BERNARDINO FEMMINIELLI

Bernardino Femminielli works in media including music, performance, poetry and film under the guise of a hyper-sexual nostalgic provocateur. His work and character are a synthesis of mysticism, transgression, danger and pleasure-- a detached crooner deep within a dystopian discotheque. Narrating in French and Spanish, from classical arrangements to brutal Italo-disco, from heavy cosmic drone to mutant industrial: his sonic ventures reflect his adopted personas. His lyrics explore an imagined illicit paradise full of excess, drugs, bars, pleasure, darkness and companionship. Much of Bernardino’s poetry is arranged using the cut-up technique, and is composed of subversive and immoral subject matter– thematics similarly found in works of transgressive fiction. He questions the crumbling capitalist order through a series of poems that unite thugs, bourgeois love, and the mechanics of his oppressors. A serial killer cruising a gendarme, a repressed homosexual hiding from his wife in coffee shops, a disco love song for a cabaret singer in despair, the human condition, your lawyer banging your wife while you’re in prison… it’s all there. He is both confrontational and intensely vulnerable in his storytelling, exploring the rich and dark energy of French and German cabaret— ground zero to where his diverse references coalesce. As Bernardino always says: He who laughs last, laughs best.