Perhaps an artist's biography is not, or at least should not be, all that important to an updated interpretation of his work, although at times it is nearly impossible to separate one from the other in light of their constant cross-contamination. This is true of the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti, who began his career in proximity to Arte Povera and was in fact included in this group by the critic Germano Celant. The mid-1960s for him was a time of experimenting with unusual materials and devising implausible combinations, usually of found objects, which soon gave way to an oeuvre with conceptualising undertones—projects in which process took precedence over the final product, considering the latter a mere consequence of the former.

Boetti began to revise the very notion of "the artist as author", a topic of study very close to 1960s aesthetics that found its best outlet in the series of maps begun in 1971, after his travels in Afghanistan. This passion for travel is the point where his biography and artwork intersect, as it was partly inspired by an ancestor who had spent part of his life in foreign lands.

The maps were Boetti's first "collaborative" work, for lack of a better term, though some have even gone so far as to call it "relational". His first map, where each country was identified by its flag, is not something the artist made all by himself; he merely established the basic pattern, and left several important decisions that determined the outcome up to the Afghan artisans who embroidered the map. Consequently, the piece exemplifies a kind of vacant authorship, shaking the very foundations of the traditional "artist as author" notion by putting major decisions in the hands of others. The author of this work is an artist divided, as Boetti made clear in 1972 when he began to sign his creations as an extended, disorientated version of himself, "Alighiero e Boetti": two in one, like the myriad hands that participate in the creation of his works.

An open work based on simple elements is the guiding principle behind Mettere al mondo il mondo [Bringing the World into the World], a series he began in the early 1970s in which the lines are drawn with a blue pen, leaving room for chance and for collaborations. [Estrella de Diego]