Felicity Mangan is an Australian artist and composer based in Berlin, Germany. Her investigations and works are primarily influenced by the biomes of wetlands, waterways, and soil. She combines field recordings, electroacoustic composition, and electronic music techniques to create immersive, quasi-bioacoustic music aided by digital audio tools. Her compositions have been presented in multichannel installations, live performances, site-specific settings, and published works.
Felicity has released several solo publications, one on Longform Editions titled Stereo’frog’ic, a play on the word stereophonic – presenting a sound piece crafted from found recordings of frogs, insects, and other ‘vocal’ animals wavering about in a stereo field. As well as Creepy Crawly (Mappa Editions) and Bell Metal Reeds (One Instrument), Wet on Wet (Klangklamm/Warm Winters Ltd.), Train Tracks Recorded and Editing by Felicity Mangan (Possible Motive), and a single Körner Park (Care of Editions). Recently, full-length LP String Figures (Elevator Bath), Felicity has presented projects in many different settings, including Technosphärenklänge CTM/HKW (2019), Sonic Acts (2024), and GRM (2024).
Michelle Atherton is an artist and academic living in London. She is interested in experimenting with what might lie beyond human perception and how we might undo reductive binaries between the living and the non-living. The works often use a remix aesthetic incorporating sound, image, and text to create fragmented narratives as hooks to explore our slippery perceptions of the world. The aim is to look again at matters that seem settled, beyond question, but where inherent instability opens into other questions of material states, refusals, politics, and new imaginaries. Her most recent project Ecstatic Rot explores our relationship with transience, decomposition, and re-composition through sonic practices.
Michelle’s work has been exhibited and presented widely in Europe including Low Hanging & Soil Séance Session Vol V Museum fur Sepulkralkultur, Kassel 2025; Soil Séance Sessions Soil Séance Sessions at Thinking in Circles OD Arts Festival UK 2025 & Museum Quinta das Cruzes & Natural History Museum, Municipal Museum of Funchal Portugal 2024; Common Grave: Live Broadcast, REVEIL London, 2024, It doesn’t have a shape, it has a shadow Spor Klübü, Berlin 2019; As Much About Forgetting, Viborg Kunsthal, Denmark 2018 and They are Sticky, perhaps you can say magnetic Kunstraum, Linz, Austria 2018. Her work is supported through funding from the National Lottery and Arts Council England, UKRI: Arts & Humanities Research Council, and a series of international residencies. She is the Postgraduate Research Degrees Tutor for Art & Design & teaches postgraduate fine art at Sheffield Hallam University, UK.
For the live performance, the artists will play two new experimental audio works/remixes based on the subterranean recordings made by Atherton at the Künstler-Nekropole as part of the Soil Séance Sessions commissioned by Museum für Sepulkralkultur, Kassel.
The original below-ground recordings were sourced from the soil surrounding Gernot Minke’s dome at the Künstler-Nekropole, Habichtswald, on the outskirts of Kassel in the summer of 2024. Three years earlier, clay was excavated from this same ground to provide the organic matter for the adobe, rammed-earth bricks used to construct the participatory walk-in sculpture designed by Minke, as a contribution to the Necropolis. Minke’s sculpture is a tomb with a dome structure that acts as a perfect amplifying chamber. An aperture in the roof provides a view of the sky and channels any internal sounds into the surrounding forest.
The live performances by Atherton and Mangan will remix the sound from the soil and harness the innate sonic qualities of the soil as a clay sculpture, as an instrument in its own right.
Atherton’s approach follows her interest in intermittent listening practices, decomposing sounds, including digestion, and base vibrations. Her lowly scores unfold in their own time following the unknowable logics of the underground. The sudden tempos of rhythms often fail, abruptly disappear, or gradually dissipate, and may or may not resound. Atherton’s underground soundtracks form and fade like erratic improvisations.
In empathetic contrast, Mangan’s work tunes into the electro-acoustic qualities of the sonic material to create an electronic music performance. Focusing on the rhythms and timbers that emerge from the pedosphere, Mangan assembles samples taken from Atherton’s subterranean recordings to enable listeners to experience the material in other ways, within the context of the chamber, aided by digital tools.
Together, they use acoustic devices as portals to the underworld, where hidden actions, processes, and movements are transformed into energies, transmuting into sonic apparitions through vibratory matters.
Date
07.05.26, 3 pm
Performance at Künstler-Nekropole
Link:
www.kassel.de