Mikhail Karikis — Sounds from Beneath, 2012

Sounds from Beneath brings the voices of former coal miners back to the site where they once worked. Mikhail Karikis invited the Snowdown Colliery Welfare Male Voice Choir to recall and vocalise the sounds of the mine, from explosions and coal-cutting machinery to alarms and shovels scraping the earth. For the video, made with Uriel Orlow, the singers gather across the disused colliery in formations that recall picket lines, their voices animating a landscape shaped by decades of mining. The work draws on shared memory to evoke labour and the solidarities formed through it. Shown in Lyon, it also resonates with the nearby Loire coalfield, where mine closures in the 1980s ended an industry that had shaped generations of working lives. As heavy industry receded, service and consumer economies reshaped the region and the social structures built around work.

Sound, voice and collective action form the basis of Mikhail Karikis’ practice. Through moving image, installation and performance, he collaborates with communities – including children, refugees and social workers – to explore forms of solidarity, labour, and resistance. His projects often emerge from specific social and political contexts, where listening becomes a means of reconfiguring relationships between individuals and environments. Through choral structures and shared vocal expression, the artist develops works that foreground collective agency and the capacity of sound to articulate alternative social imaginaries.