Art Taaalkssss: Félicia Atkinson

During her live session for Art Taaalkssss, Félicia Atkinson will discuss A Forest Petrifies, a novel about the perception of time and how some places mark people’s minds. The first part, Diamond Feedback, was released in October 2019. Conceived by Atkinson during the past five years, the story is inspired by the Petrified Forest in Arizona and its ability to change over time from an organic to a mineral state. The ongoing writing process has been the starting point of many of Atkinson’s music lyrics and recent records and exhibitions. A part of the book takes place in the middle of the desert in an indistinct future. Two men are having a discussion by a fire in a modernist house. The music they are listening to is not emitted by a device but by themselves, it’s a new kind of technology. They look at the embers of the fire and it reminds them of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. They suddenly wonder if those embers could be a republic of some kind.

Félicia Atkinson is a musician, visual artist and writer born in Paris. Together with Bartolomé Sanson she runs Shelter Press, an independent publishing house, record label, and research platform. Her work is an open reflection on the process of listening, on the kind of spaces and forms it implicates. Her music is based on spoken words, electronic sounds, field recordings and piano, and her artistic works include sound, text, sculpture and painting. She is currently artist in residence at La Becque in La Tour-de-Peilz. Félicia Atkinson graduated with honors from École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (MA) and followed the experimental pedagogical project Bocal, initiated by choreographer Boris Charmatz.

feliciaatkinson.com
shelter-press.org

Sound performance by Félicia Atkinson, Room 4, CAN Centre d’Art Neuchâtel, 2019, photo: S. Verdon / CAN Centre d’Art Neuchâtel