FILIPPO DEORSOLA

is a Queer Belgo-Italian Pianist graduating ‘Cum Laude’ in BA Jazz Performance from CODARTS, Rotterdam’s Conservatoire, in 2021. They afterwards completed a Research-based Master in Philosophy (2021-2023) at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Their artistic research on bodily performativity and explorative improvisational methodologies is due to be published soon along with other researcher’s text in a compendium published by the Universidade Catolica Portuguesa (UCP).

The borders between human and animal, natural and cultural, organic and artificial have been made porous through the 20th and 21st Century. The huge development in informational technology has made clear that our relation to the world was always one mediated by stories, technologies, images, History. The growing ability to translate information from one code to another, from sound to series of 1’s and 0’s , has created new forms of relating to each other and to phenomenons around us. Open-ended artistic practices enable the artist to form an organic and creative response to the ways we dwell on this world. Small models that show alternate possibilities of living and breathing together. New ways of coding life together on this earth. The research was presented in Porto, at Universidade Catolica Portuguesa in December 2021 in the context of [E]motion : Graduate conference on the Arts and Technology.

They have worked, played and toured in a variety of settings , most notably with their Trio ‘Anaphora’ and in duo with Saxophonist Andrea Leone, with whom they created M.A.D. Collective. The collective is currently engaging with the notions of representation and reality through a project researching the connections, reflective tensions and relational insights between Ludwig’s Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Cornelius Cardew’s graphic notation Treatise .

They have collaborated with Mexican composer Josué Amador for a project of soundscape compositions made specifically for a number of locations in the city of the Rotterdam (website here: aporee.org.- ‘A Different Soundscape’) As a student, they have also taken part in the RASL minor (Re-imagining tomorrow through Arts and Sciences), a multidisciplinary course putting together students from CODARTS, Erasmus University, TU Delft and Willem De Koonig Academy of Fine Arts. The course has been nominated for the first Dutch Higher Education Premium award. Within the context of this course and of their own thesis research, the problematic of social media and digitality in contemporary society was inspected through a variety of artistic (Artput (dopaminedemocracy.nl) and theoretical tools (Kruse, Deorsola - Explorations departing from the Topic of Social Media). The Collective ‘Dopamine Democracy’ was created together with other students from the RASL course to satisfy the need to give some sort of response the problem of the digital ( website here Dopamine Democracy)

They also received a composition commission by the Youth section of the French Orchestre National du Jazz. In February 2022, the piece Da Lontano C’era Un’Isola premiered at the Dynamo Bleues in Paris.

Filippo also explores the dimension of the Solo piano. By preparing the piano, the exploration of solo playing can be further elaborated. During the course of the Pandemic, they also started to experiment with electro-acoustic music and multi-mediality. In light of this they have co-created the quartet ‘Kinestatic’ with Jonathan Ho Chin Kiat ( Prepared Piano, Electric Guitar, Electronics, Prepared Snare Drum), an ensemble working through electro-acoustic improvisation and visuality. They have also composed several electro-acoustic pieces to further research how live electronics can further explore gesturality within musical expression and how this can reinforce linguistic and visual interplays with sound. (Filippo Deorsola- An Algorhythmic Narration of Several Different Objects of Discussion - YouTube).

Like Their character, their artistic output is modular : Compositions, Multi-media works, Free Improvisation, Philosophical and Aesthetic research. The multi-disciplinarity inherent to their work and his thinking is representative of his engagement , as an artist and as human being, with socio-political problematics encountered in the world around us. Most importantly, Filippo is preoccupied with perception and its centrality in the work of the artist, whether musician or otherwise. It is only through the education of perception that the artist can be emancipated and, in turn, have the possibility to emancipate through art.