Giovanni Fontana

GIOVANNI FONTANA

Author: Giovanni Fontana
Title: Sento dunque suono
Year: 1997
Technique: stereophonic sound work
Duration: 23'27''
Edition of 10

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This work also includes:
· 23 score pages in digital format with handwritten notes by the author.
· Digital photographs of performances, by Marco Palladini, Evelyne Goupy and Makoto Kondo.

ABOUT THE WORK

The real protagonist of the sound poem is the voice, understood both as a word that comes from a text, which appears and disappears, and as pure sound, as vocality, but also as a spell, as a seduction that captures listening. In this sense, the author plays with the myth of the Sirens, figures that evoke the seduction of song and at the same time the charm of the discovery of the new, the magic of mystery or, in other words, the courage of knowledge. The poem also reveals an allegorical character. In fact, every new cognitive experience requires a gesture of courage, an unconventional gesture, which challenges every dogma and every categorical principle.

But at the same time, in this work, the voice is also thematized, and, almost becoming the subject of itself, it becomes matter, aspires to emancipate itself from words, to become pure sound: it makes the boundaries of the root disappear, intertwining acoustic matter, where the word becomes sound, sound becomes word, in a vortex of new senses.

In fact, for Fontana the performance involves organizing and harmonizing the sound flow inherent in the textual structure through the use of the voice (main instrument, generator of significance). In action, the voice supports the text, but it can also temporarily abandon it, to dissolve it in space, to break it down into clots of phonemes, into fragments of the body, into flying particulas (particulae), into temporal germs, into pure vibrations capable of coagulating around a concept, to an idea, to a poetic gesture, to a sort of glorious body, which becomes the body of poetry. All this without ever losing sight of the project, without ever losing control of the performing situation, which is essentially a rewriting in terms of space and time, sound and more, which deals with metrics, times, durations, breaks, pauses.

16 score pages in digital format with handwritten notes by the author.

7 score pages in digital format with handwritten notes by the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Giovanni Fontana. Photos, in order of apparition, by: Marco Palladini, Evelyne Goupy (x3) and Makoto Kondo.

Giovanni Fontana (Frosinone, IT, 1946).

A polyartist, creator of sound novels, including Tarocco Meccanico [Mechanical Tarot] (1990) and Chorus (2000), he is the author of intermedia publications. His recent works include the radio play Le droghe di Gardone and the video Poema Bonotto, commissioned respectively by the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris and the Bonotto Foundation. His acoustic production is documented in a vast discography. The latest album is Epigenetic Poetry (LP Recital, Los Angeles 2016). His first book of poetry is the text / score Radio / Dramma (Geiger 1977). Among the most recent creative writings are Déchets (Dernier Télégramme 2014), Issues of waste (Polìmata 2012 - Feronia Award 2013), Fonemi (Peccolo, 2017), Discrasie (Novecento, 2018), La voix et l'absence (Dernier Télégramme , 2019). A theorist of epigenetic poetry, he has written several essays, including La voce in movimento (2003) and Poesia della voce e del gesto (2004). He edited the CD anthology Verbivocovisual (2004) and dedicated the volume Italian Performance Art (2015) to performance. He was a member of the editorial offices of "Tam Tam", "Baobab" and "Otros términos". He founded the poetry magazine "La Taverna di Auerbach" and the audio magazine "Momo". He is a member of the magazines "Doc (k) s", "Inter-Art actuel", "Bérénice" and "The Arts of Sound". He is the editor of "Territori", a magazine of architecture and other languages.

He has written for many musicians, including Ennio Morricone and Roman Vlad. His texts for music include a new version of Igor Stravinsky's Histoire du soldat.

Thanks to his friendship with Adriano Spatola, whose poetry he published for the [dia - foria] editions, he began to frequent the territories of international poetic experimentation very early on, forging collaborative relationships with the most significant exponents: from Dick Higgins to John Giorno, from Henri Chopin to Bernard Heidsieck, from Julien Blaine to Jean-Jacques Lebel. Already in 1981 Arrigo Lora Totino defined him as "one of the best Italian sound poets". According to Henri Chopin, he is "from the same school of composition as Paul De Vree and how he catches us, but, besides, he has an excellent voice" (1983). In unequivocal terms, for Spatola "he is a master", even "diabolic" (1988). Heidsieck writes that "we have much to learn from his struggle between voice and absence" (1989); Pierre Garnier emphasises his "conquest of freedom" (1999); for Gerhard Rühm "his sound poetry is extraordinary" (2003).

He has performed in Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Cyprus, France, Germany, Japan, Greece, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, Hungary, the United States, etc. He has participated in some seven hundred exhibitions, including the Quadrennial of Rome and the Venice Biennale. His work is gathered in the monograph Texts and Pre-texts (Berardelli Foundation, 2009).

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