Gaia Ginevra Giorgi

- Italy -

Gaia Ginevra Giorgi is an italian poet, sound-artist, dramaturg and performer. She studied Philosophy and Performing Arts (IUAV, University of Venice). Her practice integrates writing, sound, voice and analog devices. She creates sound stories (Racconto Concreto w/ Demetrio Cecchitelli, Oceani 2021) and site-specific participatory performances. She published L'animale nella fossa (Miraggi Edizioni, 2021), Sylvia Plath. L'altare scuro del sole (Edizioni della sera, 2019) e Manovre Segrete (Interno Poesia, 2017). Co-curator of walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears (Fango Radio), she conceived and co-created RADURA (Vertical Music, 2022). She is founder and member of Extragarbo and Call Monica collectives. She is resident artist at Radio Raheem (Milan).

 

METHODOLOGIES AND RESEARCH

She develop investigation practices and methodologies for an affective and a political rewriting of the landscape (urban and non-urban). Through sound experiments (related to Deep Listening) and site-specific participatory devices, her interventions produce ephemeral habitats, spaces of embodied and radical imagination.
Her practice, based on minor gestures (poetry, sounds, tales, ghosts, magic), betrays the space of the visible by translating it into a new affective and mythopoetic alphabet, into an occult cartography. By means of sound mappings and poetic translations of fantastic urban archaeology, she produce a situated utopia, which undermines geography as a centralized control device - where the non-neutral role of the observer is a generator of reality.


Her intermedial research interrogates memory as an editable, translatable substance that can always be betrayed and used as a potential tool for prefiguration. 

 

Fragmentation, which, according to an assembly method based on recontextualization, dislocation and decentralization, always corresponds to the generative possibility of recomposing by adding complexity, becomes here a decolonizing methodology of linguistic research.
Starting from a feminist, situated perspective, her practice queers and plunders the biographical archive, eventually producing a new collective and anti-authorial memory based on minor stories and on what has been discarded.


On the one hand, the most noticeable of Gaia Ginevra Giorgi's characteristics is the investigation of musicality, and, on the other hand, the mix between the rural and urban landscapes (although the contrast between the last two isn't inevitable). Thus, these aspects join together and the result is an expressionist lyricism – a style, of course, relatable to the Crepuscolars and their topoi but, at the same time, not with the most mournful tones of these authors.

Probably it could be better to accost Giorgi to a combination of writers historically closer to us, as Pavese in “La terra e la morte” (1947), Bertolucci, especially his “Viaggio d’inverno” (1971); Caproni, “Seme del piangere” (1958) but not the "Prosopopee". The theme of journey returns, that of itinerancy and geography exploration accompanied by its precious details, with a sensualistic panism. What remains to the reader is, then, an unexpected sense of experience, an amalgamation of: touch, hearing, sight, taste and olfaction. Thus a language with a recognisable coherence and cohesion, that has in itself the already mentioned echoes, all of them assimilated.

Still talking about words, I have to point out Giorgi's use of adjectives, in its better or worse. She moves adjectives, making, for the ears of an Italian speaker, a remarkable use of the sounds of their syllables. This ensures an emphasis of the poeticism of the verses, and also permits to produce metaphors and contrastive juxtapositions: "limo (loan) | dolce (sweet)", "cielo (sky) | ispido (bristly)”, though sometimes, she runs the risk to be too colorist.

I should also consider the use of ternary structures, of anaphores “io so il fiato bollente dell'asfalto | io so il sole che c'è nella terra screpolata | io so a memoria le cicatrici della luna”, “degli orizzonti bruciati | del sentore di salmastro | dei vigneti invecchiati” and the recurring use of assonances, especially in the book "Sisifo": "sabbia" and "faglia", "afa" e "trascinata"; "resto", "sollevo", "prego". Finally, I want to underline the importance of some lexical choices that she made in these verses: it isn't a bump meeting an aulic word or a contrived phrase, because Giorgi is able to camouflage them with more common expressions, as in the case of “annuvolare", especially if we consider that this word follows the unstressed form of the reflexive pronoun of the third person “s'annuvola", producing an euphony, although for someone it might sound a bit antique.

At last, another positive note: Giorgi, also when she deals with gloomy themes, loneliness, abandonment, is never mournful, on the contrary. Her vitality allows us to accost her to a list of European and American poets. Although on a different playground, although with a different linguistic result that cannot be overwritten and originates from very different choices. There is, in Giorgi's style, something of Brodskij, Bishop and Withman. The life, in other words, also in its harsh moment, can show us epiphanies of uncommon beauty and, in that way, is possible to avoid sorrows and to preserve serenity remnant. 

More about the poet

Poetry

  1. (Untitled) / (Untitled)

  2. (Untitled) / (Untitled)

  3. (Untitled) / (Untitled)

  4. (Untitled) / (Untitled)

  5. (Untitled) / (Untitled)

  6. (Untitled) / (Untitled)

  7. (Untitled) / (Untitled)

  8. (Untitled) / (Untitled)

  9. (Untitled) / (Untitled)

  10. (Untitled) / (Untitled)

  11. (Untitled) / (Untitled)