Between 1973 and 1988, Lista translated the writings of
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,
Luigi Russolo,
Umberto Boccioni as well as the syntheses of plays, theoretical texts and manifestos of the Futurists by publishing several collections and anthologies which introduced and divulged the Italian
avant-garde in France. At the same time he developed an original approach to the work of
Fernand Léger,
Robert Delaunay,
Marcel Duchamp,
Jacques Villon,
Francis Picabia,
Raymond Duchamp-Villon and
Jean Metzinger, dubbed "French
Cubo-Futurism". In 1976 he published the first biography of Marinetti, while beginning to analyse the Futurism founder's political ideas. After studying the political evolution of the Futurist movement, he explored and came to terms with the distinction, formulated by the Florentine Futurists, between "Futurism" and "Marinettism". He contributed in driving the Futurist scholars' attitude towards modernity by focusing on the sense of social and psychological trauma as a result of the industrial transformation. He criticised the different unitarian approaches of Futurist political ideas and in 1980 published the essay "Art and Politics: Left-Wing Futurism in Italy" (in Italian), thus completing his historiographic reconstruction of Futuristic ideology. Lista later explored Futurism's ties with
anarchism, particularly tracing Marinetti's ties with the movement. In 1978 he inventoried the postal innovations of the Futurists, and established a new historiographic object: "Futuristic Postal Art", proclaiming the invention of
mail art by the avant-gardists of the 1920s. That same year, he began researching Futurist photography and the problematic relationship that the Futurists had with the new technological media to which he devoted several publications and a series of exhibits (Paris,
Modena,
Cologne,
Tokyo,
New York City, London and
Florence 1981–2009), particularly defining the specificity of Futurist aesthetic elaboration in the fields of photo-performance, photo-collage and
photomontage, the sandwiching of several negatives. He also found that Marinetti and associated Futurists held a diminished regard for photography's potential to display the entirety of human life. In 1982 he organised the
Futurism: Abstraction and Modernity exhibit in Paris, which explored Futurist contributions to an
abstract art centered on the tangible experience of reality. In 1982, and then in 1984, he published a two-volume general catalogue of the works of
Giacomo Balla, a Futuristic artist of whom he later organised a major retrospective (Milan, 2008). In 1983, in the book
De Chirico and the Avant-Garde, Lista assembled unpublished epistolary documentation on the relationship between Italian and French artists. He also studied
Giorgio de Chirico's role in the evolution of avant-garde artistic culture during
World War I. Furthermore, he dedicated other essays to de Chirico, while also publishing a critical edition of the painter's writings on
Metaphysical art. In 1983 at the Italian Cultural Institute, Hôtel Galliffet, in Paris, he organised
The Futuristic Book exhibition, which revealed the extent of Futurist innovations in the areas of books-as-objects, books-as-typography, books-as-theatre, books-as-machines, graphic compositions, words-in-freedom plates, picture poetry. In 1985 he published
Futurism, a synthesis in which he rejects the "Second Futurism" formula used in Italy to define the period following Boccioni's death. He proposes a historiographic classification by decade of the different studies on the Futuristic movement: beginning with Plastic Dynamism for the first decade, then continuing with "Mechanical Art" for the 1920s and the "Aeroaesthetics" of the 1930s. Next, he expanded on the poetics of Mechanical Art by publishing an essay on
Vinicio Paladini, its originator. In 1989, he explored the osmosis between the plastic arts and the theatre in all the phases of Futurist practises relating to the theatre with the essay "The Futuristic Scene". In 1994 he devoted a biographical essay to
Loie Fuller in which he analysed multimedia dance as an anticipation of the Futurist aesthetics of this movement. He also directed the film montage
Loie Fuller and Her Imitators, which revealed Fuller's breadth and originality. That same year he also published an essay on sculptor
Medardo Rosso, and assembled his theoretical writings on Impressionist sculpture. In 1997, in the book
The Modern Stage: World Encyclopaedia of the Performing Arts in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century (1945–1995), he investigates the different visual forms of scenic creation within the contemporary culture of imagery going beyond the dramatic text. In addition to traditional categories, such as opera, ballet, dance, circus and puppet shows, he lists the newer expressions of multimedia entertainment, dance theatre and artist's theatre. In 2001 he tackled the study of Futurist cinema and advanced its discovery by organising three major retrospectives (
Rovereto,
Barcelona, Paris, 2001–2009). That same year, he published the book
Futurism: Creation and Avant-garde, in which he considers Futurism to be the highest manifestation of an identity
Kunstwollen, which has fertilised and nourished modern Italian art since the country's national unity was achieved. In 2003, he published the book
The Black Sperm (in Italian), which raises major questions on the deep connection between
Eros and writing. In 2005 he published the essay "
Libertine and Libertarian", showing, beyond the protean character of
Dadaism, the philosophical libertine outlook as an ideological source of Dada. In 2009 he organised the retrospective exhibit celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of the creation of the Futuristic movement in Milan. He took up his previous historiographic systematisation of Futurism, stressing its activist model, research in progress and the poetics of an ephemeralisation of art. In 2011 he published the book "
The Stella d’Italia" (star of Italy), an exhaustive essay on the origins and the history of the mythology of
Stella Veneris, the symbol of the Italian land's identity since the time of Ancient Rome. It features an extensive iconographic setting (works of art, monuments, illustrations, posters, decorative objects etc.) about the traditional allegorical representation of Italy: a draped woman with a mural crown surmounted by a star upon her head. Between 2002 and 2013, he published two essays, one on
Enrico Prampolini, the artist who played a major role in the futuristic aero-painting, and the other on the "Vitruvian Man" by Leonardo da Vinci and the reinterpretation of it by avant-garde artists including the Futurists, the cubo-Futurists, the expressionists, and also the neoclassical artists of the "return to order" in thé Thirties and contemporary artists such Pistoletto, Nam June Pake, Dieter Appelt, Ontani and Arnold Skip. He also scrutinised
Antoine Bourdelle's
Proto-Cubism,
Auguste Herbin's
abstract art and
Alberto Magnelli; the theatrical innovations of
Luigi Pirandello,
Pierre Albert-Birot, Emile Malespine; and the dialectical repercussions and reversals of the formal ideas of Futurism as they appear in the authors, artists and neo avant-garde movements of the 20th century:
Lucio Fontana,
Alberto Burri,
Frank Gehry,
Eugène Ionesco,
Arte Povera, Poesia Visiva,
process art, performance and Image-Theatre. ==Major works==