Giovanni Fontana. Epigenetic Poetry

A large audio visual installation by Giovanni Fontana, one of the key figures in Sound Poetry at an international level, is now on show in Marseille, within Manifesta 13.

His works, assembling electronic devices to project videos and broadcast audios, give materiality to the pluridimensionality of the artists’ works which, as well as being significant from a visual perspective, are also important on a textual level as they represent authentic scores.

Giovanni Fontana, in his Text as a Living Organism, defines this unity as follows: “The poem is organised inside the sound space. What is highlighted in the score is achieved through material vibrations involving all our senses. Perception is not only auditory, it is also optical and haptic. The poetic text, however, like a living organism, maintains its identity in the process of transformation. It also regenerates itself from the inside by autopoietic means, stimulated by the voice and substantially redefined through a relational network with the space-time environment.

The level of organisation of the interacting elements is fundamental for the quality of the work, understood as a real system to be interpreted as intermedia, in the sense that each of the interacting elements does not make sense if considered on its own. Everything is geared towards the whole. In the dynamics of transformation (from the static nature of the page to the space-time dimension of the intermedia poem) the autopoietic process guarantees identity in diversity.” The project aims to link the historical context of original sound poetry with the contemporary one.

(from the press release)