Mara Miccichè aka IOKOI is a composer and sound-artist based in Zurich.
Her debut album «Liquefy» (2016) interweaved physical and virtual spaces by negotiating the various meanings of the self in the digital age. The album was a play with drifting instances of identity and presented live as an interactive AV performance with video artist ARIA. Several songs from «Liquefy» were used for the Chilean series «La Jaurìa» in 2020. IOKOI’s follow up «Tales of Another Felt Sense of Self» is being released on -OUS in spring 2021 as a multi-disciplinary work mixing music and video with olfactory and visual arts.
Mara Miccichè obtained a MA degree in Pop from the Zurich University of the Arts and participated in the temporary «Master of Voice» programme at Sandberg Institute. She created the installation «Reset into Silence» for Zurich’s «Stadtsommer» at the botanical garden in 2013 and curated the musical programme of Videosoundart festival Milano in 2014. She was Artist-in-Residence at Moods Zurich and awarded the Aïda Alliman Prize in 2017. Over the years, Mara Miccichè has improvised live-soundtracks to silent movies in various formations and toured South America and China multiple times with the Institute for Incoherent Cinematography. She recorded voices for H.R. Giger’s movie «Dark Star», and works with various theatre and movie directors. In collaboration with videographer Michele Foti she creates videos and installations for various fashion and design clients.
Her new multidisciplinary work «Tales of Another Felt Sense of Self» (2021) is the result of a three-year collaborative jour-ney inward, reflecting the numerous connections, contradictions, and reflections between the «self», the «same» & the «other».Combining avant-pop & spoken word with field recordings & mercurial electronic textures, IOKOI researches the very essence of our being in relation to others. She is in search of who and what we are, as we face increasing disembodiment in the digital age. «Tales of Another Felt Sense of Self» demands a re-embodiment of all senses by exploring our rou-tines of listening, seeing, sensing, understanding, and feeling, both in terms of the personal & the collective.
In 2021/22 she got two artist residencies in Berlin funded by Stadt Zürich Kultur and Kultur Kanton Zürich. In collaboration with Julian Sartorius and Balz Bachmann she composed the soundtrack for the Swiss movie “Becoming Giulia” by director Laura Kaehr, which won the public award at Zurich Film Festival 2022.
Mara Miccichè is co-founder of the music label -OUS and the multi-disciplinary collective MADAM.
In 2023 she received a work stipend from the Landis&Gyr Stiftung and is currently working on new material.
Photo Credits: Samuele Cherubini, Pro Helvetia Venezia September 2022
