Benjamin Fanni

Residency report
My stay at La Becque revolved around Wi-Fi Polyphony, a spatialized sound installation in which a ghost orchestra performs requiems inspired by the eastern, western, northern, and southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Rooted in my Romani heritage and shaped by centuries-old funerary rituals, my approach creates a hybrid music at the crossroads of Eastern and Western traditions, combining microtonal scales, harmonic development, and basso continuo.

This stay allowed me to deepen my research into site-specific creation, opportunistic foraging, and spontaneous materials: making strings from brambles, percussion instruments from woven willow, charcoal pigments, and shells from Lake Geneva. My work is built around a conceptual tension between the low-tech of raw artisanal craftsmanship and the high-tech of sound spatialization — between what is made by hand and what is brought to life by electricity.

Musically, this stay marked a real baptism by fire for a practice that had previously been rooted in painting. My relationship with music, intuitive, melodic, made up of incantations and ornamentation, was enthusiastically received by accomplished musicians such as HMOT and Yunis. Nevertheless, experiencing the music of Keiji Haino and HMOT, whether live or during rehearsals, definitively changed my approach and compels me to consider sonic abstraction as the new field to embrace in order to complete my practice. Which is extremely exciting! — Benjamin Fanni

Biography
Benjamin Fanni is a French artist and designer based between Paris and Lausanne. Trained at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and later at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, he founded Studio Johnny Brecht in 2009, developing projects in interior design and scenography for the performing arts, cinema, and fashion. Alongside his design practice, he has developed a multidisciplinary artistic practice combining painting, sculpture, music, writing, and performance. Through a conceptual and poetic approach, his work explores the figure of the ghost and seeks to dismantle the mythologies that shape our relationship to the invisible. His work has been exhibited in France, Belgium, and Switzerland, and in 2021 he received the Talent and Creativity Grant awarded by Casino Barrière de Montreux.