Sound artist Aurélie Lierman was born in Rwanda (1980), but was raised in Belgium from the age of two. Fascinated by the narrative power of abstract sound and music, she frequently adds dramatic and documentary elements to a musical compositional structure (or precisely the other way round). That is why Aurélie Lierman’s oeuvre is multidisciplinary and balances between radio, installation, performance, vocal art and composition, with her extensive collection of unique field recordings and soundscapes from rural and urban East-Africa serving as the common denominator. Soundbite by soundbite she transforms and molds all those sounds that she herself has collected into something that she describes as “Afrique Concrète”.
She developed a set of site specific installations and electro-acoustic compositions for Slagwerk Den Haag, premiered in January 2017. Aurélie Lierman’s work has won her international awards several times: in January 2016, she won the Sally and Don Lucas work grant for Promising Musicians and Composers awarded by the Montalvo Arts Center in California (USA). In 2014, she won the First Prize at the Monophonic Festival (Brussels) for ‘Anosmia’, a radio composition about the Rwandan genocide. In 2013, she was awarded the First Prize at Sonic Arts Award (Rome) for ‘KARIAKOO’ – an audio portrait of a vibrant district of Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania) – as well as winning the Third Prize at the Grand Prix Nova (Boekarest) for ‘iota mikro’, based on field recordings made in her birthplace, the Karisimbi volcano in Rwanda. Aurélie Lierman is a former radio maker and host at VRT Broadcasting (Brussels, 1999-2007). And she was invited to be a guest vocalist and audio artist on two albums by the British cult group Nurse With Wound ([SIC] in 2013 and “Santoor Lena Bicycle” in 2014).
Aurelie Lierman and Fedor Teunisse taught a workshop at U staat hier on 10 November 2016.
