Portrait
Surprise
Blessina on belonging, sharing her music, and a single five years in the making.
Words Azhari · Photography Léa Dang, Mahrus Harnadi
On 12 August 2026, a total solar eclipse crossed Europe, and millions of people stopped to look up. Fred went somewhere quiet instead: the forest by her parents’ house, in a small hamlet called Bois Barbu. She set up a chair, a table, a microphone and a little audio equipment, and picked up a guitar. As the light thinned and the afternoon slid toward dusk, she sang twelve songs, softly, and filmed it. The last one was called “Surprise.”
Fred, whose full name is Frédérique Blessina Vivet, performs as Blessina. She has been back in France for about five months, after two years in Spain. “Surprise” is her new single, and she is going on a mini tour to support it. The night before she spoke with URAKAN, she played another show. The song itself is not new. She wrote it five years ago in Paris, in a life so full of plans that one cancelled date, a text message saying, more or less, surprise, I’m not coming, was enough to knock it off balance. It has been waiting in the vault ever since.
Fred and I met in Yogyakarta, where she lived for most of a year from September 2023. Shortly before she left, we played music together, a small, happy parting gift.
In conversation
Why release it now, after five years?
Fred It’s very simple. It’s money (laughs). I recorded in a studio in Paris and it was quite expensive, and I wasn’t ready to invest in a musical project before. Now I want to do it in a good way. I want it to be pro. So I’m going to pay, and then we’ll see.
Did the song change over those five years, or did you?
Fred The lyrics stayed the same, which is crazy, after five years. Only my relationship to them changed. It was like healing myself from a broken-heart period, and then I learned to cherish loneliness. I was so sad, and then I understood that being alone was really helpful, especially in Paris. We need to be alone, when we want it. When there are too many events, you need to slow down and take time for yourself. I was reading the lyrics again and I thought, oh wow, that’s true. I changed.
It also changed musically, because I worked with other people. In five years there was one person, then another, then another, each with their feedback.
“We need to be alone, when we want it.”
Fred was born in Malang to an Indonesian mother and a French father. When she was three, the family moved to France, and the move was not gentle. At school she kept speaking Indonesian to the other children, who told her they didn’t understand her and that she wasn’t their friend. Her mother says that around then Fred simply stopped talking. For years afterwards she would answer her mother only in French.
Music became the place she could go. She took piano lessons for five years, then quit them, bought the sheet music she wanted and taught herself Chopin. Her name, Frédérique, is his in the feminine, and she decided she was the new Chopin. She spent hours at the piano every day. “It was my kind of home,” she says, a kind of meditation before she knew meditation existed.
As a teenager, Fred tried to be as French as she possibly could. Her village was white, and she wanted to belong to it. Then she went to study fine arts at the Beaux-Arts, where the first year is for trying everything. She wrote poems, made sound performances, painted. Slowly she understood that video held all of it at once: performance, sound, image and poetry could live in the same piece. She started making videos, met other people, joined their shoots, and became a filmmaker.
Paris also did something else. For the first time she was around other Asian people, and she felt drawn to them, starting with the Cambodian community. She watched Cambodian films and spent time with Cambodian friends. Then she asked herself why she was doing it. The answer was simple: she also felt Asian, and if there was a Cambodian community, there had to be an Indonesian one. She went looking and found it. And there she noticed something about herself. She had always taken her way of communicating for personality, a quirk. Among Indonesians she saw the same gestures and the same way of speaking, and understood that they were Javanese, handed down from her mother. She had not been different after all. What she had taken for personality was a culture, and there were others who shared it.
In September 2023, Fred arrived in Yogyakarta for the Darmasiswa exchange program at ISI Yogyakarta. She had been to the city before, but only as a tourist with her family, to the famous sites. Staying was different. The city did not feel familiar, even with relatives living there, and she was in for a surprise as daily life and culture pulled her in deeper. The first month was hard. People called her bule, and she wrote about it in her diary.
Her first address was Ruang MES 56, in a room without windows. It is also a very active cultural space, and in the week or two she stayed she met more people than she could count, from many different backgrounds. Soon she was renting a house with Daniela Alexandra (Dani) and Martin Fatmaja Hogard, fellow exchange students at ISI. The house became a place where friends gathered. They cooked, made batik with other ISI students, threw parties. “Even when we were cooking, it was for meeting people,” Fred says.
Fragments from Fred’s archive.
For all that creative company, she played little music. Beyond the gamelan class at ISI, where she performed once, she kept it to herself. She was shy. That began to change one night after an intimate, experimental performance at a café near ISI. I was there too. The set ended with a jam open to everyone, and Fred did not join in. But afterwards she and her friends kept telling each other the same thing: we all wanted to play too. We went home, picked up instruments, and started, awkwardly, too shy to make much noise. It helped that Shohei Hosoi, a Japanese artist friend, was there. He was not shy at all, and watching him enjoy himself made everyone want to play along.
Since then, most of the music Fred played in Yogyakarta she played with Dani and the friends around her, and shortly before she left came about a week of rehearsing for a live performance.
Music gave her a way into the city. Belonging was a different question.
“It depends on the gaze.”
Do you feel Indonesian when you’re in Indonesia, or do you still feel like a stranger?
Fred It’s a mix of both. It depends on the day. Actually, it depends on the gaze. I’m really sensitive to this.
I went to the Cold ’n Brew cafe almost every day to work, and I always spoke Indonesian with the barista. One day he realized I was French, and he was like, what? You’re not Indonesian? He was so shocked. For me that was my highest feeling of being Indonesian, that someone had thought I was. It’s the only one.
When people ask me where I’m from, I feel like a stranger. When people speak to me directly in English, I feel like a stranger. Even with my family. One time my grandmother invited me to a wedding and said, come, so my friends can take pictures with you. I was like, you’re my grandmother! How can you say that?
I’m sorry, that happens.
Fred I know. But it was funny. I went to the wedding.
What do people misunderstand most about your relationship with Indonesia?
Fred Right now, it’s fine. It was hard before, because I didn’t understand what it is to be bicultural. I read a lot of books about it, and something important was meeting other French-Indonesian children and sharing what I was feeling, and finding out that we have the same reflections. Everyone is so different. It’s okay not to understand everyone. If people don’t understand, I’ll be fine.
She left Indonesia a changed person. Within two days of landing in France she was missing Indonesian food, and she had no appetite for the pasta. So she went to the Indonesian community around her mother, knowing the food would be there. The people were not what she was looking for. They were Indonesian women with French identities, her own mother among them, and it was a shock. What she took from it was an idea: “identity is just something that moves.” Back in Europe she had felt very Indonesian for a while. Now, she says, that feeling is travelling on again.
This year, in Paris, she went to a screening of “Vaterland” or A Bule Named Yanto, Berthold Wahjudi’s short about a German-Indonesian man visiting his younger sister in Yogyakarta. For Fred it brought Yogyakarta back at once: the places she knew, Substore, a bar the city’s art crowd frequent, even the sound and jingle of the train station. She had not expected it to hit so hard. She missed Jogja, and she wrote a song right after.
She stayed in France for only about a month, long enough to see friends. In 2024 she was scared by how popular the right had become there, Marine Le Pen’s party in particular, and she moved to Spain.
Work was hard to find. A few jobs as a filmmaker did not add up to a living, so she took up babysitting, and music filled the rest of her time. She met a lot of people. In Spain she found music audible in the streets and plenty of people playing it, and it helped her step onto a stage and sing in front of an audience. Bit by bit, the hiding ended.
“I had a feeling
that I lost years
in my life
hiding this
music part
of me.”
Blessina
Photography
Mahrus Harnadi
For the moment, music fills her days, and her filmmaking lives in her music videos. So what does she call herself?
Would you call yourself a musician now? Or are you still a filmmaker? How do you introduce yourself?
Fred When you started the question, I was like, yeah, I’m a musician, that’s the answer. And then when you said filmmaker, I was like, oh yeah, that’s right, I’m also a filmmaker. So I think just being an artist, no? Using art to question things in life.
My filmmaking is more about the political questions I ask myself. All the stories in my movies are about what it is to be different, especially in France, where people really judge you. They’re a way to understand other people, and to speak about my place as a child of immigrants. I’m sure cinema can help humanity get better. If you don’t understand other people, the fear comes, the fear of the stranger.
Music is really different. It’s more about love. But love is also political, because if you learn how to love the other, maybe that’s a more popular way to speak about my questions.
Film depends on so many people. Music can be very singular, but it also opens a door to collaboration. How do you find your collaborators?
Fred At concerts, in places with live music. That’s where I met most of my musician friends. It’s so important to share music and listen to it live that at some point you just want to make music with other people. I think you cannot make music alone. Truly. Maybe for healing, as I did as a child. But when you want to share your music, you need other people.
And what can music do that film can’t?
Fred Film is sound with images, so there’s a lot of information. Music is more about feeling something. When I like a song, it’s not because of the lyrics or the theme. It’s touching me, but I don’t know why. Then I listen again, and on repeat I start to hear the lyrics, and I realize they’re so close to what I’m going through.
“Love is also political.”
Film has not disappeared from her life. It has moved into the music. For “Surprise” there is a video, and the idea began with YouTube. Fred had been watching unboxing videos, by now a genre of their own, and what struck her was how fast they are. There is a cut every two seconds. Within three seconds, or less, the box is open and the item inside is revealed, with hardly any tension. Fred makes documentaries and can sit through an hour of film without getting bored, so she wanted to push against the norm. “I want to do an unboxing, but really long.” Around two minutes, with the reveal only at the end.
Footage from the “Surprise” video, courtesy of Blessina.
The song is about cherishing loneliness and taking care of yourself. In the teaser for the video, she reaches for a small wrapped gift.
She has not opened it yet.
Fred is still looking for ways to widen her sound. So far she has mostly played acoustic, with guitar, piano and voice. Lately she has been inspired by Patrick Watson, who plays piano on stage surrounded by machines and mixes his voice, the piano and the electronics live, and she would like to work that way too. Her recordings and her stage shows are very different right now, and she wants to make a version of both. Two universes, the acoustic and the electronic, in the same room.
When asked what the Fred who arrived in Yogyakarta in 2023 would make of the person she is now, she was not sure she would be surprised, and answered with a habit instead. Fred keeps a diary, but one month ahead. She writes about her days in advance, and about her projects as if they were already finished: I did this today, and it was amazing. None of it has happened yet. “It’s manifesting it by writing,” she says, and it works for her, a lot. A month is as far as she goes, because it is easier. She has never tried two years, though she says she will. Maybe, she wondered, the Fred of 2023 had imagined this one in advance. Maybe not. “I don’t know.”
Near the end of our conversation, she had a new entry to write. She wants to tour Indonesia, and to make songs in Indonesian. She said she would put it in her diary, somewhere in the summer of next year: the tour is over, she is back home in Malang, exhausted, with a happy kind of tiredness she would not trade for anything. In the diary, it has already happened.
Diary · Malang, 6 July 2027
Here I am, back in my hometown, my heart full of new memories to set down, despite everything this city already carries. I am here, and exhausted, with a happy kind of tiredness I would not trade for anything. The tour in Indonesia went wonderfully. Surprise, right?
Once again I dreaded singing in French. This language weighs on me, and it reminds me that it pushed Indonesian out of my head, my mouth, my shoulders and my breath, and yet it went well. I think I am enormously lucky with this dream team, straight from Jogja.
I believe that is where the poetry comes from: our very different paths coming together on a stage, making noise together. And there I see the power, and the need, of playing live to share it with an audience.
It is corny, but it is true: music is universal, whatever language I sing in. It is only a transcription of what I feel anyway. In any case, thank you. I am infinitely grateful.
Translated from the French. See her page at full size
“Surprise” by Blessina is out now. Listen on your favourite platform.
Photography: Léa Dang and Mahrus Harnadi. Interview conducted by video call.
Jingle: “Sepasang Mata Bola” by Ismail Marzuki and Suto Iskandar, as heard at Yogyakarta station. Diary page, archive photos and video footage courtesy of Blessina.