Performing Listening

Melissa Van Drie's project reflects critically on how we become listeners across different places and times. Engaging performance-based research, she investigates listening as a process of becoming: a set of multisensory, performative and relational practices that extend far beyond the human ear. The aim is to contribute to decolonial, convivial, and plurivocal ways of inhabiting a shared planet. How can listening cultivate new ways of knowing and interacting across more-than-human worlds? 

A key research initiative of Van Drie's fellowship is The SPLAT! Protocols, a performative series in which food becomes central to sonic inquiry. Rather than treating food as an object, it is approached 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 imagination. Specifically, Van Drie curated the SPLAT! Protocols throughout the five sessions of Sound Arguments 2026, check out images here: 

Melissa Van Drie’s artistic research thus explores intersections of sound and metabolic processes. In the context of planetary change, biodiversity loss, and increasingly digital lifestyles, it remains important to give sensory work a central role in thinking about entangled forms of planetary habitation. Through its practice-based approach, the project Performing Listening proposes sonic frameworks for engaging ecological discourses and multispecies relations. During her Orpheus Instituut fellowship, Van Drie's intention was to point towards a future of artistic research that is participatory, multisensory, and grounded in making, one that begins by listening differently.