Frédéric Acquaviva

Frédéric Acquaviva (born France January 20, 1967) is an autodidact experimental composer and avant-garde sound artist living in Berlin.

Acquaviva has been prolific on the underground/experimental music scene since 1990. Creator of "chronopolyphonic" installations, he works on the notion of "oxymoron" and in the intersection of instrumental or voice with computer editing since 1990, sometimes including video-texts or live streams, mixing a conceptual approach with physical body sounds. His music pieces are thought from the compositional phase to the form of the final objet, as people could see at his retrospective sound exhibition "Frédéric Acquaviva, Music & Multiples Multiple Musics" at La Plaque Tournante, Berlin, in 2017 or with the first exhibition of his magazine CRU curated by Martha Willette Lewis at Institute Library, New Haven.

He has worked with major figures of the historical avant-garde, Isidore Isou, Marcel Hanoun, Pierre Guyotat, Bernard Heidsieck, Maurice Lemaître, Henri Chopin as well as people from a more recent experimental scene like poets-artists Jean-Luc Parant, Joël Hubaut, lettrist Broutin, poet-film maker F.J Ossang, choreograph Maria Faustino, Maîtresse Cindy, trombone player Thierry Madiot, pianist Mark Knoop, harpist Helen Sharp, flutist Carin Levine, Bartosz Glowacki (accordeon) and mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg.

His work has been performed in concert halls and also galleries like Palais de Tokyo and TIPI du Centre Pompidou in Paris, Moderna Museet Stockholm, 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 Experimental Intermedia in New York, Gallery Lara Vincy in Paris, Gallery White Box in New York, Le Lieu, Québec, Spor Festival in Aarhus, Futura Festival in Crest, Licences Festival in Paris, ZKM in Karlsruhe, XP in Beijing, BKA in Berlin, Palazzo Bertalazzone in Torino. He has also created works for radios all around the world: France Culture, Radio Libertaire, Resonance FM, WGXC Radio New York, Deutschlandradio Kultur, RadioWebMacba, Radio Canada.

The music critic Franck Mallet wrote a 3 pages essay: "Introducing Frédéric Acquaviva" in art magazine Art Press no. 393, Paris, October 2012.

He received a command from the French Ministry of Culture in 1998, from ACR (France Culture) in 1999, Motus/Palais de Tokyo in 2009 and has been in composing residency at Emily Harvey Foundation Venice (2009, 2011 and 2016), EMS studios in Stockholm (2015) and also won the prestigious Beinecke Fellowship Yale University USA (2012 and 2017), as well as have been curating since 2003 more than 40 exhibitions on avant-garde art and poetry (Gil J Wolman and Isidore Isou among others) in museums such as MACBA, SERRALVES, Museo Reina Sofia.

With voice-artist and mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg, he founded the artist and experimental music space La Plaque Tournante in Berlin in 2014, which is based on Archiv Acquaviva, consisting of a massive archive of Lettrist and experimental documents or artworks from the mid 20th century to the present day, alongside Acquaviva's music archive. He also runs the CD-DVD-Web Site-Magazine CRU (present in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; MACBA, Barcelona; Fondazione Bonotto, Italy).

Acquaviva has also published around 100 publications, and apart his own musical work and multiples, many artist books spanning Lettrism, Body and Bio art, Sonic art and composers under the labels Casus Belli, Editions AcquAvivA, £@B and B@£.