The lecture that Futurist theorist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti gave at the Teatro Artigas in Montevideo caused an uproar. Marinetti, who wrote in both French and Italian and had studied at the Sorbonne, was the engine behind the manifesto that expressed the basic ideas of the movement; that manifesto was launched in Le Figaro in 1909 and was backed by a number of Italian artists the following year. Marinetti’s public presentations were incendiary; he acted as a provocateur, making intentionally aggressive statements in a disruptive syntax also evident in his manifestos, propaganda, poems, and essays. Futurism encompassed all areas of culture—in the visual arts, its adherents included Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, and Ardengo Soffici—in its celebration of the fast-paced world of the future brought on by the machine. It adamantly rejected traditions that held back the vital force of change. Interdisciplinary in nature, Futurism embraced a strategy of international expansion. Indeed, that spirit was partly why Marinetti traveled to Latin America (the “new world”) on more than one occasion, although his public presentations had to negotiate the ideological tensions that associated Futurism with the aggression of Italian Fascism. In the atmosphere between the wars, the lecturer’s rhetoric became ideology. The theme of the three-hour lecture was Montevideo-born French poet Jules Laforgue (1860–87), whom Marinetti praised. This article is signed by H. W., who describes the lecture as a fiery speech by a great communicator of the “new [Italian] aesthetic.” The journalist took the opportunity to criticize the local audience as “long-necked prima donnas […], lovers of Italian opera […] and saccharine melodies” incapable of feeling the power of Marinetti’s outburst or of his “frenetic onomatopoeias.” For H. W., then, the event helped shake up a passive local scene.
