Esther Venrooij is a Dutch composer, artist, and professor of Mixed Media, Performance, and Sound Art at LUCA School of Arts, campus Sint-Lucas Gent, where she supervises master and doctoral research projects. Her artistic and pedagogical practice orbits the question of how sound and movement inhabit space, an inquiry she has pursued through composed music, improvised electronics, site-specific installation, video, and the essay film.
Venrooij conceives her dual roles as artist and composer as occupying two distinct sensorial planes, yet it is precisely in their convergence that her work finds its resonance. Her research, rooted in the concept of audio topography, examines the architectural, spatial, and physical qualities of sound as an immaterial yet structuring presence. This line of inquiry led to her doctoral dissertation, Audio Topography: The Interaction of Sound, Space and Medium (KU Leuven, 2015), and has since expanded into the supervision of research projects such as Umwelten of Artists and Architects (2013–2018) and the publication of Sounding Things Out – A Journey Through Music and Sound Art (Onomatopee, 2020). Currently, she co-directs the research cluster Art, Space & Sound at LUCA, holds a ZAP-mandate at KU Leuven and is an active member of the research group Material Narratives at KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture.
Together with Annelies Monseré, Venrooij is developing a research trajectory on intangible heritage, exploring how sound, memory, and embodied transmission shape the experience of place and community. This work has recently crystallised in a major new research project for which she serves as promoter. She also co-promotes a related FWO-funded project on the future of traditional arts, examining artistic methodologies for revitalising and appropriating inherited practices.
Venrooij is currently completing a new publication, And Another Thing I Heard – Modes, Practices and Exercises in Listening, which extends her long-standing engagement with listening as both a compositional method and a critical, pedagogical tool . The book approaches listening as an artistic, spatial, and investigative strategy, drawing on decades of practice-based research. Concurrently, she is developing a series of audiovisual works that take the act of listening: its gestures, its attention, its performativity, as their primary subject, with particular interest in the role of listening within cinema and the cinematic. This inquiry was recently advanced in her lecture You See I Write by Ear (2024), which delves into how auditory experiences shape spatial narratives and how listening can function as a mode of creative inquiry.
Venrooij’s recent artistic work continues to probe the thresholds between sound, memory, and historical consciousness. Her 2023 multimedia work Grey Alder, exhibited at Kunstenfestival Watou, engaged with the auditory landscapes of the First World War, not through reenactment or documentation, but by foregrounding listening as a methodological and experiential framework for approaching historical experience .
Rather than seeking to represent wartime horrors, the work elucidates the auditory observations and hallucinations intrinsic to the trenches and the Westhoek landscape, inviting viewers into a nuanced sensory encounter with the past. This framework now animates a major new collaborative project. Together with four master students, Venrooij is developing On a Good Day, Only Moderately Precarious for the EMAF festival. The work begins with the idea of the precarious ensemble: a temporary group of image- and sound-makers collaborating through the Halprins’ RSVP cycle, moving between its four elements (Resources, Score, Valuaction, and Performance) as an open, flexible framework for collective improvisation and real-time composition rather than a fixed sequence.
In her teaching, Venrooij continuously tests the boundaries between theory and practice, between the studio and the public realm. For the master seminar Too Body to Fail, developed in longstanding collaboration with Pieterjan Ginckels, she initiated a series of group performative interventions that situate student work in charged, everyday environments. Public performance have taken place on the Krook Library in Ghent, KBR Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels, with additional interventions developed at IKEA Ghent . The seminar brings together students from LUCA School of Arts and KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture, inviting them to explore how bodily presence, group dynamics, and spatial interaction co-produce social and architectural scripts through simple practices of embodiment, attention, and collaboration.
Venrooij has performed and exhibited extensively across Europe, Asia, and the United States, and her work is represented on labels including Entr’acte (London) and Robo Records (Antwerp). Her practice continues to explore the thresholds between the visible and the audible, the tangible and the ephemeral, the composed and the contingent; thresholds she now also cultivates in the work of a new generation of artists and researchers.
