Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti

Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti is a classically trained pianist, singer, composer, performer, and visual artist. Of Bolivian and Brazilian descent, her body of work is deeply connected to the post-colonial justice movement and addresses the paradox and beauty between grief and celebration. Her abiding interest in Andean cosmology has informed her work as a source for reclamation, resistance, and resilience. She has collaborated with various musicians including Alabaster DePlume, Jaimie Branch, Wilbert de Joode, Ab Baars, and others. With her spouse/partner, drummer Frank Rosaly, Ferragutti founded the D.I.Y. arts/music space Molk Factory in Amsterdam in 2017. The pair have worked and performed together since then. In 2024 the duo issued the acclaimed debut album MESTIZX on International Anthem through Nonesuch. She was born and raised in Bolivia within Bolivian and Brazilian families. At three she began classical piano studies and spend 18 years in formal training. Further, she took up contemporary dance and spent a decade in formal study and performance. She earned her bachelor's in performance arts at the Superior School of Art in Amsterdam in 2006. She has performed internationally in a wide range of concert venues, festivals, theater stages, and museum spaces. Her practice takes a multidisciplinary approach involving movement, speech, singing, and speech. Her inspiration stems from a deep connection to ritual and trance as a form of encountering worldviews carried by her ancestors, as well as a deliberate act of resistance: Her works bind her to ancestral and cultural knowledge and history that have been otherwise erased by colonization and oppression. In 2016, Ferragutti appeared as a guest vocalist on psychedelic Latin band Fumaca Preta's sophomore long-player Impuros Fanáticos. In 2022, she appeared as a guest on Pura Maldad by Lola's Dice, a funky vanguard rock quartet founded and led by Fumaca Preta's Alex Figueira. During the pandemic, Ferragutti and Rosaly began creating the project that ultimately resulted in a recording and performing collective. They dove into the sounds of their respective ancestral roots (Puerto Rican in Rosaly's case) to create a deeply personal meditation on decolonization and the power in ritual and protest. Following a slew of live performances in Europe, the duo signed to the Nonesuch-distributed, Chicago-based International Anthem label. Beginning in the label's Chicago studio, they enlisted a cast that included trumpeter Ben Lamar Gay, guitarist Bill MacKay, percussionist Daniel Villareal-Carillo, and keyboardist Chris Doyle, among others. In addition to Chicago, they did further recording at Ferragutti's Molk Factory in Amsterdam, and in La Paz and Cochabamba in Bolivia, as well as in Puerto Rico. The finished album, MESTIZX, appeared to critical fanfare in May 2024. The title is a non-gendered version of the troublesome Spanish colonial word for a "mixed person" to challenge and embrace the slippery liminality of their identities and artistic practices.
© Thom Jurek /TiVo