INTERVIEW
Meet our resident: Francesca Fantini
By Goya van der HeydenYou are starting your residency at Intro in Situ very soon, what are some things you are planning to do at Intro? What can we expect?
I am very excited to start my residency in Intro in Situ. It might sound obvious. but it’s simply true. Maastricht and Intro are not new to me and my artistic practice: I am literally re-siding in here, sitting again in a ground that has been feeding my roots for quite some years. If back then I was still searching, in terms of sounds, practice, identity, this time I come because I have found something I want to share and grow together with a community.
My main plan is to share my method - or, more artistically speaking, my sonic performative world - with audiences and colleagues. I want them to experience, physically, how I perceive sound, shape it, and let it carry meaningful messages. I aim to build a space of shared knowledge and mutual mentorship, a safe space where to explore, create, and feel strong together, especially in these challenging times.
But! If you are a much more pragmatic person I also like you joining! So what I am planning is a series of monthly performative appointments (better known as concerts or work in progress presentations), followed by jam sessions (oriented in free jazz/free improvisation style). Talks won’t be missing either! I like history, sociology, philosophy and I am currently studying authors like Ponty, Oliveros, Eco, Calvino, and theories like Embodied Cognition Theory and Decolonising Approaches to Culture. I forgot to mention I play saxophone, focusing on avant-garde repertoire, experimental music and free improvisation.
You speak about a fascination for non-idiomatic improvisation, simply put, a style of music improvisation that avoids ‘rules’. How do you position yourself as a classically trained musician and PhD researcher within that context? Are there things you have to unlearn?
Sometimes I think I should have been less of a “good girl” back in my teens and twenties - so that now I would be perfectly satisfied interpreting a score in an elegant dress. Joking, of course! I started my PhD to keep nerding out, but at the same time, I am breaking rules there and here.
I think if I hadn’t studied classical music, I wouldn’t be so drawn to free improvisation. Classical
What I mean is that European music has always contained an active dialogue between composition, interpretation, and improvisation - the body has always had a voice. But between the 19th and 20th centuries, musical authority became rigid, and scores were treated almost like a bible. This is the “rule” I am pushing against. It is not about unlearning; it is about reshaping, reclaiming space, and allowing more freedom in the musical discourse, intertwining interpretation and free improvisation.
Currently you are pursuing a PhD at Roma Tre University in Cultures, Practices and Technologies of Cinema, Media, Music,Theatre and Dance, leading a research rooted in embodiment. Can you explain to us in your words what embodiment means, and how that relates to music?
I have slightly anticipated you with my previous answer but I appreciate focusing on the topic of embodiment and what it means to me and how I relate it to music practice.
Embodiment is a sort of body knowledge. Not a sort, it is the knowledge that resided in our bodies! We often think (especially in European thought) that body and mind exist in a dichotomy, and that knowledge and wisdom exist only in the intellect.
But it is definitely outdated. Thinking this way re-project the same dichotomy into society, recognising as more intelligent people that work with abstract tools over people that use their bodies and tacit knowledge every day. This brings to classism. And we should be quite bored of it.
Our bodies store information from training, traumas, environmental exposure, and daily life. And we all need ways to express it safely. Sometimes that is through words; sometimes, it is through more body-oriented practices. One of those is music.
Within the context of interpretation I have more limits of course. I tried to avoid thinking that I have to feel entirely into the music. I rather think the music is entirely coming from my body. When I am improvising there is no limit, unless the ones that the moment is bringing along.
While reading about embodiment I had to think about this scene in the series Euphoria, where the character Kat is confronted by toxic powerwomen. In that scene, the body seems to be shaped by external gazes and power rather than inner sensation. Do you encounter similar pressures in performance, and do you feel improvisation allows you to resist or renegotiate those forces?
Thanks a lot for this question! I have to say I don’t know the series Euphoria but I love the fact that the musical discourse I am developing can open up broader topics like this.
My research is based on the fact that the body is shaped by external forces. We can not escape it and that is its strength. If I play a composition, I absorb a language, I shape my movements so that my body can play it. Later on, my body makes it proper, because it lived it, and new creation can arise. With our body we access the world, we operate in it, we build knowledge. But I think there is a huge difference between shaping, influencing, and controlling.
When our body is controlled by external forces -normative, aesthetic, economic, or ideological- it no longer opens a dialogue with the world but becomes an object addressed to an external norm. It loses itself as a subject.
Regarding free improvisation as a space to renegotiate these external forces: yes, I think it helps. Free improvisation is showing a process in real time.The making happens in the moment (of course always well informed from previous practice, at least in my approach). But still, the process is on the stage. At the beginning, I was feeling vulnerable in sharing so much of myself: of my body performing, my music reaching out, my method, my process. Now I feel more comfortable in it because my body is what I want it to be. It is yet shaped by our contemporaneity, but it can also find the space to disagree with it and to propose an alternative.
In order to achieve this, I work with a method, not a rigid one, but a flexible method that resonates with my persona. I bring the body to the method, not viceversa. And then the process unfolds and the process leads to its results, but they are never end points. When performance is reduced only to the presentation of a finished product, there is a risk that performers’ bodies become exposed to external gazes and power structures without mediation. Sharing methods and processes is vital and allows us to create communities that have a common code.
I hope during my residency I will manage to give time to process, more experienced performance, and shared dialogue.