Biography

Giovanni Fontana (Frosinone, Italy, 1946) is a multi-talented artist. He has experience in visual art, architecture, theatre, literature and music, but the major field of his experiences is that of intermedial writing. He has been dealing for 40 years with multi-code languages. Interested in the relationship between the arts, he comes to a new conception of text and theorizes his “epigenetic poetry”. His visual compositions present themselves as real scores, as pre-texts through which to attain a performance dimension. With regard to the dramatic field, he is active as playwriter and occasionally as director; for theatre he wrote many texts, but he also worked as set designer and musician. He is interested in electronic arts and audiovisuals and has particularly paid attention to the different aspects and ways of cultural communication. He has published books and records. Among his works are the plays Tutuomini (1972), Sturtizia (1972), Ticoshow-Tacoshow (1973), the score-text Radio/Dramma (1977), the visual poetry works Le lamie del labirinto (1981) and L’uomo delle pulizie (1984), the collection of poetry Scritture lineari (1986), the poem La discarica fluente (1997), the sound-novels Tarocco Meccanico (1990) and Chorus (with CD, 2000), the “pre-textual” poem Frammenti d’ombre e penombre (2005), the critical essays La voce in movimento (with CD, 2003), Poesia della voce e del gesto (2004) and the international sound poetry anthology Verbivocovisual (CD in “Il Verri” n° 25, 2004), etc. His poems have been broadcast by the three RAI television network channels, BBC, BRT, RNE and by various private italian and foreign broadcast television.

During the last thirty years, he brought his performance in hundreds of festivals in Belgium, Canada, China, France, Great Britain, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iran, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, United States, etc.

In 1959 he starts taking part in painting exhibitions. In 1963 he holds his first one-man show (“La Saletta” gallery, Frosinone). His first visual writing appears during the years 1966-68 and develops together with sound experimentations on magnetic tape, which will be later used on the stage (1968-1972). With his visual poems he has taken part in over six hundred exhibitions around Europe, in America, in Japan and in Australia. His last one-man show is Testi e pre-testi (Fondazione Berardelli, Brescia, 2010 – with an extensive monograph about his artistic work).

He wrote lyrics for many musicians, including Ennio Morricone, Roman Vlad, Antonio D’Antò, Luca Salvadori. Nowadays he is part of the group “Hermes Intermedia” with composers Antonio Poce, Giampiero Gemini and Valerio Murat.

He is the founder of the review of intermedia poetics La Taverna di Auerbach and of the sound poetry review Momo, he belongs to the editorial staff of Baobab, Le arti del suono, Inter, Doc(k)s, etc., and is the editor of Territori, a review of architecture and other languages.

Statement

In the pre-textual dimension, the polyartist is the creator and the actor of the „Hyperpoetry”. With his gesture, his energy, his relentless pressure, the poetic body undergoes subsequent processes of reorganization and it is subject to a progressive plastic modeling, so that, in reference to the „genotypic” structure of the score and to the evolutionary phases of the action poetry, one might speak of Epigenetic poetry.

In this dimension, my voice in motion, sustained and mediated by modern technologies (which consent to highlight the imperceptible sounds of the body, to amplify the innermost flatus and even to generate new vocal universes, by using more and more sophisticated software, up until the total devastation of the initial acoustic diagrams), produces sounds and draws spaces, becoming text and ultra-text, body and ultra-body, animus and anima, becoming a real and proper “hypervox”. So, we can talk of „electro-phonic mask” (and/or „digital form”), behind which the sound is articulated as one of the fundamental aspects of language, for what looms as a genuine hyper-poetic form: the Epigenetic Poetry.