Sabine Venaruzzo

- France -

A poet, performer, opera singer and actress, trained in 2009 at the Action Theater in Berlin, Sabine Venaruzzo devotes a large part in spontaneous / real time creation. In 2012, La Demoiselle et cætera has become a spectacular form of her poetry in the sense that she appeals to theater, singing, movement, music and staging altogether. A proposition of multifaceted performances in which poetry is central. In 2016, she launched a vast poetic construction, « Sur les routes » (On the roads), aiming at turning the world into a poetic one. In this way she is setting her P.P.F. (Projet Poétique Fondamental, Fundamental poetic project) in direct contact with reality. It is a cross-border project with multiple engines, closely linked to its identity at the junction of various cultures: a family story marked by migration and European history, an atypical path abroad (studies, jobs, stays), and the practice of several languages. Her writings are published in magazines, anthologies and books both personal and collective. She is regularly invited to festivals and writer-in residences, and for 15 years is pioneering the poetry festival « Les journées Poët Poët, la poësie dans tous ses états d’art » in the Alpes Maritimes (France).


Sabine VENARUZZO’s poems are profoundly marked with the sonority and musicality of words. After her training at Berlin’s Action Theater, the spontaneous composition/in real time – whether written, bodily or oral – is at the core of her concern. This line of work that questions the state of presence to the world and the consciousness within the action, is a determinant factor of her future poetical works.

 

For more than 15 years, she sums up experiments of poetry outside the book blending poetic writing and performing arts, for and with all types of audience. In this way she establishes the principle of performed acts of poetry, ephemeral or lasting in situ, as in 2012 with « La Demoiselle et cætera », embodied manifestation of her poetry. She stands up strongly for the body’s rôle in poetry’s passing on in which the concepts of « corpoliture » (to write with one’s body, space becoming the white sheet) and of « oraliture » (to write with voice) prevail as much as plain writing.

 

In 2016, when she launches her long course project « Sur les routes » (« On the roads ») whose ambition is to poetize the world, she affirms : « to go on the roads with my poems as my luggage means to scale to reality the crazy urge to poetize the world. Utopia ? No, an absolute necessity ! This is a matter of urgency ! I dare to affirm that the poet holds a rôle in the city and owes to himself to give depth, to provide for density, to enhance vision, to humanize borders and to make sensitivity spring up again in the reality that suffocates it. A sensitivity made of our personal stories, collective memory and current events. This my state of emergency ! ».

 

This is a way to put into action her P.P.F. manifesto (Fundamental Poetic Project) : a reconquest of the spaces where the poet makes sentivity spring up in our realities that suffocate it. She initiates a process of participative poetic creation in which the collected words in various encounters give birth to a brotherly or universal poem. A potential answer to the haunting question : What is the use of it ?

 

She specifies : « Words cannot be stopped, they are free as air once spoken. If the body they live in cannot travel freely they will go by themselves pass on their screams. Because a border symbolizes a closed mental scheme, a self-centered structure wearing bliders. Border is closure when poetry is aperture. Because today’s world rebuilds its walls, erects new ones and because the concept of border gets reaffirmed again and again as  the main guideline of a new world order ».

 

In January 2017, her symbolic march between Vintimille and Nice, « L’humanité avant toute chose » (« Humanity before anything ») is filmed by the video artist Rémy Massagli. The short movie is shown in French and foreign festivals. She performs the « Mots Charte(r)s » on Berlin’s Tempelhof old airport. In 2020’s summer, she « corpoliture » (writes with her body) the « Cris Demoiselle » in response to the new mathematics of space and the new morphology of living beings induced by the health crisis.

 

Poetic residencies are as many opportunities to enrich her project (Une Poule sur un mur/Sensibilis in 2018, Vallée d’Aspe in 2021, Pays de Grasse in 2022). She participates at various actions towards audiences, from nursery babies to senior people, encouraging them to take poetic action (written/oral/visual/bodily).

More about the poet

Poetry

  1. AND NOW, I WAIT / ET MAINTENANT, J’ATTENDS

  2. HUMANITÉ FIRST / L'HUMANITÉ AVANT TOUTE CHOSE

  3. LIBERTÉ / LIBERTY

  4. IN THE WILD / ÉTAT SAUVAGE

  5. RECOVERED TRAVEL JOURNAL / CARNET DE VOYAGES REPÊCHE