Andrea Molino is a composer and conductor. He studied in Turin, Milan, Venice, Paris and Fribourg. He currently lives in Zurich.

*The Smiling Carcass *(1999), a critique of advertising communications, and *Those Who Speak in A Faint Voice *(2001), on the theme of the death penalty (both pieces were created in collaboration with Oliviero Toscani and produced by Pocket Opera Company of Nuremberg), are early examples of Molino's focus on innovative, multimedia music theatre.

In his role as artistic director of Fabrica Musica he has produced a series of ambitious interdisciplinary and multimedia projects. CREDO, on the theme of ethnic and religious conflicts, debuted in April 2004 at the Staatstheater Karlsruhe and was subsequently presented in Rome on the occasion of the World Summit of Nobel Peace Prize Winners and at the Queensland Music Festival. The recent WINNERS, on the theme "of the victors and the vanquished", opened in July 2006 at the Brisbane Festival, Australia, and was presented as a European premiere in Paris in the Grande Salle of the Centre Pompidou.

As a conductor, after debuts at the Edinburgh International Festival and the Wiener Konzerthaus, Molino opened the Biennale Musica in Venice at the Teatro La Fenice with Heiner Goebbels' Surrogate Cities. He has also conducted the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the Orchestra del Teatro La Fenice, the Klangforum Wien, the Badische Staatskapelle Karlsruhe, the Bochumer Symphoniker, the Dresdner Sinfoniker, The Queensland Orchestra, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Staatstheater Darmstadt, the Norddeutsche Philharmonie and the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana.

He has produced CDs and DVDs with Stradivarius in Milan and Naive in Paris. His concerts and recordings have been broadcast by major international radio stations.

"In my work as a composer and conductor there has long been a growing trend towards innovative and unconventional forms of musical theatre. For me, the term 'theatre' does not indicate a place or a building, nor a certain way of performing, but rather an attitude: as the root of the word indicates, it is a matter of 'looking carefully', of 'understanding by observing'.

In this context, there are a few things that are of the utmost importance to me:

• The need to fundamentally rethink the concept of representation (Anton Webern: "I don't want symbols, I want the things themselves"). For example, dealing in a -- precisely -- non-representative way with subjects and themes of a social nature, i.e. that are "important to the life of the community in which I evolve" (here the concept of community is obviously in constant and exciting reformulation). I'm convinced that artists have the right and the duty to 'get their hands dirty', to come down from their ivory towers, which are more and more damaged and less and less welcoming, and to have the courage to venture into fields that are more and more perilous, but more necessary.

• The intense and increasingly integrated use of communication technologies in live performance. One crucial point is the organicity of language: elements that are normally considered to belong to different disciplines (sounds, images, theatrical gestures, texts, etc.) merge until they become totally interdependent and can no longer be conceived of as separate. For example, it must be possible to phrase and even improvise using audiovisual material with the same flexibility as a musician playing his instrument. In fact, it is the gesturality linked to the musical action that interacts in many ways with the multimedia elements.

• The growing attention to places (Wim Wenders: "The sense of the place") and their expressive potential. Experiments such as CREDO, in which four groups of musicians played together live by satellite from four different cities, led me to work on the ideas of simultaneity and distance in both the literal and metaphorical sense. It is precisely the extensive use of new technologies that makes it possible to reconsider these areas in depth and open up new and exciting possibilities for expression.

My project for Le Fresnoy will be a multimedia musical performance in which I will focus on these last two aspects, in particular through the use and elaboration in real time, in a musically instrumental approach, of audiovisual sources of different kinds, such as live cameras and webcams. The musicians who perform will control the digital processing of the audiovisual material through their musical and instrumental gestures and will directly direct the dramaturgy."

A.M (15.07.2006)