Falsimoniæ

Falsimoniæ is a project of historical and sonic narration that takes as its starting point one of the most enigmatic figures in European history: Joanna of Castile. A queen, a political character progressively marginalised, an identity rewritten by others: Joanna has, for centuries, been the object of a single, repeated narrative that has gradually come to be accepted as truth.

A research-based project

The project is the result of extensive research conducted primarily at the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) in Brussels, which preserves some of the most important musical testimonies connected to Joanna of Castile and her historical context. In particular, the presence of fundamental manuscripts such as the Cancionero de Juana la Loca, together with the book of basse danse belonging to Margaret of Austria, as well as numerous key sources of the Franco-Flemish and Hispano-Aragonese repertories, has made the KBR a central point of reference for the development of the programme. Early texts, literary fragments, chronicles, letters, and direct and indirect proofs have been selected and brought into dialogue not as illustrative materials, but as traces of a complex narrative system. The sonic dimension is grounded in a philologically informed practice, the result of rigorous and sustained work on the sources.

Sound as a critical space

The musical fabric neither accompanies nor comments in a didactic way, but instead creates a space for listening and suspension. Sound becomes a means of suggesting what has not been transmitted: absence, ambiguity, the distance between events and their representation. Music acts as a counterpoint, making the fractures of historical narrative perceptible.

A contemporary urgency