Sara Persico & Mika Oki present “Sphaîra” Live A/V
Sphaîra is an immersive audiovisual work by sound artist Sara Persico and visual artist Mika Oki, developed from Persico’s 2025 album of the same name for Subtext Recordings.
The work began with an encounter with the Experimental Theatre at the Rachid Karami International Fair in Tripoli, Lebanon, the monumental modernist complex designed by Oscar Niemeyer. Persico returned to the unfinished domed theatre with field-recording equipment to investigate its unusual acoustic properties, recording impulse responses alongside her own voice, metallic resonances and sounds entering the structure from the surrounding city.
These recordings became the raw material for Sphaîra. Whispers, breath, vocal fragments, percussion and environmental sound are stretched and reorganised into an electroacoustic composition shaped by the architecture itself. Rather than documenting the building, Persico treats it as an instrument: its scale, reverberation and unfinished surfaces determine the behaviour of the sound.
For the live A/V work, Brussels-based artist Mika Oki extends this investigation into the visual field. Drawing on her background in sculpture, moving image and electroacoustic practice, Oki creates an evolving environment of abstract imagery, light, spatial distortion and stroboscopic interventions. Sound and image operate as parallel systems, continually altering the audience’s perception of depth, scale and physical space.
At once intimate and monumental, Sphaîra moves through drones, fractured voices, metallic textures and sudden rhythmic pressure while its visual environment destabilises the architecture around it. The original theatre is not reconstructed but becomes a point of departure for a new environment in which sound, light, memory and spatial perception overlap.
Premiered at Berlin Atonal in 2024, Sphaîra has since developed an extensive international trajectory across experimental music, audiovisual art and digital-culture contexts. Presentations have included Sónar Barcelona, Sónar Istanbul, Nuits Sonores Lyon, Bota By Night at Botanique Brussels, FIBER Festival Amsterdam, La Nature Festival, Nextones, WOS Festival, Lunchmeat Festival Prague, Sonic Territories at WUK Vienna and Le Guess Who? Utrecht, followed in 2026 by Videocittà Rome and MUTEK Montréal, where the work received its Canadian premiere.
In 2025, Sara Persico and Mika Oki received the Videocittà Award for AV Performance for Sphaîra. The project subsequently returned to Videocittà in 2026 for a Main Stage performance at Rome’s Gazometro, further consolidating the work’s position between concert, installation and audiovisual performance.
Recent and upcoming presentations continue to explore how the work changes in response to distinctive architectural settings, including San Nicolò l’Arena in Catania and Prima Onda Festival at Loggiato San Bartolomeo in Palermo in 2026. Each new site becomes part of the composition itself, allowing sound and image to respond to the scale, resonance and perceptual character of the space.
