This project explores relational and collaborative practice within postwar and contemporary Italian art. It examines a groundbreaking set of artists and critics brought together by similar working methods and group associations as well as personal and family ties. Emphasizing the monastic connotations of poverty, the book examines the work of prominent couples within Arte Povera, including Mario and Marisa Merz and Alighiero and Annemarie Sauzeau Boetti. Significant figures on that movement's fringes are also examined, with chapters on the feminist partnership between Carla Lonzi and Carla Accardi and on Carol Rama and Edoardo Sanguineti’s joint interest in aesthetic deformation. Arguing that relationships became central to establishing a new politics of shared experience in the art world, this book demonstrates how Italian artists expanded the formal and methodological boundaries of socially engaged art.