MOSSO | Mappa
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Saturday, 2 May 2026
3:15 pm
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Gallery, National Film and Sound Archive
1 McCoy Crescent, Acton
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In Association with
Weaving sound, movement and ancient craft traditions, Mappa unfolds as a shared space between art and audience. Devised by Fiona Hill and Miranda Wheen, audiences are invited to wayfare freely through the transformed NFSA gallery.
Step inside the Gallery and enter a world where sound, movement and material are woven into a living map. MAPPA is an immersive collaboration led by Fiona Hill and Miranda Wheen, uniting artists from Ensemble Contrechamps (Geneva), Western Sydney and Canberra in a constantly shifting landscape of improvisation, gesture and making.
Threads become pathways. Plants become fibre. Fibre becomes rhythm, breath and motion. Knotting, tying, twisting and spinning, performers transform the gallery into a site of gathering and wayfaring, where the boundaries between dance, music and visual art dissolve. Each action binds bodies to place, tracing connections between women’s histories, community and our shared relationship with the earth.
From the Latin for the linen on which the first maps were drawn, MAPPA re-imagines cartography as a sensory, collective act. As Elizabeth Wayland Barber writes, string was the quiet technology that reshaped human history. Here, it becomes the pulse of a new, global meeting point.
Exploratory, tactile and mesmerising, MAPPA invites you to move, listen and lose your bearings inside one of MOSSO’s most intimate, exploratory and transformative works.
Artists
Fiona Hill co-director / performer / composer
Miranda Wheen co-director / performer
Ensemble Contrechamps
Tom Fell performer-collaborator / saxophone
Lucky Wheeler (umki) performer-collaborator / vocals
Photo credit: Wolfwerk Photography
MOSSO is supported by Revive Live – an Australian Government initiative
ARTIST Learn more about the artist
Artist Tom Fell
Tom Fell is a Canberra-based saxophonist, composer and educator who has been active in the city’s music community for more than 15 years. He works primarily in jazz and improvised music, performing regularly in small ensembles, collaborative projects and festival settings. Alongside his performing career, Tom teaches saxophone and directs jazz ensembles at Canberra Grammar School. He has also previously taught at the Australian National University School of Music, contributing to both tertiary and community music programs.
Tom’s work often involves collaboration with leading Australian improvisers and musicians from across the contemporary music scene. His performances span a range of contexts, from traditional jazz settings through to interdisciplinary projects that bring together music, visual art and other creative practices. In 2025 he released his debut album Mantra, a collection of original compositions recorded with pianist Steve Barry, bassist Chris Pound and drummer Nick McBride.
Artist Umki
umki (L Wheeler) is a multi-disciplinary artist, creating things with sound and other materials, working primarily on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri land.
Artist Fiona Hill, composer-in-residence
Emotive, textural and organic, Fiona Hill’s ‘striking timbral exploration of abstract sonic properties’ (Music Trust) and ‘seamless working in of live electronics’ (Sydney Arts Guide) blends new technologies with corporeal evocations to generate detailed and immersive sound worlds. Composed through the layering of textural and harmonic sounds her music creates a deep and expansive bedrock on which to place melodic materials concerned with a freedom of spirit.
Fiona has a deep collaborative, multi-disciplinary based practice, through response and interaction with sonic materials as well as through direct collaboration with other artists. Her work has been recognised with multiple awards and nominations including winner of ‘The Stelvio Cipriani international Film Scoring Competition’ 2022, winner of ‘Best Film Score’ at the Seoul International Short Film Festival 2021.
Fiona has been performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Tasmanian Symphony orchestra, Sydney Dance Company, Ensemble Offspring, Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellows and multiple electroacoustic works. She has a Masters in Screen Composition from AFTRS, a PhD in Composition from the University of Sydney and is currently lecturer in Composition for Creative Industries at the University of Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
Photo credit: Deep Hill Media
Artist Miranda Wheen
Miranda Wheen is a Sydney-based independent dancer and choreographer working on Dharug Country. Her contemporary dance practice integrates intercultural collaboration, community engagement, teaching, dramaturgy, and advocacy for the dance sector.
She is Co-Artistic Director and a founding member of Dance Makers Collective, directing all their major works including Dads, The Rivoli, The Saturday Night Social, and All In (touring nationally in 2026). Since 2017, Miranda has been an Associate Artist with Marrugeku, performing in acclaimed works such as Jurrungu Ngan-ga, Cut the Sky, Le Dernier Appel, and Burrbgaja Yalirra. She has been a member of Mirramu Dance Company since 2004 and has collaborated widely across the Australian dance sector, including long-term work with Martin Del Amo, Stalker Theatre, Shaun Parker and Company and many others.
A passionate sector advocate, Miranda was part of Creative Australia’s 2024/25 Creative Leadership cohort, is Vice Chair of Dance Makers Collective’s board, and a dedicated educator and mentor.
Artist Ensemble Contrechamps
Ensemble Contrechamps is an ensemble of soloists specialized in creating, developing and disseminating instrumental music of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The Ensemble is dedicated to highlighting the diversity of aesthetics and formats making up the contemporary and experimental scene. For over 40 years the Ensemble Contrechamps has been working hand in hand with a large number of composers, conductors and artists – Rebecca Saunders, Pierre Boulez, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Christine Sun Kim, Michael Jarrell, Jacques Demierre, Olga Kokcharova, Sofia Jernberg, Vimbayi Kaziboni or Heinz Holliger, among others. The Ensemble also showcases the multiple skills and unique talents of its member musicians.
Contrechamps strives to develop fresh formats such as installation-performances, radiophonic concerts, research laboratories or collaborative processes. The Ensemble is a hybrid, both orchestra and collective, which enables it to adapt to a variety of artistic constraints and to the proposals of the artists it works with. Within this context, Contrechamp’s partnership with the Geneva Haute école de musique is meaningful inasmuch as it allows its members to remain in touch with the freshest ideas, as well as impart their expertise to coming generations.
Recognized for its work and invited to perform on international stages, Contrechamps regularly appears at events such as Ultima in Oslo, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Venice Biennale, and Ircam-Centre Pompidou in Paris.
The Ensemble’s many partners in Geneva include La Bâtie, Archipel, the Grand Théâtre, the Ensemble Vide, the OCG, the Théâtre Am Stram Gram, the ADC,the cave12 and the St. Pierre Cathedral. Contrechamps has performed on a variety of stages throughout Switzerland like the Gare du Nord in Basel, Schauspielhaus in Zurich or Plateforme 10 in Lausanne, to name just a handful.
A colorful outreach program and exciting educational activities involving schools and museums allow our musicians to impart their passion to a public of all ages and from all walks of life, and to enrich and fortify the local cultural fabric. Contrechamps Editions publish significant books on contemporary music.
The Ensemble has made over twenty recordings and, since last season, has been offering a new collection of vinyls on its own Contrechamps label in collaboration with Speckled-Toshe.
Ensemble Contrechamps is supported by
Photo credit: Guillaume Collignon