We were lucky to catch up with Emanuele Basentini recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Emanuele, thanks for joining us today. Do you feel you or your work has ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized? If so, tell us the story and how/why it happened and if there are any interesting learnings or insights you took from the experience?

People think that an artist should communicate emotions. For me this feels kind of like of commercial exchange (I scratch your back you scratch mine) that I would like to avoid. I play rather as a cognitive experience, not in order to comunicate anything to anyone. Along the same lines, I also think that art that engages with the social is an instrumentalization of the social for personal gain.

Emanuele, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I come from an artistic family of musicians and sculptors, but I see art as something opposed to the concept of industry or business. Art should be a private vice, an experience of contemplation rather than sharing some banal feeling under the facile effects of suggestion. The only use of art is to lose your identity (rather than to express one) in order to give voice to the most ancestral and hidden parts of yourself. This is why the artist is never the author of his own work. It is always some “who-knows-what” from “who knows where”, unknown to the artist, that becomes the determining factor of the creative act. As Derrida says, art is an “excrement” (in the etymological sense), something that detaches itself from the artist, and takes on a life of its own.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

My objective is to take the focus off of the gestural and performative abilities and aspects of music and art in general, which are dominant in an era facile myths and quick results, and to bring attention to the aesthetic, philosophy, and problematic aspects of art, which are the only interesting parts of the artistic phenomenon. The art that interests me is “beyond the pleasure principle.”

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

In a way, for me, art is an unlearning of the mental constructs of society (which has turned art into just another product on the market), in order to give space to new interpretations of reality.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @interjazzband
• Youtube: https://youtu.be/2J8auYCLEHI?si=j2JfqjGs18nM7LHB

Image Credits
Emanuele Basentini