The Cyclist and the Mushroom is a sound installation based on the meeting between a cyclist and a car and explores the different worlds inhabited by both at the moment of impact. It takes as its points of reference the writings of Terence McKenna, and in particular his interest in the meetings of different worlds through his experimentation with the hallucinogen DMT, and of the English geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, who acknowledged that ‘the universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose’. The worlds in question are the single-minded world of the cyclist, the distractedness in the cabin of the car, and the police report that attempts to make sense of it all, much in the way road markings attempt to bring order to the chaos and keep these worlds apart while also allowing them to work in conjunction with each other.

The sound installation revolves around a sonic roundabout and includes a text that visitors are invited to print out, incorporating into this circular procession the printer’s own circular, but fatally distracted sonic route; bringing the production of text into potential collision with other ‘queer universes’.

Computer, two speakers, printer. 2014


The Cyclist and the Mushroom

This piece is a text sound piece, loosely based on the idea of an artist’s talk, performed by David Mollin and Salomé Voegelin as part of a recent exhibition entitled Nietzsche Cyclists and Mushrooms curated by Heidi Brunnschweiler at the Kunst Raum Riehen, Switzerland. It comprises of a text based on writers’ written anecdotes, taken from the internet, on how they write, Hindu numerology and the particular numerological time structure of the virtual environment of the computer game interjected by other concerns about words and texts.
The stage for the talk was provided by the physical space of one of the artists’ installations shown in the exhibition into whose soundtrack the talk was embedded, borrowing its pace and circularity.

Writer's Habits

Hidden Lives explores ideas of the house as the repository of memories, and of women as the curators of memory and of hidden histories. The daily repetition of domestic routine tasks is common to women, in particular, across centuries, societies and cultures. Through carrying out this invisible work women have shaped and sorted cupboards, rooms, all manner of dwelling places, and the inner lives of societies and cosmologies. At particular times they have been, at once, confined to the  inside the house to carry out unrecognised and exhausting domestic servitude and at the same time able to colonise the ‘inside’ as their own, the place for daydreams and memories.

All the material for this piece is drawn from a selection of women reading from  “The Book of Hints and Wrinkles” a small piece of social history from the 1930s which describes how women should manage both their houses and themselves in no uncertain terms. The daily routine timetable is enough to ensure that no woman could ever spend much time outside the house or away from this backbreaking schedule, and advice on personal appearance is delivered in such a way as to suggest that women are in fact part of the furnishing of the house to be polished, scrubbed and generally to look clean, welcoming and attractive.

‘Hidden Lives’ is one of  a series of  tape works which explore the compositional use of space and gesture as a metaphor for physical and emotional experiences. It attempts to use the distribution, movement and gesture of sound in space in order to emphasise and highlight possible the associative qualities of the recorded material according to personal experience. 

Some of the specific ideas that inform the composition of ‘Hidden Lives’ are in the treatment of the text which moves from the whispers and breaths of memory to half articulated emergent sentances to the mantra of the repetative routine which becomes like a wall of orders and commands. 

The piece was commissioned by the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique and realised in their studio in Bourges, France.

‘Hidden Lives’ is in celebration of all lives lived and forgotten .

Hidden Lives

Since 2008 Salomé Voegelin and David Mollin have developed a collaborative practice with words and sounds. Their work has a conceptual basis, establishing through texts, voices, sounds and images, conversations and reconfigurations of relationships and realities. Their artistic engagement focuses on invisible connections, transient behaviour and unseen rituals. It re-considers socio-political, architectural and aesthetic actualities through the possibilities of an ephemeral sound, whose invisible mobility invites a semantic inhabiting of words and works, and brings a participatory engagement to installative and performance based pieces.

Writer's Habits

Mollin+Voegelin