Looking back on the fellowship of Melissa Van Drie
We look back on Melissa Van Drie’s visiting fellowship, which began in September 2025 and now comes to a close just before the summer break. One thing is certain: her work leaves lasting traces.
Melissa Van Drie’s fellowship centred on performing listening: with others, in practice, and through traces. Engaging practice-based research, Melissa explores listening as a process of becoming: a set of multisensory, performative, and relational practices that extend far beyond the human ear. In a time of ecological transformations, she asks how listening can cultivate new ways of knowing, sensing, and sharing about more-than-human worlds.
A key research initiative of her fellowship is The SPLAT! Protocols, a performative series in which food becomes central to sonic inquiry. Rather than treating food as an object, she approaches it as a vibratory event: one ripe for exploring complex ecosystems. Food-making workshops became the experimental terrain through which practices of listening and sounding (both musical and nonmusical) were re-considered. These hands-on experiences transformed familiar workspaces into a curious laboratory for collective reflection, experimentation, and discovery. SPLAT! Protocols was curated throughout the five sessions of Sound Arguments 2026.
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Ultimately, Van Drie’s research opens up new sonic frameworks for working on more-than-human stories.
Sounds are not a backdrop to our world. Sounds are the vibrant relations that relate our interconnections. Sensing sound is a visceral, deeply embodied experience that connects us to place and to others.
Looking ahead
By bringing artistic research into shared acts of making and listening, Melissa Van Drie continues to challenge how we understand sound, food, and ecological relations. Her work at Orpheus Instituut points towards a future of artistic research that is participatory, multisensory, and grounded in practice, one that begins by listening differently.
