Fanfare 2025, Priscila Fernandes

Fernandes, who has lived in the Netherlands for years and currently resides in a rural village in the north of the country, has built a career marked by her explorations of pedagogy, labour, and the right to leisure, as well as freedom and fiction. The artist frequently turns to seemingly simple narrative structures and cultural forms—games, tales, music—to question the ideological mechanisms that regulate our perception of time, pleasure, and the possibilities of collective action. Earlier works such as The Book of Aesthetic Education of the Modern School (2014) and What Horses Dream Of? (2023) already evidenced her interest in the social construction of sensitivity, the tension between desire and discipline, and in structures of power and privilege.

Fanfare 2025 is a dystopian fiction set against pastoral backdrops. Filmed in Giethoorn, a water-based town in the Dutch countryside—the same place where Bert Haanstra filmed the Dutch classic Fanfare (1958)—the film recreates and updates the original story: a rural brass band, divided by internal squabbles, still attempts to reach the national competition on time.

But time, here, is different. In Fernandes’s version, as in Haanstra’s, the musicians are at odds, caught up in minor disputes that cause them to lose precious time. Once they realise that they’re running late, they launch into a frantic and disoriented dash. They march through fields of cows, row along canals, and rehearse amongst the reeds. Eventually, they arrive at the competition site to find only a blindfolded judge and a submerged landscape. Despite the absence of any competitors, they are awarded second place, then third, and finally an honourable mention—a consolation prize. The band plays, disheartened, their instruments pointed toward the water that now covers everything, as if their bickering had rendered them oblivious to the world around them.

With absurd humour and lyrical melancholy, Fanfare 2025 turns a comedy of manners into a critical fable. Fernandes collaborates with a real local band—De Bergklanken—who take on the role of protagonists. Collective production, a sense of community, and rootedness in the land are central: the original film is part of the region’s identity, and residents already knew the melodies before Priscila's camera even arrived.

In this remake, Fernandes contrasts the post-war ideal of a harmonious community in tune with its surroundings with today’s reality, marked by ecological crisis, reactionary nostalgia, and ideological polarisation. Whereas Haanstra’s band overcomes its differences and wins the competition, in the 2025 version, the conflicts persist, and the world is sinking, both literally and metaphorically. Water rises to their knees, and the music no longer sways the jury. The level keeps rising—the inevitable result of global warming, which we all feel, each in our own way.

The film engages in dialogue with other audiovisual works that blend music, satire, and social critique: from Fellini’s Orchestra Rehearsal (1978), with its perpetually rebellious orchestra, to The Clowns (1970), also by the Italian director, where laughter and failure intermingle in scenes oscillating between the grotesque and the tender. It also evokes Crusade (2010), a video by Brazilian artist Cinthia Marcelle, in which sixteen musicians approach an intersection from all four directions—four per side, each band in a different colour. When they meet at the centre, they engage in a sonic duel that ends in a choreography of position swapping, forming new hybrid bands that disperse in harmony. In Silly Symphony: Music Land (1935), one of Walt Disney’s earliest works, saxophones and violins engage in forbidden romances, musical battles, and wordless reconciliations—just as in Fanfare 2025, where the instruments themselves become characters that laugh, quarrel, cry, and announce the end. Instruments whose sounds merge with the lowing of cattle, the breath of the wind, and the murmur of the canals.

If Fanfare 2025 is a bittersweet fiction about a world falling apart, the work There Are No Radical Futures is based on footage documenting efforts to hold that world together—or at least to keep it inhabitable. Filmed in Paris during an international gathering organised by La Fanfare Invisible, the piece follows nineteen activist brass bands from across Europe over four days. In rehearsals, workshops, and street interventions, the musicians play together in protest against violence, inequality, the climate crisis, patriarchy, racism, and fascism.

These bands bring together amateurs and professionals, young and old, and adopt a collective, disobedient musical practice inspired by popular struggles, union movements, and revolutionary songs. In actions that fuse music and activism, they raise issues such as housing precarity, forced evictions, the plight of migrant youth collectives, and solidarity with Palestine and feminist and anti-racist movements.

There Are No Radical Futures alternates between musical performances and fragments of political debate, building a choral testimony to the urgency of resistance. More than documenting sounds, Fernandes captures the practice of collective listening: how they organise, which repertoires they choose, what memories they carry, what they expect from music and from the world.

Here, the artist positions herself as a witness and amplifier of living action. The activist fanfares she follows—such as the Fanfarria Transfeminista (Madrid), Block Brass (Netherlands), and Ottoni a Scoppio (Milan), among others—are fragile, improvised, yet powerful formations. They re-enact the gesture of appropriating the instruments of power to subvert them with joy. Their words call on collective strength as the only viable path to shifting what holds us still.

In one of the work’s most powerful moments, members of the Fanfarria Transfeminista recount episodes of police repression during protests and explain how they use music to de-escalate violence and create positive impact. Meanwhile, musicians from the Italian band Basaglia, based in Naples, reflect on the rise of neo-fascist governments attempting to roll back historic gains of feminist movements—such as women’s and reproductive rights—and how they resist this conservative backlash through music.

The manifesto of La Fanfare Invisible speaks of “musical attacks”, “harmonic terrorism”, and “acoustic delinquency”. But all is done playfully, in the spirit of “joyful resistance” that seeks to reweave the social fabric through sound. Much like in the lyrics of Grândola, Vila Morena by Zeca Afonso, the song that marked the start of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution: “The people are the ones who give the orders / Inside you, oh city.” Even today, this song resounds as a hymn of freedom, fraternity, and social demand, sung at political demonstrations such as those on May Day. Music as an invitation to listen, to act, and to celebrate.

Between fictional dystopia and militant documentation, Priscila Fernandes’s two films explore the potential of music and communal organisation as tools for remembering, resisting, and imagining. Fanfares, in the plural: sometimes traditional ensembles on the brink of disappearance; sometimes activist collectives blowing against the status quo. Both, however, are vulnerable, intense communities, brought together by sound and by a shared desire—or struggle.

The project presented in Portugal weaves together cinema, installation, and performance in a gesture of collaboration that is both aesthetic and political. “When the water rises, you have to play louder,” this body of work seems to say. Or perhaps it simply reminds us that we must listen more attentively—and act together.