What were your primary inspirations for this project? Do you follow specific artists, scientists, or theorists to ground your research?
Robbie Doorman: “I had more of a main motivation than a main inspiration, which was to build some speakers that I had been wanting to make for a long time. However, after visiting the space I could use in Het Katoenhuis, I became very inspired by the space itself: its size and the infinite echo it produces. These are very interesting properties to work with. Usually, I find the space I exhibit in just as important as the work I’m making.”
Aimée Theriot: “Sound sustains and decays through cyclic, harmonic structures that nod to the trance-inducing qualities of ritual music across cultures: Islamic nasheeds, Christian hymns, protest chants, and healing ceremonies. These traditions share an understanding that music can do something beyond entertainment, anchoring collective experience, inducing altered states, and serving as a form of grounding.
My broader practice merges acoustic research and composition, and this work was shaped by thinking about how resonance, decay, and repetition function both acoustically and culturally. The final moments of the piece include a sample recorded at a pro-Palestine demonstration at Amsterdam Centraal Station: hundreds of people producing collective sound as a form of appeal, resistance, and ritual in the most contemporary sense.”
Jilles van Kleef: “I specifically used an aluminium-neck guitar to achieve as much sustain and as many overtones as possible. It also felt fitting to use an instrument made mostly of metal and wood within an installation consisting of huge wooden plates inside wooden frames. I experimented with alternative guitar tunings until I settled on one that matched the voicing and mood I had in mind. It is tuned quite a bit lower than a standard guitar and contains some repeating notes, which gives it a droning quality.
I really tried to write something that would emphasise what I found most interesting about the sound sculptures. There is a specific volume at which the plates almost overload, making them sound like gongs or cymbals being struck with mallets. I tried to write and perform a piece that constantly moves towards this point and away from it.”
The theme for Conflux 2025 was Rites of Decay. How did you interpret this theme in relation to your work?
Robbie Doorman: “Often, people find my sculptures mystical and relic-like. They have something of the monolith effect from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, as if they are artifacts from an unknown civilization. This also relates to my idea of challenging the way we listen to sound, where the loudspeaker as we know it today has become both a blessing and a curse. In its purpose of creating an optimal sound reference, it eliminates a certain form of creative freedom in both making and listening to sound.”
Aimée Theriot: “The theme Rites of Decay felt like a fitting description of what the piece tries to do. Decay, in acoustic terms, is the gradual loss of sound energy after a source stops, the reverb tail, the echo fading into silence. Decay is also what happens to structures, certainties, and lives under conditions of violence and abandonment. The protest sample at the end tried to make that connection explicit. The piece moves from the intimate acoustic decay of metal vibrating in a room to a much larger and more urgent form of collective sound-making.”
Jilles van Kleef: “The piece thematically moves from hopeful to overwhelmed and overloaded, to euphoric and dreamy, to contemplative and moody, and finally toward something dark, threatening, and full of impending doom. The ending quite literally sounds like incoming drones, bombers, or bombs. After almost two years of witnessing horrific footage of the genocide in Gaza, this was something that was very present in my mind.”
