Seismic

Concert as terrain

What if sound were no longer medium but matter. No longer time but pressure? In SEISMIC, the concert is stripped of its frame and exposed as terrain: unstable, porous, inhabited. Seven performers move like tectonic plates in slow collision. Silence grows heavy. Slowness tightens until it fractures. Light ceases to illuminate and begins to build, turning into architecture, pressing against us like stone. Figures wander. Sometimes they crash, sudden and violent; sometimes they pause in suspension, a silence more dangerous than impact. Intimacy arrives as rupture, violence as a strange kind of care. Nothing is stable. Sound, movement, and image collapse into one another, dissolving their borders. The audience navigates inside this shifting geology, caught in a field where order falters, empathy sharpens, and every vibration remakes the ground beneath us.

Blurred lines

SEISMIC reimagines the concert as an unstable field, a place where sound, movement, and architecture act as equal forces. The work begins from the grammar of the concert - instruments, musicians, duration, attention - and pushes it beyond its own limits, crossing the bridge towards performance and installation. Here, the concert becomes a living environment: the score turns into landscape, the ensemble into a collective body, and sound into material pressure.

Developed through a collaboration between composer Maria W Horn, Ictus Ensemble, and stage director Aïda Gabriëls, the piece unfolds as a living geology rather than a fixed composition.

At its core lies a study of three ecologies: sonic, kinetic, and architectural.

The sonic ecology explores sound as matter. Frequencies behave like layers of sediment: eroding, colliding, accumulating. Maria W Horn treats tone as substance: bending and leaking through air until it reshapes the space around us. What we hear is never stable; it drifts, fractures, reforms.

The kinetic ecology extends this to the body. Movement becomes a way of registering and redirecting pressure. Every gesture transfers energy between performers, materials, and audience. SEISMIC cultivates a language of proximity and friction, where tension and release are shared responsibilities.

The architectural ecology turns space into an active instrument. The metal panels by Noir Métal act as both wall and resonator, modulating visibility and ricocheting sound through the room.

Matteo Sedda navigates this terrain through physical negotiation, tracing lines of pressure and orientation, redefining how bodies move and pause within the field. Astrid Vansteenkiste’s light reveals the space’s shifting density, while Tanja Mala Ngombe introduces wax - soft, translucent, and fragile - as a counter-material to metal’s weight and opacity. Together they compose a landscape that breathes, conceals, and reveals.

In the tremor together

In SEISMIC, performers and audience share the same ground. There is no stage, no safe distance. The public navigates inside the work’s vibrations: their bodies reflect sound, their movements alter balance, their stillness shapes duration. Listening becomes a collective gesture, an attention that is at once physical, social, and spatial. This approach grows from the practice of OESTER. Working at the crossroads of music, performance and visual arts, OESTER seeks out spaces of friction and dialogue between disciplines, opening new ways of listening, seeing, and being together. Its projects ask how histories, bodies, and voices resonate in the present, shaping encounters that are as critical as they are sensorial.

A field of sound

The sound world of SEISMIC unfolds through a constellation of composers who treat vibration as material rather than message: Maria W Horn, Aisha Orazbayeva, Alvin Lucier, Laure Hiendl, and James Tenney. Their works coexist rather than follow one another, overlapping, drifting, interfering. The piece becomes an ecosystem where tone, gesture, and space continually reshape one another. SEISMIC moves between the precision of composition and the openness of installation, turning the act of listening into a spatial, collective and sculptural experience.

Active listening

SEISMIC explores how time itself can be shaped: stretched, compressed, suspended. Rather than drive forward, the piece invites listening as a shared act of duration: a slow unfolding in which sound, body, and space continuously recompose one another. Stillness is never empty; it holds tension, resonance, and care. Each tone lingers just long enough to shift the balance of the room, revealing how fragility and focus can exist side by side. The experience unfolds like a landscape in motion. Alert, patient, alive. What remains is not a story but a state of attention: a temporary equilibrium between sound and space, performer and listener.

In SEISMIC, listening is not passive, it’s how we stand together inside the tremor.