We wrap up this week by highlighting a recent addition from Italian multimodal poet and performance artist Giovanni Fontana: a sampler of six recordings from his prodigious career. Titles include "Per Segrete Stanze," "Sento Dunque Suono," "Pressing," "Vesunna," "Di Bocca in Bocca," and "Le Tombeau D'Amadeus."
"In Fontana's work, the voice becomes inexhaustibly sound, word, phrase, speech, and it does so in its own rhythmic continuity. Poetry is not only with the voice and in the voice, but behind the voice, within one's body, where are also chants and sighs, and everything else beyond the saying word is a sign of inexpressible, primordial conscience of the existence," Paul Zumthor writes. "Fontana refers to the human body as a primitive and final reality, where the voice emanating from the whole body, confirm (our) corpus and spiritus as one only thing, that is a sort of primitive cry, a sonority destined to end with the last breath, identified by a gesture of the body, by the most simplest and radical gesture: that of living."
Sean McCann offers a similar appraisal, noting that "In one light, Fontana's voice erects a brutal and guttural effigy of man, primitive and hermetic. Yet, stepping to the side, one can see the thin strands of support bolstering such combustibles." McCann expands his focus to Fontana's full spate of creative endeavors, concluding, "The interconnection between Giovanni's visual and audio artwork is significant. Words twist and dissolve; blotted with ink, soaring across an empty score." This reinforces Fontana's own assertion that "Usually in art, the signifier is much more important than meaning. Because in art it is important not what is said, but how it is said."
You can listen to these six recordings on PennSound new Giovanni Fontana author page.
