Seismic

A concert unframed

SEISMIC grows from a collaboration between composer Maria W Horn, Ictus Ensemble, and stage director Aïda Gabriëls, unfolding as a living geology rather than a fixed score. 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 and accumulating over time. Maria W Horn treats tone as a physical substance. What we hear is never stable: it drifts, fractures, and reshapes the air around us. 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 M. Hiendl, and James Tenney. Their works do not follow one another but coexist: overlapping, drifting, and interfering.

The kinetic ecology extends this to the body. Movement becomes a way of registering and redirecting pressure. Each 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 Metal function as both wall and resonator, modulating visibility and sending sound ricocheting through the room. Matteo Sedda (performance artist and choreographer) shapes this terrain through movement, tracing lines of pressure and orientation. Astrid Vansteenkiste’s lighting and lucid structures expose the space’s shifting density, while Tanja Mala Ngombe introduces wax - soft, translucent, and fragile - as a counter-material to the metal’s weight and opacity. Together they compose a landscape that breathes, conceals, and reveals.

Modes of Listening

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. The act of listening becomes spatial and collective, an attention that is both physical and social. 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 and genres, opening up new ways of listening, seeing and experiencing. OESTER-projects probe how histories, bodies and voices resonate in the present, shaping encounters that are as critical as they are sensorial.

The Team

Maria W Horn - Composer, performer

Maria W Horn is a Swedish composer whose work investigates sonic extremes, from fragile harmonic tension to physical, vibrating density. Combining electronics with acoustic instruments, she explores perception, psychoacoustics and the architecture of listening. Her music is released on labels such as XKatedral, Ideal and Portals Editions.

Aisha Orazbayeva - Composer, Performer

Kazakh-born violinist and composer Aisha Orazbayeva is known for her radical interpretations and exploratory performance practice. She moves fluidly between classical repertoire and experimental music, often using feedback, electronics and extended techniques to uncover new acoustic relationships.

Victor Guaita - Performer

Victor Guaita, Spanish viola player and improviser, performs across contemporary music and performance. A member of Ictus Ensemble.

Geert De Bièvre - Performer

Geert De Bièvre is a cellist whose practice bridges historical performance, contemporary music and improvisation. As part of Ictus Ensemble, he has collaborated with a wide range of composers and artists, focusing on the physical and spatial dimensions of sound.

Nabou Claerhout - Performer

Belgian trombonist and composer Nabou Claerhout explores the instrument’s full sonic spectrum, from subtle breath to seismic resonance. Her work moves between jazz, contemporary and experimental music, driven by curiosity for texture, timbre and collective sound-making.

Ruben Orio - Performer

Spanish percussionist and sound artist Ruben Orio works between concert, performance and installation. His practice examines rhythm, resonance and space through gesture and repetition, often transforming simple materials into complex sonic environments.

Aïda Gabriëls - Concept, direction, light & scenography

Aïda Gabriëls is a stage director and curator working at the crossroads of music, movement and visual arts. With OESTER, the collective she founded, she creates transdisciplinary works that open new ways of listening and perceiving, blurring boundaries between stage, installation, and concert. Her projects explore how histories, bodies and voices resonate in the present, shaping encounters that are as critical as they are sensorial.

Matteo Sedda - Choreographic advice, performer

Matteo Sedda is a choreographer and performance artist navigating between movement, endurance and ritual gesture, using the body as a site of pressure and transformation. He shapes spatial relations in SEISMIC through physical negotiation rather than formal choreography.

Tom Pauwels - Dramaturgy

Guitarist and artistic co-director of Ictus Ensemble, Tom Pauwels combines musical precision with conceptual dramaturgy. His work often questions the relation between score, body and space, fostering collaborations that blur the boundaries between composition, performance and listening.

Astrid Vansteenkiste - Light

Belgian light designer and visual artist Astrid Vansteenkiste approaches light as sculptural matter, a moving architecture that frames and distorts perception. Her work ranges from performance to installation, exploring reflection, opacity and the tension between visibility and disappearance.

Tanja Mala Ngombe - Scenography

Visual artist Tanja Mala Ngombe works with tactile materials - wax, fabric, pigment - to create spaces that balance fragility and resistance. In SEISMIC, her sculptural interventions respond to the metallic landscape, introducing warmth, transparency and transformation.

Noir Métal - Scenography

Noir Métal was founded in 2020 by French artists Nicolas Bourthoumieux and Julien Dumond. Working as blacksmiths, they create sculptural metal structures that operate between craft, design and installation, stately yet raw, functional yet poetic. Their pieces often serve as supports, frames, pedestals or light fixtures for exhibitions, blurring the lines between sculpture and scenography through a refined practice of repurposing and recontextualisation. SEISMIC features Pans (2022), a modular steel structure originally produced for the exhibition at La Verrière, presented by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, reactivated here as a resonant architecture within the performance’s evolving landscape.

Milan Henderickx - Scenographic advice

Milan Henderickx is an Antwerp-based designer and curator whose work bridges design, architecture, visual arts, and performance. He investigates how spatial systems influence behaviour and perception, providing scenographic and conceptual support to transdisciplinary projects at OESTER. Milan is the owner of COUR, a once-abandoned apartment overlooking Antwerp’s cathedral and now a gallery and home that reads like a living installation. From fourteen planters in a courtyard, COUR has grown into instinct-driven, collaborative exhibitions that reject white-cube sterility in favour of lived-in intimacy, enduring craft and valuing permanence over disposability. 

Ruth Sarens - Production management

Ruth Sarens manages and coordinates artistic projects across music theatre and performance. Known for her precision and creative sensibility, she ensures the logistical and organisational backbone behind SEISMIC.