SARA PERSICO
Sara Persico is a Naples-born, Berlin-based sound artist, composer and performer working across voice, analogue electronics, field recording and electroacoustic composition.
Trained as a vocalist in Naples and Bologna, she developed her practice through the experimental and noise scenes of her native city, gradually building a distinctive language in which breath, speech and extended vocal techniques merge with electronics, environmental recordings and unstable rhythmic structures.
A recurring concern in Persico’s work is the relationship between sound, architecture and landscape. Field recording is not simply documentary material within her compositions: she uses the acoustic properties of buildings, urban environments and natural sites as active elements in the work, often exploring impulse responses, resonance and the traces that spaces carry within them. This research has extended into installations, residencies and educational projects alongside her concert practice. In 2024 she created the site-specific sound work Brutal Threshold for Il resto di niente at MADRE – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina in Naples, presented with Gucci, while in 2026 she co-led an intensive field-recording laboratory on Mount Etna, working with environmental microphones, geophones and seismic material.
Her first solo release, Boundary, appeared on Karlrecords in 2023. It was followed in 2025 by her first full-length album, Sphaîra, released by Subtext Recordings and developed from recordings made inside Oscar Niemeyer’s unfinished Experimental Theatre in Tripoli, Lebanon. The project subsequently evolved into an immersive audiovisual performance with visual artist Mika Oki, presented internationally at festivals including Sónar Barcelona and Istanbul, Nuits Sonores, FIBER, Nextones, Lunchmeat, Le Guess Who? and MUTEK Montréal.
Persico’s wider performance history includes Berlin Atonal, documenta fifteen, CTM Festival, Irtijal Beirut, Nyege Nyege Festival, WOS Festival, Botanique Brussels, Rewire, Southbank Centre and Romaeuropa, among many others. She was selected for the SHAPE+ 2023–24 platform and has collaborated with artists including Caterina Barbieri, Elvin Brandhi, Tony Elieh, Ziúr, Ludwig Wandinger, Dirar Kalash, Gabriele Mitelli and Mika Oki. Her work also extends to live film scoring, improvisation and multidisciplinary contexts, including a 2026 collaboration with Elvin Brandhi for Cinema Galleggiante / Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
Across these different formats, Persico approaches listening as an active way of encountering a place. Whether working with a voice, an abandoned building, a volcanic landscape or a live electronic system, she transforms acoustic traces into highly physical and immersive compositions in which the boundaries between body, environment and sound remain deliberately unstable.
