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Curating Contemporary Art (MA)

Kevin Bellò

We are just animals, humans, and machines getting on together in specific lifeworlds

Breath Mark x Lisa Hall & Hannah Kemp-Welch 

Breath Mark, a curatorial collective formed as part of the RCA’s MA Curating Contemporary Art programme, has commissioned sound artists Lisa Hall and Hannah Kemp-Welch for Furtherfield’s People’s Park Plinth. Furtherfield strives to produce work that gives people a shared sense of ownership of their lives and localities and in 2021 People’s Park Plinth is imagining the whole of Finsbury Park as a platform for public digital art where people can explore a range of artworks and then choose the one they want to experience more of. Hall and Kemp-Welch’s work will be voted on in August and has the potential to be expanded into a three-part listening experience that takes the themes of connection across species further.

Hall and Kemp-Welch present a listening experience taking you on a journey through the park, suggesting new ways of experiencing this vital green space. Turning up the volume on non-human inhabitants in Finsbury Park, the sonic artwork creates moments of connection between strangers of all species. You can tune into the voices of different park user groups and sounds of many species on your digital devices: scan a QR code located outside of the Furtherfield Gallery to open a sound-based navigation system, developed in collaboration with Studio Hyte. This leads you to a place where you can pause, listen and consider the social and ecological concerns of the area. The destination serves as a meeting point, forming new, shifting listening communities across the park and amplifying the voices of local park user groups.

As part of extended public engagement, Breath Mark has collaborated with design studio An Endless Supply, on a digital microsite acting as a reading room allowing audiences to further engage with the artwork’s themes.


Look for the companions around you. 

Draw closer to the unheard, the silenced, the unwanted sounds. 

Tune in, feel, communicate.

Extend your senses and rest in them.

Kevin Bellò

Kevin Bellò is an independent curator working among contemporary art, music and technology. His curatorial approach is rooted in an ongoing collaborative practice that develops critical dialogues and cross-disciplinary influences. Methodologically, his work engages the wider political context by implementing gentler, but not necessarily softer, forms of care and by reflecting on emotional encounters. Recently, his research has turned toward an interpretation of the occult through forms of fiction and philosophical speculation in the context of the Anthropocene.

For his graduate project, Kevin curated with the Breath Mark collective the project We are just animals, humans, and machines getting on together in specific lifeworlds by Lisa Hall and Hannah Kemp-Welch. Developed in partnership with Furtherfield, the commission investigates the cross-species connection emerging in city parks by creating a sonic collage of the Finsbury Park soundscape. The project also tested the boundaries between physical and digital in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

His interest in sound also emerged in his dissertation The Emergence of the Curatorial Discourse in Contemporary Music, in which he studied the recent appearances of discursive events around curating and the curatorial in the new music context. The paper aims to critically reflect upon the opportunities, challenges, and political implications of curatorial practice and thinking outside the contemporary art system.

Kevin has also further developed his interest in music and the curatorial while studying in the ArtEZ (NL) course Curatorial Practice in Music (Jan / May 2021), a master level program based on a fruitful peer exchange among experts, guests, and colleagues on the current music curating trends. Before his experience at the RCA, Kevin studied economics and the market for the arts and culture at the Università Cattolica (IT) and Sotheby's Institute (UK). 

The People’s Park Plinth, Furtherfield, 2021
The People’s Park Plinth, Furtherfield, 2021 — designed by Studio Hyte.
We are just animals, humans, and machines getting on together in specific lifeworlds, Lisa Hall and Hannah Kemp-Welch, 2021
We are just animals, humans, and machines getting on together in specific lifeworlds, Lisa Hall and Hannah Kemp-Welch, 2021 — designed by Studio Hyte.
Breath Mark Collective; designed by Kevin Bello.
Breath Mark Collective; designed by Kevin Bello. — Inspired by musical scores, we chose the symbol of a breath mark to represent ourselves as a curatorial collective. We understand a breath mark as an indication of a pause that reminds us to rethink the fast-paced tempo of our daily lives. Besides punctuating musical notation, a breath mark also opens up a space for critical reflection and reveals things that have been lost in the constant repetition of quotidian tasks. https://www.instagram.com/breathmark_collective/
Reading Room
Launch Project
Reading Room — designed by An Endless Supply
Voting will start soon! Stay tuned!
Launch Project
Voting will start soon! Stay tuned!