FELICIA ATKINSON (FR, 1981) & BARTOLOME SANSON (FR, 1984)
Residency period: January-June 2020
Over seven months at La Becque, Félicia Atkinson and Bartolomé Sanson worked on many projects: their research project Hush Hush the Sky is Singing, the ongoing Shelter Press catalogue, Atkinson’s new EPs and commission works, her drawings, the life experience of raising a young child together in an artist residency during the lockdown and/or finding everyday resources for childcare and home-schooling.
Exchange with the other residents also led to the release of James Rushford LP Lake From The Louvers on Shelter Press with a cover artwork by Pa.laC.E (Valle Medina & Benjamin Reynolds).
Hush Hush the Sky is Singing features a project emerging from two points of view: that of the researcher and publisher on the one hand, and that of the artist and musician of the other. Inspired by both Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Daphne Oram’s book An Individual Note (1972), the project questions the subject of music as a non-verbal language, interconnection between species, technologies and nature, sciences and the world of childhood,science fiction, energies, minerals, plants, modular synthesisers, field recording, ambient music, whales, electricity and poetry.
Atkinson and Sanson address the issue of technology through the prism of various archives which relate the experience of women and men who have used sound innovations as a means of communicating with all forms of life, whether using modular synthesisers to help whales escape hunters or creating waves that help plants grow.
This research, still ongoing will lead to a series of paperbacks in the form of short essays and interviews about those topics that will be published in 2021-2022.
In the meantime, Sanson worked on the 2020-2021 Shelter Press catalogue which included Okkyung Lee’s LP Yeo-Neun; Volume 2 of SPECTRES magazine on the theme of Resonance, co-published by INA GRM with contributions by Maryanne Amacher, Chris Corsano, Ellen Fullman, Christina Kubisch, Okkyung Lee, Pali Meursault, Jean-Luc Nancy, David Rosenboom, Tomoko Sauvage, The Caretaker, David Toop and Christian Zanési; Kassel Jaeger’s LP Swamps / Things with artwork by Cameron Jamie; Lisa Lerkenfeldt’s A Liquor of Daisies cassette and Collagen LP; François J. Bonnet essay’s The Music to Come and Bernard Vouilloux’s essay on choreographer Gisèle Vienne’s work Plateaux Fantasmatiques, Gisèle Vienne; Marina Rosenfeld’s double LP Deathstar with cover art and inside artwork by artist Eileen Quinlan and Atkinson’s EP Everything Evaporate.
Atkinson also focused daily on studio work such as drawing and painting, but also composed a dozen sound pieces, most of them presented through two EPs (Shelter Press and Boomkat) and several commission works listed below.
Bartolomé Sanson (b.1984) is an independent publisher, founder of artist fanzine Kaugummi Books (2005 – 2011) and a freelancer for various publishing houses. Félicia Atkinson is an artist and musician (b.1981) who graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Paris. Together they created Shelter Press, an independent publishing house, record label, and research platform dedicated to establishing dialogues between contemporary art, poetry and experimental music. Born during an artist residency in Ohio in the summer of 2012, Shelter Press now has more than a hundred titles to its catalogue and participates in fairs around the world, supported by a solid network of international distributors.
Images 1-4: video stills for Burberry
Image 5: SPECTRES Volume 2 / Resonances
Image 6: EP « Everything Evaporate »
Image 7: Echo (Vinyl Edition)
Image 8-9: Echo (Tape Edition)