Séverin Guelpa, born in 1974, is an artist and curator. He lives and works between Geneva, the Swiss Alps, and the American deserts. His work draws on forms of collective intelligence and the ecologies specific to arid and remote regions. At the core of his practice is MATZA, a manifesto founded in 2014 that explores the capacity to create shared commons and to imagine new relationships with nature and its resources.

His architectures, sculptures, and videos take shape through contact with raw materials, construction elements, and recycled matter sourced from threatened territories. Following projects in the Mojave Desert, on the Aletsch Glacier, and in the Kerkennah Islands, MATZA has recently expanded to Medellín, Cúcuta, and Nairobi (2022–2023).

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Energy as a Vehicle

Energy as a Vehicle offers a sonic and physical exploration of the invisible flows that traverse both urban and social spaces. The project invites listeners to tune in to Geneva’s underground energies: the pipes through which fluids and vital forces circulate, the city’s true silent arteries, and to connect them to human energies through the collective voice of a choir and a soloist.

The project was carried out in collaboration with the Geneva Industrial Services, which granted access to the city’s underground conduits to record the sounds of the fluids and energy networks (water, electricity, gas) flowing through them. These recordings capture the vibrations of the ground and the power of the flows, seeking to reveal the city’s invisible activity : its breath, its rhythm, and its movement, literally its energy. These sounds, both powerful and fragile, engage in a dialogue with the voices of a choir, creating a sensitive bridge between the energies of the earth and those of its inhabitants, and transforming the sound experience into a poetic and social encounter.

The harmonized recordings are played through large steel core-drilling tubes set within massive stones in the entrance hall of the new Comédie de Genève, transforming the architecture of the space into an instrument and a resonant chamber. The tubes, which fragment and amplify the sounds, become mediators between the underground world and public space, between the intimate and the collective.

This installation highlights the interdependent connections between life in the soil and that of a society: energy flows, transforms, and intertwines. It underscores that the strength of infrastructure and networks is inseparable from human energy, and that society itself is a fabric of sensitive flows.

Both powerful and fragile, it invites us to feel, listen to, and perceive these invisible energies, to experience the city as a living, physical, and sonic organism.