Poésie Épigénétique
Giovanni Fontana
Performances exhibitionFrom Concrete to Liquid to Spoken Worlds to the Word
26 min
Performance held on August 23, 2017, on the occasion of the exhibition From Concrete to Liquid to Spoken Worlds to the Word.
The poet-performer Giovanni Fontana is a true «poly-artist», he extends and modifies the limits of poetry. His poetry is charged with new tensions, characterized by the contamination of systems, the fusion of separate universes, the use of new media and new supports, combining the enormous energies offered by science with the energies of the body and memory, through a different conception of the materiality of language, sustained by the voice; but it is an «other» voice, which on the one hand connects us to an area of extinct orality, and on the other hand put us on the face of an unheard-of voice, through digital passages and new tools for sound synthesis.
The poly-artist, then, is the creator and actor of a «hyperpoetry». Thanks to its gesture, its energy, its constant pressure, the poetic body undergoes subsequent processes tuned to multidirectional roads and becomes the object of a progressive plastic modeling, so that, in relation to the «genotype» structure of the score, one could speak, for the evolutive phases in space-time, of Poésie Épigénétique (Epigenetic Poetry).
Giovanni Fontana is the theorist of Epigenetic Poetry. For forty years he has been interested in languages and its varied codes, intermediate techniques and synesthesias. He has written books on the voice in contemporary poetic research and on performance. His sound poems are highly appreciated by international art research circles. He has made video-poems and published several books and records.
He has written poetic texts for many composers including Ennio Morricone, Roman Vlad, Antonio Poce, Antonio D’Antò, Umberto Petrin, Luca Salvadori and others. In 2011, he wrote the text of Elegy for Italy, opera composed by Ennio Morricone for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the unification of Italy. He is part of the group «Hermes Intermedia», along with Antonio Poce, Valerio Murat and Giampiero Gemini.