL INSIDE THE MILL
Luigi Bonotto was a textile entrepreneur who had also studied at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts under Emilio Vedova. Artists became part of family and factory life: they came to the house, stayed, talked, worked and formed friendships that lasted for decades. The collection grew out of those relationships and remains inside the working mill today and includes Yoko Ono, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, George Maciunas, Claes Oldenburg, Christo and Jeanne Claude, Merce Cunningham, Jonas Mekas and La Monte Young, alongside major figures in Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry. Among its individual works are Nam June Paik’s 1989 robot The Baseball Player, a John Cage watercolour, Maciunas Fluxkits and Spice Chess, and Beuys’s Kunst = Kapital.
From the 1970s onwards, artists stayed at the Bonotto home and worked inside the Molvena factory. Some produced pieces specifically for these spaces. Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, Philip Corner and others even designed personalised grappa bottles after discovering the local spirit during dinners nearby.
The archive has since collaborated with institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Museum of Contemporary Art Houston, Venice Biennale and São Paulo Biennale. Its complete digital archive has also become an international research reference for Fluxus and experimental poetry. The Foundation is listed by Italy’s Ministry of Culture as offering guided visits, and its programme includes workshops, performances, lectures, concerts and specialist schools. In May 2026, for example, an international Spring School included five days of archive study, performances and a visit to the collection itself.
The recorded example says it best: the wheat under the snow s’ingavàssa. It meant putting down roots and becoming lush.
The Vicenza Lexicon →