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Artist's statement

I’m a sound artist from Brussels, Belgium. I make installations, soundscapes and performances and I do sound design for dance and theatre. Sound is a medium that is both very direct – hearing is in a sense just an extremely good sense of touch – and yet very malleable, it leaves a lot of room for imagination and interpretation. Far more than visual perception, sound gets it’s meaning from the context it’s being heard in. It is this context, this imagination and interpretation that I use in my work, finding new artistic forms and questions for it. I want to create experiences for the spectators that confront them with their own history and identity, asking questions how they frame situations, listen to sound, and reflect on how they create their own view of the world. This couples back to my own history as a sociologist and radio journalist. I’m interested in how listening can be a mirror of, or a lens into the structuring of our identity, our memory, our society, questioning our conception of the world we live in.

Sound creates a non-space, a template or shifting body of interpretations which is easy to fill by the spectator, but because of it’s physicality, it also structures and guides the sensory experience, and therefore it’s openness can be used to softly destructure and deplace the sensory experience and it’s interpretation, heightening the room for the spectators imagination.

My work often starts by collecting testimonies, images, sounds, and then finding structures where this material can nudge the spectator to reflect on his or her own interpretation process. I do this by focussing on small moments, small histories since I believe that this is where our identity lies, a collection and history of modest experiences, small stories that we’ve lived, we’ve been told and that we’ve told to ourselves.

In this framework, I also do a lot of field recording, which I then use in installations, compositions and live sets. The field recordings mostly come from nature, but I also look for sonic material in cities and urban areas. Sometimes the field recordings are connected to a specific project; sometimes they are encompassed by a larger search for sound, and a great fondness of and wondering about listening.

The past few years I’ve been increasingly involved in contemporary dance as well. I do sound design for dance pieces, have made an audio dance performance with Georgia Vardarou and Marisa Cabal and currently I’m developing Pressure Sequence, in which I explore the auditory facets of dance and their interaction with imagination and live dance. The installation version is ready and I’m now working on a performance version.