Snow in Mória, Jessica Feldman 2026
Snow in Mória is a sound & architectural installation. The project was begun in Paris in 2021, in collaboration with asylum-seekers living in the CCAC and Mória refugee camps in Lesvos, Greece. It continued over the years and was completed during a residency at Overtoon in summer 2026. During winter, the migrant camps on Lesvos (and other encampments throughout EU sites) are flooded due to heavy rainfall. The piece uses field recordings of water and rain as a flexible signifier to represent the specificity of this structural problem, and to connect it with recurring practices of deportation, migration, and human trafficking in Europe’s history. Sounds associated with this site also include the sounds of fires, and, more recently, wind and emptiness, as fewer asylum-seekers are entering the EU due to strict regulations, and more and more people are being sent back to their countries of origin.
The piece takes form as a long corridor made of corrugated sheet metal walls, which is the same material used to construct both barriers at borders and shelters in many migrant camps. Transducers mounted inside cause the walls to vibrate with an audio composition made from field recordings of water, rain, fire, and wind. The audio is gathered from important sites of migration and deportation, including recordings sent from the camps in Lesvos and recordings made during a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris) of the Seine river at Le mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation (memorializing Holocaust deportations from Paris). During Feldman's residency at Overtoon, a series of above and underwater recordings were made of the canal at the Petit Château” arrival center, where asylum seekers entering Brussels are received. The piece uses site-specific sounds (which are both referential and abstract) to bring together current and past questions of expulsion, shelter, and movement and the broader humanitarian issues.
The installation is designed together with Emma Canton, an Italian interior architect and scenographer whose practice focuses on constructing processes and spaces as narrative and relational devices with a particular interest in temporality as a design material.
Design: Jessica Feldman & Emma Canton.
This piece was made in dialogue with Refocus Media Labs and includes commissioned contributions by citizen journalists who were living in the Mavrovouni Refugee Camp on Lesvos.