Frédéric Acquaviva, born near Paris in 1967, is a self-taught experimental composer and avant-garde sound artist who lives in Paris, Berlin and London. He works with voice, instruments, electronics, film and body sounds.
Acquaviva has been involved in the underground and experimental music scene since 1990. He has collaborated with important personalities of the historical avant-garde, including Isidor Isou, Marcel Hanoun, Pierre Guyotat, Bernard Heidsieck, Maurice Lemaître and Henri Chopin, as well as creatives of the more recent experimental scene such as poet-artists Jean-Luc Parant and Joël Hubaut, poet-filmmaker F. J. Ossang, the cellist Anton Lukoszewieze, the violinist Chihiro Ono, the trombonist Thierry Madiot, the pianist Mark Knoop and the mezzo-soprano Loré Lixenberg.
As the creator of "chronopolyphonic" installations, he has been working with the idea of the "oxymoron" since 1990. At the interface of instrumental and speech sounds, he uses computer processing and mixes it with physical body sounds. Some works include video texts or live streams.
His musical pieces must be considered from the compositional phase to the form of the final work, which was well demonstrated in subsequent exhibitions: In his retrospective sound exhibition "Frédéric Acquaviva, Music & Multiples Multiple Musics" at the project space "La Plaque Tournante" in Berlin (2017), in the first exhibition on his magazine "CRU" curated by Martha Willette Lewis at the Institute Library Gallery in New Haven, or in the comprehensive exhibition of his "CRU" issues at the Librarie-Galerie Lecointre et Drouet in Paris in 2018.
His work has been exhibited in concert halls and galleries such as the Palais de Tokyo and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Moderna Museet Stockholm, the Weserburg Museum in Bremen, the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London, La Fenice in Venice, Fylkingen in Stockholm, Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening Institute and Phill Niblock's Experimental Intermedia in New York, the Galerie Lara Vincy in Paris, the Galerie White Box in New York City, the Center for Contemporary Art Le Lieu in Québec, the Spor Festival in Aarhus, the Futura Festival in Crest, the Licences Festival in Paris, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, XP in Beijing, Hamburger Bahnhof and the Kantine im Berghain in Berlin and the Palazzo Bertalazzone in Turin.
He has furthermore created works for radio stations all over the world: France Culture, Radio Libertaire, BBC Radio3, Resonance FM, WGXC Radio New York, Deutschlandradio Kultur, RadioWebMacba, Radio Canada.
The music critic Franck Mallet wrote the essay: "Introducing Frédéric Acquaviva". Yoann Sarrat published a special issue of his magazine "Freeing (Our Bodies) # 2" on the music of Frédéric Acquaviva in the Parisian art magazine Art Press. It included contributions by Henri Chopin, Maurice Lemaître, Dorothy Iannone, ORLAN and Jacques Lizène , Jean-François Bory, Philip Corner, Bernard Heidsieck, Tom Johnson, Esther Ferrer.
Acquaviva was commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture in 1998, by ACR (France Culture) in 1999 and 2018, and by Motus / Palais de Tokyo in 2009. He has worked as a composer at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice (2009, 2011 and 2016) and at the EMS studios in Stockholm (2015 and 2019). Acquaviva also received the prestigious Beinecke Fellowship from Yale University in the USA (2012 and 2017). Since 2003, he has curated more than 40 exhibitions on avant-garde art and poetry (Gil J Wolman and Isidore Isou, among others) in museums such as the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), Serralves and the Museo Reina Sofia. In June 2019, Acquaviva's first monograph on Isidore Isou's artworks (Editions du Griffon) was awarded the FILAF prize for the best contemporary art book of the year.
Together with vocal artist and mezzo-soprano Loré Lixenberg, he founded the artist and experimental music space La Plaque Tournante in Berlin in 2014. This is fed by the AcquAvivA archive - an extensive collection of works by Lettrists and documents on experimental art from the mid-20th century to the present day. He also runs the CD-DVD website magazine CRU (represented in the collections of the Center Pompidou, Paris; MACBA, Barcelona; Fondazione Bonotto, Italy).
Acquaviva has also published more than 100 publications: in addition to his own musical works and multiples (published by Al Dante or Les Presses du Réel), numerous artist books on Lettrism, body and bio-art, sound art and composers (published by the labels Casus Belli, Editions AcquAvivA, £@B and B@£).
