new book by Giovanni Fontana / Vispo

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

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).