JULIA ECKHARDT

BIO

Julia Eckhardt is a viola player in the field of composed and improvised contemporary music. After her studies she worked in different, mostly contemporary, chamber music groups, and after this a couple of years in the National Orchestra of Belgium.
Since 1995 she is a founding member of and artistic director of Q-O2 workspace in Brussels, which was first an ensemble for contemporary experimental and improvised music, and became in 2006 a workspace for experimental music and sound art. For Q-O2 she initiated and curated different thematic projects. She has been collaborating with composers such as Eliane Radigue, Phill Niblock, Pauline Oliveros, Stevie Wishart, Jennifer Walshe, Wandelweiser-composers, Antony Coleman and many of the young generation.
After having started to play free improvisation in 2001 she has collaborated with musicians such as Andrea Neumann, Burkhard Beins, Rhodri Davies, Keith Rowe, Arnaud Jacobs, Lucio Capece, Taku Sugimoto, Robin Hayward.
She is part of the group Incidental Music which is specialised in conceptual music and operates near to the Wandelweiser composers group, together with Manfred Werder, Normisa Pereira da Silva, Angharad Davies and Stefan Thut.
She has been teaching and lecturing at Lemmens Institut (conservatory of Leuven), Transmedia (postgraduate program of Sint-Lukas Brussels University College of Art & Design, Brussels) and La Cambre (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels, Brussels)
She grew up in Berlin and lives and works in Brussels.

FRAME OF RESEARCH

Opera in boxes

I received an ‘onwikkelingsbeurs’, to get different functions in my work in balance; the composing, interpreting and curating are intertwined but do not always get the same attention. In Les Bains I plan to listen and read a lot, and at the same time prepare a cd and recordings for an installation which I plan, an opera in a box.