Caterina Davinio - Biography

Biography

Born in Foggia, she grew up in Rome since 1961. She studied literature and art history (student of Giulio Carlo Argan) at Rome University La Sapienza, where, in 1981, she received a bachelor's degree in Italian Literature. Caterina began to write poetry when she was fourteen years old. In Rome she came in contact with the international circuit of experimental poetry and art, resulting in an intense curatorial activity in collaboration with renowned artists, critics and poets of the avant-garde. Since 1997 she has been living in Monza and Lecco, working at international level.

From the early 1990s Davinio was a pioneer of Italian electronic poetry, in the experimental field among writing, visual art, and new media, using computer, video, digital photography, Internet. She was the first woman artist who utilized the computer and Internet in literature and poetry in Italy. Author of novels, poetry, essays, visual and sound poetry, she created also works with traditional techniques, such as painting and photography. She collaborated to netOper@ in 1997, the first Italian interactive work for the web by the composer Sergio Maltagliati. She also initiated Net-poetry in Italy, in 1998, with the website and network Karenina.it. The participants included Julien Blaine, Clemente Padin, Philadelpho Menezes, Mirella Bentivoglio, Lamberto Pignotti, Eugenio Miccini, and many other new media artists, critics, and experimental poets.

Her art has been featured in more than three hundred international exhibitions and festivals in many countries, among them the Biennale de Lyon, the Biennale of Sydney, the Athens Biennial, E-Poetry (University SUNY Buffalo, NY, and Barcelona), Polyphonix Festival (Barcelona and Paris), seven times in the Venice Biennale and collateral events, where she collaborated also as a curator. She exhibited animated digital poetry works - called "Terminal Videopoems" - in the 1997 Biennale, in VeneziaPoesia, a project directed by the poet and writer Nanni Balestrini.

Davinio's net-poetry participated in the Biennale di Venezia in 2001 - Harald Szeemann curator - in the context of Bunker Poetico, which was a collaborative installation - involving 1000 international poets and artists - created by the architect Marco Nereo Rotelli in cooperation with Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici of Venice, Massimo Donà, I Quaderni del Battello Ebbro publisher, Caterina Davinio, Milanocosa cultural association, and others. Davinio engaged in this project renown avant-garde poets and organized a virtual happening on-line called "Parallel Action-Bunker", simultaneous with real readings and performances at Orsogrill delle Artiglierie, a venue of the Venice Biennial. She created the virtual installation The First Poetry Space Shuttle Landing on Second Life and other on-line happenings in the 2009 Venice Biennale Collateral Events, engaging more than 200 poets from around the world, to celebrate the centenary of Italian Futurism. In the context of the 2009 Venice Biennale Davinio participated also in the exhibition Détournement Venise 2009. Davinio has been married two times and one of her husbands was Muslim. She has two sons. In the late Seventies and in the Eighties she lived a turbulent young life marked by drug addiction; this experience emerges in some of her books, such as the novel Color Color (1998), in the poetry collection Serial Phenomenologies (2010), and particularly in Il libro dell'oppio 1975 - 1990 (The Book of Opium 1975 - 1990), a book of poems published in 2012. Lover of travels, she dedicated to India, Africa, and many other places, poetry and photography works.