Félicia Atkinson & Bartolomé Sanson (Shelter Press)

Shelter Press is a French record label/publishing platform founded in 2012 by Bartolomé Sanson and Félicia Atkinson, building up dialogues between contemporary art, poetry and experimental music through printed publications and records.

Distributed worldwide by Secretly.

Starting September 2021, Shelter Press is also carrying and collaborating on the releases of the Ideologic Organ, Recollection GRM and Portraits GRM labels.

https://shelterpress.bandcamp.com/

“Can an artwork be a secret? What is the music we want to hear?”

For nearly fifteen years, Shelter Press has grown from a conversation between our different practices: Bartolomé Sanson’s work as a publisher and Félicia Atkinson’s work as an artist and musician. Together, we have developed an editorial approach shaped by intuition, chance, long-term friendships, and a close community of artists and collaborators. A DIY spirit remains at the heart of everything we do: learning through making, finding our own methods, and staying directly involved in each stage of the process.
In The Music to Come, François J. Bonnet writes: “The music remains to be discovered, it is still hidden (…) it does sometimes appear, but most often incompletely and unevenly.” This idea of searching without knowing exactly what we are looking for feels very close to our work. Our catalogue is not the result of an academic research project, but a form of research that happens through publishing itself, one book or record at a time.
Improvisation, central to Félicia’s artistic practice, has also become a working method for Shelter Press. It means paying attention, responding to what happens, trusting unexpected connections, and accepting that the direction may change along the way. Rather than following a fixed programme, we allow each project to open a path towards the next.
In this talk, we will share how our different practices meet, and how Shelter Press continues to take shape through a balance of intuition, independence, lasting connections, and improvisation.
“A music that exists in a world that doesn’t exist
or a world that exists in a music that doesn’t exist?”