Caterina Davinio

Caterina Davinio (born Maria Caterina Invidia; 25 November 1957, Foggia) is an Italian poet, novelist and new media artist.

Born in Foggia, Davinio grew up in Rome since 1961.

Davinio lived a turbulent young life marked by heroin addiction and abuse of drugs and alcohol; this experience emerges in many of her literary works, particularly in Il libro dell'oppio 1975 – 1990 (The Book of Opium 1975 – 1990).

Student at the Faculty of Humanities, University La Sapienza of Rome, in 1977, she participated in the Movement of 1977 and in the occupation of the faculty.

In 1980 she married the Turkish entrepreneur Levent Muharrem Sergün in Rome, moving to Munich and Istanbul; in 1982 their son Leonardo was born in Rome.

She studied literature and art history (student of Giulio Carlo Argan) at Rome University La Sapienza, where, in 1981, she received a MA degree in Italian Literature.

Davinio 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 a number of collaborations with renowned artists, critics and poets of the avant-garde.

After the divorce in 1984, Caterina married Claudio Preziosi in Romein 1986.

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 and the Internet.

She was the first woman artist who utilized the computer and Internet in literature and poetry in Italy.

Author of visual and sound poetry, she also created works using traditional techniques, such as painting and photography.

She is author of novels, books of poetry, essays, and has received literary awards and recognition in Italy and abroad.

Since 1997, she has been living in Monza and Lecco, working at an international level.

In 1997, she collaborated to netOper@, the first Italian interactive work for the web, by the composer Sergio Maltagliati.

She exhibited animated digital poetry works - called "Terminal Videopoems" - in the 1997 Venice Biennale, in VeneziaPoesia, a project directed by the poet and writer Nanni Balestrini.

She is the author of works of digital art, net.art, video art and was the creator of Italian Net-poetry in 1998.

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, among them two editions of the Biennale de Lyon, the Biennale of Sydney (on-line events), 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.

Net-poetry project Karenina it (1998) was the first art-poetry-communication project presented on the web in an Italian context; the website was not a simple cultural on-line journal, but a "space of aggregation", which hosted an ongoing discourse, involving emerging and established experimental artists, critics, and visual poets.

The communication aspect was treated as an artistic medium that goes beyond the contents or the quality of the words: borders among art, critic, and communication, in Davinio's own concept, were cancelled.

The flow of words and information became art in itself, transcending the necessity to view art in traditional terms of form.

The suffix ".it" present in Karenina.it title is a geographic locator for the origin of the website.

In 1999 she participated, as a poet and a video artist, at the events organized by "Progetto Oreste" at the 48th Venice Biennale, where she also curated a video poetry exhibition.

Davinio's net-poetry participated in the Venice Biennale also 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.

The value of the site resides within the conceptual framework of the Fluxus art movement." Karenina.it won MAD03 Award (section Net-Zin) in 2003, Madrid.

Other Davinio’s net-poetry and net.art performances and events are based on the evolution of the multi-located structure experimented with Parallel Action-Bunker, mentioned before: beyond the simple presence of the performer on stage, performance is considered a collaborative, decentralized, multi-located action; poetry is conceived as "social structure, e-communication, real/virtual interaction", and "e-communication" is assumed as a new material for the artist.

Among them:

Caterina Davinio participated in more than three hundred international art exhibitions in the world, among them: Biennale de Lyon (two editions), Poliphonyx (in Barcelona and in Paris), Liverpool Biennial (Independents, Online Venue), ParmaPoesia, VeneziaPoesia (Nanni Balestrini curator), RomaPoesia, Biennale di arti elettroniche, cinema e televisione of Rome (Marco Maria Gazzano curator), Le tribù dell'Arte, Tribù del video e della performance (Rome, Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Achille Bonito Oliva curator), Artmedia VII (University of Salerno, Mario Costa curator), E-Poetry Festival (University of Barcelona, University SUNY Buffalo, NY), Interactiva, New Media Art Biennial, Merida, Mexico, Hong Kong Artists' Biennial, and many others.

In 2005, she created the net-poetry work "Virtual Island", a web site and poetry network, in the context of the 51st Venice Biennale.

Virtual Island involved 500 international poets, among them: Adunis, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Alda Merini, Fernanda Pivano, and many other established writers.

In 2009, she created the virtual installation The First Poetry Space Shuttle Landing on Second Life and other on-line happenings in the 53rd Venice Biennale Collateral Events, engaging more than 200 poets from around the world, to celebrate the centenary of Italian Futurism.

In the same project she curated also the event Network Poetico Net-Poetry Reading in Webcam, a poetry reading in Skype videocall with poets from various continents and countries.

In the context of the 2009 Venice Biennale Davinio participated also in the exhibition Détournement Venise 2009.

In 2014, she exhibited her net-poetry installation "Big Splash" in the "Master Section" of the international festival OLE.01, dedicated to electronic literature, in the Doric Room of the Royal Palace of Naples; The festival took place in many institutional spaces of Naples in October 2014 and involved some of the main international pioneers of electronic literature and experts and scholars in that field.

Among the literary critics who have written about Davinio's works of fiction and poetry: Francesco Muzzioli, Dante Maffia, Ivano Mugnaini, David W. Seaman; some of the critics who have been interested in her work of digital poetry and electronic art are: Eugenio Miccini, Lamberto Pignotti, Jorge Luiz Antonio, Christopher Thompson Funkhouser, Marco Maria Gazzano, and others.