Firefly 2026
Sat, 25 July 2026 at Floating
16:00 – 20:00 Installation
Axel-Camilla Barratt-Due – The Lore of Large-eyed Crimson Apergy
Live installation-performances at 16:00, 18:00 and 19:00
20:00 (sharp) Live performances
Henrique Fernandes – Water flux
Marta Zapparoli – Transductive Grounds
Martin Howse – Fruiting and rotting
Free admission
The new edition of the one-day festival Firefly brings together four sound artists and the nature/culture learning space Floating Berlin. Engaging with the terrain’s individual effects and actors, the artists celebrate the extraordinary resilience of the forgotten rainwater retention basin at Tempelhof Airfield, where natural ecosystems are reclaiming the human-made wetland – despite urban pollution in water and air. These local processes of resistance and regeneration serve as inspiration for the newly commissioned works.
Martin Howse explores the decomposing artistry of mycelium, linking cycles of cosmic creation and decay. Henrique Fernandes explores the rainwater basin using hydrophones and geophones, capturing its transformation through the dynamic presence and absence of water. Marta Zapparoli investigates hidden signal ecologies within the electromagnetic spectrum, activating Floating’s terrain. Axel‑Camilla Barratt‑Due develop for their performance installation a pneumatic post-instrument that explores the symbolic, mythical and material dimensions of the heart, blood circulation and air.
With a nuanced attention to locality and materiality, the artists place elements of this specific urban environment in dialogue with their own artistic practices and with technological processes. Aspects of craftsmanship and organology expand toward microorganisms, muons, water, soil and atmosphere. Attention is drawn not only to the consequences of environmental crises, but also to the ways in which ecosystems regenerate through local forces of resistance, adaptability and resilience.
Martin Howse
Fruiting and rotting (new work)
For two masqued performers, mycelium, compost, fizzles and muon topographics… (2026, WP)
Let the waters above the heavens fall and the earth will yield its fruit.
»Fruiting and rotting« is a new installation/performance work connecting cycles of cosmic creation and decay, with extremely local processes of growth and decomposition. Linking heavenly and earthly phenomena, deep relativistic time dilations and unobserved time scales of mycelial growth and deep earth composting, Fruiting and rotting refines techniques developed in works such as “Mycelium and Dust,” imagining, creating and eavesdropping on radio-networks of micro-cosmic actions and cyclical connection. Howse will work with groups of human and non-human processes at Floating University, to create an expanding observational (audible) networked ecology defined by detected instances of cosmic decay (muons) and earthly de/composition (growth of mycelium and activity of soil composts).
In collaboration with Melissa Aguilar and Cammack Lindsey.
Martin Howse – www.1010.co.uk/org
Marta Zapparoli
Transductive Grounds (new work)
Live electromagnetic performance
»Transductive Grounds« is a site-specific electromagnetic performance by Marta Zapparoli that activates the terrain and hidden signal ecologies of Floating University Berlin. Here, the site becomes a transducer – a body that receives and converts invisible energies (radio waves, noise, electromagnetic interference and wireless signals) into a shared sonic experience. Using antennas (some hand-built), and radio receivers, VLF receivers, passive sensors and analogue technology, Zapparoli scans and amplifies the radio wave activity and ambient soundscape of the area in real time. The work explores a layered spectrum of electromagnetic interferences and ionospheric disturbances, collecting both natural and artificial emissions (including VLF signals), as well as anthropogenic interference (urban wireless infrastructure, electromagnetic smog, radio communication). These are processed live using custom analogue technology, transforming the space into a dynamic sonic topography – a performance in which transmission and contamination become both literal and metaphorical.
At its core, the work asks: What does the land receive? What do we unknowingly transmit? It invites us to hear the environment not as passive ground, but as an active receiver – absorbing histories, energies and cultural noise. Zapparoli draws attention to the unconscious signals we emit: ideologies, environmental impact and electromagnetic waste – calling for radical listening as an ecological and political act.
Marta Zapparoli – https://martazapparoli.klingt.org
Henrique Fernandes
Water flux (new work)
Building upon previous explorations developed in Liquid Aesthesia, by Henrique Fernandes in collaboration with Vincent Martial and Gustavo Costa, this new sound performance expands the reflection on the presence and absence of water – as both a physical and symbolic matter – and its relevance within the context of climate change, drought, and water management. With a focus on listening and on the transposition of the acoustic and sonic qualities of the site, the work employs a set of electroacoustic devices — air and water pumps, tubes, containers, modified speakers and sensors such as hydrophones and geophones – to create a sonic ecosystem that responds to the environmental characteristics of the space. Materials gathered on-site – water, soil, and vegetal sediments – become audible agents, generating a continuous cycle between the environment and its sonic memory. Through this system, sound emerges as a trace of a transforming presence – an echo of the relationship between the human, the space, and the liquid element.
Axel-Camilla Barratt-Due
The Lore of Large-eyed Crimson Apergy (new work)
a new instrument built with light sensors, blood and air (2026, WP)
»The Lore of Large-eyed Crimson Apergy« draws inspiration from Thomas Aquinas’s »De motu cordis« (1273), a meditation on the heart and its movement. It also resonates with Alexander Bogdanov’s »Red Star« (1908). Looking at the heart and the heart circuit this piece coins an instrument formed as a heart-fantasy-channel. An eco-industrial and sonic heart where air and fluid meet in the music patterned from blood, water, acid and breath.
Blood is geography and a living borderland. Maps are rewritten with each heartbeat. If blood were a frontier, it would not just mark the boundary between inside and outside. It would be a territory in constant negotiation. Tracing memory, oxygen, waste, hormones, microbes, immune responses and histories through a living landscape.
Alexander Bogdanov was the founder of the blood transfusion institute in Russia and is seen as one of the developers of the medical procedure of how we know blood transfusion today. Both Aquinas and Bogdanov are contemplating on the mythical essence of blood. Aquinas from the perspective of a religious connection to its movement, Bogdanov from a medical but also science fiction view on blood as a cosmic practice of solidarity.
In collaboration with Jo Grys, Fredrik Olofsson and Jonathan James.
Axel-Camilla Barratt-Due – https://camillabarrattdue.com
Location/Address
Floating Berlin
Lilienthalstraße 32
10965 Berlin, Kreuzberg
www.floating-berlin.org
Graphic Design: Roman Karrer
Artistic Direction: Dr. Karin Weissenbrunner
Funded by inm – initiative neue musik Berlin e.V.
In co-operation with Floating e.V., Berlin.