Alessandro De Francesco - Biography

Alessandro De Francesco (Pisa, 1981) is an Italian poet, theoretician and sound artist based in Paris, France. He earned a degree in Philosophy at the University of Pisa and studied philosophy and comparative literature at the Écoles Normales Supérieures of Paris and Lyon and at the Technische Universität Berlin. Trained as a musician as well, he played bass professionally, attended the Siena Jazz International Master Classes and studied composition and electronic music a.o. at IRCAM (Paris), Accademia Chigiana (Siena), Centro Musica & Arte (Florence).

Internationally regarded as one of the most significant young Italian poets, he has been Poet-in-Residence at European Graduate School in 2008 and is currently Creative Writing program director and teacher at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Literature Theory lecturer at University of Paris – Sorbonne, Italian Contemporary Poetry lecturer at École Normale Supérieure in Lyon and associate curator for literature and film at Centre Pompidou. He has also been artist-in-residence in several European countries, often with projects focused on the interaction between poetry and sound art.

Alessandro De Francesco published the following books of poetry: Lo spostamento degli oggetti (Verona: Cierre Grafica, 2008, language: Italian), da 1000m (e-book, www.gammm.org, 2009, language: Italian, English and French), Redéfinition (Paris: Mix., 2010, language: French). This last work, originally written in Italian, has been translated in six languages and published in poetry reviews worldwide (a.o. Nioques, Fence, OR, Anterem, il verri, Semicerchio, poet, OEI). The Italian and Dutch versions will be published in 2011 respectively by La Camera Verde (Rome) and Onomatopee (Eindhoven).

In his essay on Alessandro De Francesco's first book Lo spostamento degli oggetti (Objects Moving), Martin Rueff points out many complex lyrical, objectual and philosophical articulations of Alessandro De Francesco's poetry and underlines the depth and variety of its international references. In Da 1000m (From 1000m), Ridefinizione (Redefinition) and the still unfinished La visione a distanza (Remote Vision), Alessandro De Francesco's poetry becomes more prose-like and post-genre oriented, but there is still a strong continuity in all his work until today. Since the beginning, Alessandro De Francesco undertook a project of deconstruction of the borders dividing, on the one hand, national literary traditions and, on the other hand, lyrical and experimental approaches through a permanent redefinition of a series of key-themes: narrative, perception, emotion (almost in a clinical sense), sleep and dreams (from a perspective which is far from any post-surrealistic seduction), childhood, possibility and events, information and media, installation, technology, life of objects in space and time, unspeakable and unknown contents.

Very active also as a theoretician and translator, Alessandro De Francesco published several articles mainly focused on western poetics from the 19th century until today and translations from Italian, French, German and English poetry and theory.

Alessandro De Francesco has been invited by many academic and non-academic institutions in Europe, USA and Canada for poetry readings and lectures (a.o. University of London's School of Advanced Study, Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, The Berlin University of the Arts, Outpost for Contemporary Art Los Angeles, McGill University, Guelph University, Media-Lab Tallinn, Verona Poetry Biennale, Printemps des poètes Berlin, La poésie / nuit poetry festival, Biennale des poètes en Val-de-Marne...) and since 2005 he has been realizing all over Europe several “reading environments”, as he calls his poetry performances and installations with voice digital processing. Among them: o.m., Arthouse Tacheles, Berlin 2005; sosta#1, University of the Arts, Berlin 2006; sosta#3, Denkmalschmiede Höfgen, Leipzig 2006; lo spostamento degli oggetti, Ausland Berlin, 2007; ridefinizione, European tour with the composer and performer Paolo Ingrosso: Amsterdam, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Lyon, Verona Rome, Lyon, 2008-10; cercavo fantasie e trovavo solo sassi., Florence 2009, etc. De Francesco's reading environments are often produced by STEIM, Holland's leading centre of electronic performing arts.

Through the “reading environments” and an ongoing 3D text visual processing project, Alessandro De Francesco conceived the innovatory notion of “augmented writing”. This notion, spanning from poetry to sound and visual art, describes Alessandro De Francesco's critical use of technology and digital media within his writing and performing practice. A sort of iconoclast double of the “augmented” and “virtual” realities, the “augmented writing” consists of sonic and visual enhancements of the text through sound treatment and graphic design software. The text remains at the same time the sole source and object of these multi-media works, since no external sound or image are added besides the sonic and visual digital treatments of the text itself.