Oddkins

Oddkins is a collaboration between Felicity Mangan and Merche Blasco. Through a spatialised electroacoustic performance, live processing and custom-made instruments, the duo brings together field-recording archives gathered from diverse wetland environments to create biophonic hybrids inviting audiences to reflect on symbiotic possibilities between species and technology amidst the urgency of environmental change.

The project began with a field trip to Spreewald, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, where the sound artists transformed a canoe into a mobile field-recording rig. They suspended hydrophones and contact microphones from its edges and frame, capturing the hydrographic rhythms of the waterways, the biophony of birds and insects, and the intermittent traces of their own voices as they listened and paddled through the marshlands. 

For the artists, listening to these moving bodies of water becomes a way of listening to multiple temporalities and the interconnectedness of all species living in those habitats. These unique landscapes such as delta waters, where the river meets the sea in a delicate balance, serve as a microcosm for some of our most acute environmental crises. There is a special urgency to listen to what these ecosystems are telling us before they no longer have the chance to speak.

Oddkins premiered at Silent Green, Kuppelhalle, Berlin on November 2024 and has been presented since then at +RAIN Research Film Festival and ECOSS Festival, in Barcelona, Spain. 

Supported by the Music Fund e. V. with project funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Berlin District Culture Fund and the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. Additional support for mobility was granted by the Culture Moves Europe project, funded by the European Union and implemented by the Goethe-Institut.

Image by Moritz Draheim