Responsive Recording – Ernst Maréchal

In this field recording atelier, foraging becomes a way of gathering sound in close dialogue with the environment of the VUB campus. Instead of treating recording as something we take, we approach it as a form of listening with a place. We ask how recorded sounds can stay connected to where they come from, and what it means to record in a responsive and ethical way. If we take sound, how can we also givesomething back?

Through hands-on exploration, shared listening, and discussion, participants are invited to rethink field recording as a reciprocal process, where human and more-than-human presences resonate together.

The atelier is initiated by sound artists and researchers Nele Möller (LUCA) and Ernst Maréchal (RITCS), in collaboration with artist/curator Gosie Vervloessem (The Foragers for VUB Crosstalks).

Part of The Foragers: Engagements Beyond the Human, an interdisciplinary art–science series at VUB. The Foragers brings together artists and researchers who reclaim the ancient practice of foraging as a bold, imaginative, and future-oriented method. Alongside film screenings, talks and collective practices, the program comes together in the exhibition at PILAR on the VUB Campus (23 April – 31 May). The field recording atelier is developed in collaboration with Future Narratives, the artistic research program of RITCS School of Arts.

Ernst Maréchal is an audiovisual artist, performer and songwriter. His focus is on co-creation and on how we can make diverse voices resonate and give meaning in public space by bringing them together. He tries to understand and represent the dramaturgy of these encounters by searching for artistic forms to hold traces of them, from a participatory observation and activation. In the recent past he was founder and artistic director of Manoeuvre, a co-creative arts space in Ghent. Before that he created together with other artists and with many new Belgians (in collaboration with Globe Aroma & Kaaitheater) the projects: The Table Kitchen, Made in Belgium and Blue Key Identity. A shared research into the possibilities of integration as a dialogical process. Now he is active as an artistic (PhD) researcher at RITCS School of Arts/VUB where, with the trajectory Social Recordings, he searches for the relational power of sound, for feedback as communication, for forms of open listening that enter into dialogue with the unknown and the antagonistic and for how, despite the differences, we are subject to (but also contribute to) the sonic space we share.

Nele Möller is currently working towards a PhD in the Arts at KU Leuven and LUCA Brussels. Her research project, The Forest Echoes Back, oscillates around the Thuringian Forest in Germany, which is severely impacted by monoculture plantings, climate change, and bark beetle outbreaks, exploring how to retrace and react to these ongoing changes using field recording, live audio streaming, listening, and mimicry as the central methodologies.

Gosie Vervloessem lives and works in Brussels. She studied Educational Sciences at KU Leuven, Audiovisual Arts at LUCA School of Arts Brussels, and Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies at a.pass. In 2010, Vervloessem began working under the name Domestic Science Club, through which she developed lectures, performances, workshops, recipes, and installations. In 2014, the focus of her work shifted toward food, digestion, and indigestion. She is currently concerned with tensions and oppositions related to nature and its environment. Her work has been presented at Recyclart, Vooruit, Beursschouwburg, STUK, De Brakke Grond, Belluard Festival, PPP Bern, Dock 11, and other venues. Since 2025 she co-curates the public program The Foragers, in collaboration with Benoît Henriet and VUB Crosstalks.