In vitro: Max Eastley & Rie Nakajima / Allan Gilbert Balon / Caroline Profanter

Max Eastley & Rie Nakajima

Max Eastley is a sound installation artist and a musician. He has been an AHRC Senior Researcher at Oxford Brookes University investigating Aeolian phenomena; City Sound Artist for Bonn, Germany; a Composer in residence with DAAD, Berlin, exhibiting installations and giving concerts and performances and as an artist with the Cape Farewell Climate Change Project. He has made interior installations in major galleries and for public and private collections worldwide and Aeolian installations throughout Europe. Recordings of some of his installations are on the Paradigm label.

As a musician and performer, Max has played many solo concerts, as well as performing and recording in combinations with other musicians. He has also worked with dancers and choreographers and devised a variety of mixed media performances, the most recent being revivals of “Whirled Music” for festivals in Switzerland.

Rie Nakajima is a sculptor living in London. She creates sounds using a combination of motorised devices and daily objects. It can be installation or performance. Fusing sculpture and sound, her artistic practice is open to chance and the influence of others. Her first major solo exhibition was held at IKON Gallery in Birmingham in 2018. She has also worked with Museo Vostell Malpartida (Cáceres), Association de Le Cyclop (Milly la Forêt), ShugoArts (Tokyo), Donaueschinger Music Festival (Donaueschinger), and Cafe OTO (London). Her collaborators are Pierre Berthet, Angharad Davies, David Cunningham, Keiko Yamamoto, Miki Yui, Hans W. Koch, Marie Roux, Billy Steiger, David Toop en Akira Sakata.

Allan Gilbert Balon

Artist and composer Allan Gilbert Balon was born in Les Abymes, Guadeloupe in 1986 and is now based in Créteil (France). His protean works combine sculpture, composition, sound installations and performance and explore themes of presence and intimacy. Allan is the co-founder of Xyä Edition together with Uta Guan Hyë and has released music on labels like Recital Program and Séance Centre.

Caroline Profanter

Caroline Profanter is a composer and performer born in Bozen. Her work oscillates between acousmatic composition and live-performed electroacoustic music, with a focus on imaginary soundscapes and sonic narratives. She is interested in sounds and noises taken from the context of everyday life, transformed digitally and used as pure material. Therefore she collects field recordings and combines them with instrumental sounds or electronically generated sounds, with analog synthesizers and feedback-systems. She works with multiple speaker settings, using given spaces and surfaces as resonators, and produces work for Acousmonium and live spatialization.

She collaborates regularly with artists of other fields, at the crossroad to literature, video and radio art. She studied Computer Music and Electronic Media at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna and holds a Master's degree in Acousmatic Composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Mons in Belgium.

Lives and works in Brussels and is part of the artistic team of Q-O2 workspace for experimental music and sound art.

About In vitro

Iv (In vitro*) is a project space and event series based in Brussels. It focuses on promoting contemporary music and sound art through live performances and time-based exhibitions. By cultivating new frameworks for experimental practices, it tries to nurture an artistic community that’s often overlooked in their commercial and institutional fields. In vitro seeks to create a platform for the dissemination of sound on an international scale.