Giovanni Fontana

Giovanni Fontana (born 1946) is an Italian poet, performance artist, author and publisher.

Career Fontana was born in Frosinone, Lazio. He has been dealing for forty years with multi-code languages, intermedia techniques, sound poetry and visual poetry.

Interested in the relationship between the arts, he came to a new conception of text and theorized the concepts of "pre-textual poetry" and the "epigenetic poetry". From the latter half of the 1960s, he has experience in theatre with the dramatic art groups. In 1968, he founded a small experimental theatre company. For the theatre he wrote texts, and he also worked as scenographer and musician. and L'uomo delle pulizie (1984), the collection of poetry Scritture lineari (1986), the poems La discarica fluente (1997), Frammenti d'ombre e penombre (2005), Questioni di scarti (2012), the monograph Testi e pre-testi (2010) and two novels: Tarocco Meccanico (1990) and Chorus (2000). Fontana wrote theoretical and critical essays, including "La voce in movimento" (2003), "Poesia della voce e del gesto" (2004), "Le dinamiche nomadi della performance" (2006), "L'opera plurale" (2009).

Fontana was the curator of the CD Verbivocovisual. Antologia di poesia sonora 1964–2004 for the magazine Il Verri; he founded La Taverna di Auerbach, an international magazine of intermedial poetics, and the magazine of sound poetry Momo (voci, suoni & rumori della poesia), and he is an editor of the audiomagazine Baobab.