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THE ART

The Beginnings: 2005 - 2012​

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Fabi Cruz’s art emerges from a lifelong inclination toward music. A classically trained musician and chorister before turning to visual arts, she has always experienced sound as something spatial — a geometry in motion. What began as an academic exercise in 2005 soon revealed a personal obsession: to make audible things visible.

 

During her studies at La Sorbonne, Fabi took a class on music videos. Instead of filming a band, she decided to draw music directly onto the street. The chosen piece — Mozart’s Queen of the Night — became a score of moving lines and gestures, a performance where melody was translated into motion. The piece resonated deeply with viewers and marked the beginning of her Visual Music practice.

 

She continued to explore this dialogue between sound and form through a series of performances and experimental videos: Agitata da Due Venti (2007), a tribute to Cecilia Bartoli’s baroque virtuosity; Blackbird (The Beatles), where a sculptural “instrument” attached to her arm mimicked the act of playing; and other works where color, rhythm, and gesture fused into abstract choreography. These early explorations all shared the same intuition — that music and movement are not separate arts, but two expressions of the same phenomenon.

 

In 2010, Fabi encountered the concept of synesthesia and recognized herself in it. Through research, she discovered the historical lineage of Visual Music — from Oskar Fischinger and Mary Ellen Bute to Walt Disney’s Fantasia (a film she cites as one of her childhood obsessions). She realized that her instinctive impulse to visualize sound was not anecdotal but neurological — part of a universal cognitive connection between rhythm, color, and emotion.

 

Yet, despite the clarity of her vision, she faced a practical challenge: how to present video-based art in a physical, collectible, and aesthetically coherent form. Traditional screens and monitors felt intrusive; they broke the spell of abstraction but, most of all, took away the beauty of music as a physical object. This impasse led to several quiet years of reflection and experimentation...

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​2018 - nowadays

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Everything changed in 2018. First, she made her first forays into the world of synthesisers and sound design. She began composing her own music for the first time, using synthesizers and MIDI controllers, freeing herself from the limitations of copyrighted sound. This autonomy allowed her to fully synchronize what she heard, saw, and created. Around the same time, a chance encounter in Paris reshaped her artistic path. Passing by La Bourse, she discovered a public Augmented Reality project: images that came alive through a phone screen, projected onto the building’s façade. The discovery was electrifying. For the first time, she saw a medium capable of preserving the integrity of her artworks while revealing their hidden movement. AR became not just a tool but a revelation: a way to merge the immaterial and the tangible, to let sound inhabit matter.

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In 2018, her work also reached architectural scale. The Miami Symphony Orchestra commissioned three pieces that Fabi projected — through video mapping — onto Zaha Hadid’s Elastika sculpture at the Moore Building, transforming the space into a living instrument. Soon after, she created another large-scale projection for La Nuit Blanche in Paris, inspired by Christian de Portzamparc’s Cité de la Musique. Both projects embodied her belief that sound can shape space, and that geometry itself holds rhythm.

 

Today, her practice continues to bridge sensory and technological worlds. Through prints, laser-cut wall pieces, interactive sound canvases, and Augmented Reality artworks, she extends the century-old language of Visual Music into a new dimension — one where anyone can point a phone and witness the invisible harmonies behind the shapes. Her work invites viewers to experience sound as she does: as motion, color, and emotion intertwined — a synesthetic dance between what we hear and what we see.

© 2025 Fabi Cruz

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