Priscila Fernandes: Fanfare 2025

Amidst the sound of water, the blowing wind and the rumbling of metal, two new works by Portuguese artist Priscila Fernandes emerge: Fanfare 2025 and There Are No Radical Futures. Born from a partnership between Batalha Centro de Cinema and Solar Galeria de Arte Cinemática, with support from Mondriaan Fonds, these works offer a critical, poetic, and musical take on the present, drawing on ideas of landscape, community, and eco-social crisis.

Fanfare 2025 revisits Bert Haanstra’s classic Fanfare (1958), contrasting the idealised image of the post-war period with the contemporary reality marked by ecological crisis, reactionary nostalgia and ideological polarisation. Once again, the action centres on a local philharmonic band, plagued by absurd rivalries and united only by a shared mission: to win the annual competition.

If Fanfare 2025 is a bittersweet comic fiction about a world on the brink of collapse, the work There Are No Radical Futures is based on records documenting the attempt to keep it together. This multi-channel video installation follows 19 militant fanfares from across Europe in their rehearsals and interventions, in which the musicians perform in protest against violence, inequality, the climate crisis, patriarchy, racism and fascism.

Programme notes by Isabella Lenzi (curator, critic and researcher).

Priscila Fernandes is an artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, installation, photography, video, and book publishing. Through a speculative, fictional, and humorous approach, her work raises concrete questions about the idea of individual and collective freedom—particularly in the context of precarity, the commodification of time, and the looming threat of violence in contemporary societies. Based in the Netherlands, she co-directs the BEAR (Base for Experiment, Art and Research) programme at ArtEZ University of the Arts, and Kunstwerk Kolderveen. Her work has been shown internationally, including at the São Paulo Biennial, Museo Reina Sofía, Fundació Joan Miró, Artium, Reykjavik Art Museum, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Serralves, MAAT, CIAJG, among others.