The Unseen and the Visible

As a composer working with sound, Esther Venrooy often spends hours at her desk listening to specific recordings or found footage. These audio sessions often result in sketches. Not only as a means of understanding the landscape of auditory events but also in order to establish or extract the musicality of the images. The domain of sound is often a point of departure for her when creating an audiovisual installation, leading her to reflect on ‘what sound is’. A sound can sometimes be a fragment of a remembered past that speaks to our deepest auditory memory and takes us back to a certain place in time. As Stockhausen once said: “Whenever we hear sounds, we are changed.” Esther Venrooy’s work ‘Slam Your Doors in a Golden Silence’ can be viewed as a key work within the exhibition. The artist shows that sound has the ability to bring people both in motion and together. The sounds of the boats in Zaltbommel, where she grew up, have left a lasting impression on the artist. Now, through her work, she attempts to reconstruct these experiences and emotions, the wonderment and the magic. She hopes to achieve this by drawing on the experiences she has gained regarding the relationship between space and sound. Not only for herself, but as a means of connecting people.