Welcome to Let Us Cook, a day of bold new sounds, experiences, and ideas. Five emerging curators – working together as Mulch-imédia – were given the freedom to shape their vision of a day that embraces renewal, transformation, and the vibrant energy of spring. Across the different spaces of the Concertgebouw, you’ll encounter intimate sonic landscapes, musical traditions of the past reimagined for the present, and performances sure to awaken your senses – and your taste buds.
Installation artist Hye Young Sin plants a garden in the Foyer. This new commission is a delicate soundscape of plastic plants growing not in water, but in sound.
In the Angel Room, Emine Bostancı intertwines ancient sounds of the kemenche with singing and live electronics, bridging the rich musical heritage of Istanbul and our present.
Join Pepe Dayaw and friends in the kitchen on the main stage. In this unique experience of music and storytelling, the artists will prepare a meal that the audience is invited to taste and enjoy together. (Mind you, you will not get a full meal, but you will get a taste and be fully filled with music ...)
We start in the central hub, the Foyer, where the daily bustle gets put on hold for a fragile soundscape performance. Next, the route takes us to the highest stage of the building, the Angel Room. In the end we follow our nose to the heart of the house: the main stage. The audience joins the artists in a communal setting and the black box transforms into a cozy, collective kitchen.
Let Us Cook was born as an educational initiative of SoundsNow – a big five-year European project dedicated to promoting contemporary, experimental music and sound art, by focusing on the social and artistic role of the curator. Between 2019 and 2024, the project established a network of 9 music festivals and art centres across Europe, and presented an array of performances, workshops, mentorship programs, and hands-on curatorial labs with established and upcoming scholars, artists, and curators. The final SoundsNow project was hosted in October 2024 by Musica Impulse Centre (BE) in collaboration with Concertgebouw Brugge. During the intensive 1-week course led by meLê yamomo and Irene Revell, five aspiring curators between 22 and 27 years old engaged in workshops and discussions centred on the theme of curating diversity.
'Whose stories are told on concert stages? How does curation shape the audiences experience? What can the future of concert hall and its performance look, sound, and taste like? Can curation be an act of rebellion?'
The participants explored the responsibilities and possibilities of curation, the influence of institutional structures, how history is preserved in musical archives, and how inclusion can be more than just a word or ideal in artistic programming. Importantly, however, this was not just an intellectual exercise — it was a hands-on process designed to translate reflection into action. They were tasked with developing and overseeing the Young Curators' Happening as part of the Concertgebouw’s Spring is in the air festival, guiding it from concept to execution. For most, this was their first time engaging with the full scope of curatorial practice: managing budgets, designing a program, and navigating both artistic and logistical challenges in real time. Let Us Cook is the result of that process – an afternoon of performances curated by the new collective, Mulch-imédia.
At the heart of the day are two guiding themes: joy and community. The resultant programme was designed to reimagine how audiences engage with the art, how the artists engage with the audience, and how members of the audience engage with each other. In the different parts of Let Us Cook, the curators wanted to build spaces where listening becomes an active and shared experience for everyone involved. Each performance invites participation in a different way – whether through deep immersive listening, by reinterpreting genre and musical traditions, or by breaking down the formal barriers of performance entirely. By creating intimate moments of exchange rather than only passive observation, Let Us Cook encourages connection, inspires curiosity, and experiments with how we listen to music and art as a community.
Another key priority for the group was platforming emerging arts which, like the curators themselves, are in the midst of shaping bold and unconventional artistic careers. Let Us Cook brings these voices into the Concertgebouw, offering them an open space to experiment, meet new audiences, and share the afternoon in a festival that values innovation.
The phrase Let Us Cook emerged early in the process as both a playful provocation and slogan for this sort of curatorial work. Good cooking is not merely about preparing food, it’s about creating an experience that engages all of the senses. Master chefs combine colours, textures, aromas, flavours, and shapes in unexpected but delicious and unforgettable ways, thus connecting the deeply human act of preparing food with the spirit of improvisation. It’s exactly why the word ‘cooking’ has been a part of jazz-speak for decades.
'When musicians are improvising together – ‘jamming’ together – someone might say 'Hey, now we’re cooking!' when the group sounds and feels really good together. Each player is in the flow, responding intuitively to one another, layering ideas, and building something greater than the sum of its parts.'
Here, in jazz and in food, Let Us Cook is a call for audiences and the artists to create spontaneously, to push boundaries, and find a collective groove where individual voices and minds merge into a dynamic whole. It’s a call to trust, to listen, and to share. It’s a reminder to embrace the joy of making something together – whether a meal, a melody, or a moment of connection. In a complex world that too often values perfection and products, Let Us Cook celebrates the unpredictable and the process itself. It invites us all to step into the kitchen, pick up an instrument, take a leap, and imagine what we can create when we do it together.
David Wolfswinkel
Mulch-imédia is a curatorial collective formed by five emerging artists and thinkers – Koen Gijsman (NL), Phoebe Riley Law (UK), Ellie Murphy-Weise (USA), Rocío Naval (PH) and David Wolfswinkel (ZA). Based in the Netherlands, the UK and America, their work comprises installation art, performance, improvised music, and opera. Their name – a combination of ‘mulch’ and ‘multimedia’ – reflects their curatorial practice: just like mulch nourishes the soil, Mulch-imédia layers and breaks down ideas, disciplines, and perspectives to spark new growth. Together, they create and curate experiences centred around joy, confidence, care, and community. Mulch-imédia believes in radical collaboration – letting ideas simmer, blossom, transform, and come together in new and surprising ways. Their practice is an open experiment in sound, space, playful disruption, and coming together.
Emine Bostancı was born in Istanbul but moved to the Netherlands in 2016. She combines the age-old tradition of kemenche playing with singing and contemporary electronics. As such, she takes us from our technology-driven present to the rich tradition of Istanbul.
Plastic Garden is a series of performative installations by Hye Young Sin, employing sound as an act of cultivation. The art work conceptualises a new type of garden, integrating the exhibition space as both medium and context for its realisation. Concertgebouw Brugge commissioned the last edition: Trellis. During the performance, trellis structures are transformed into string instruments or generate feedback sounds through their interaction. The project explores artificiality and ecological concerns by reimagining growth, where plants thrive not through water, but through sound. It reflects on how human actions reshape environmental processes and sociocultural patterns, challenging conventional understandings of nature while exploring the boundaries between living organisms and synthetic creations.
There are things that we remember, and there are things that we don’t. That doesn’t mean these things are not there, our dressed-up memory and consciousness just could not access them. Island is a performative exploration of that which we call the 'improvised' or the 'unseen'. Pepe Dayaw and friends welcome you to a small tasting on an island in the middle of a sea of fantasies and histories; served warm, fluid and malleable enough, like a gentle dish, where it is possible to wonder about the mysteries of the past and re-member that which can never be forgotten.
The performance involves a small cooking process. Optionally and voluntarily, you may bring a small piece of leftover from your house and it will be incorporated into a dish which we can all taste and share once cooked.
Imagine how music is not only performed by instruments but in all of the sounds around us. Like music, cooking is not just about food: it is a ritual, a memory, a story. All of these elements come together in making a meal.
What are your best memories of food and cooking together with other people?
Pay special attention to the interactions between the piano, double bass – how they riff together and respond sights, smells, and sonic elements of the performance.
Emine Bostancı (TR) is a performer, composer, improviser and academician originally from Istanbul. Currently, she is an external PhD researcher in Cultural Musicology Department at the University of Amsterdam. She was awarded the First Prize at the Young Instrumentalists Competition held in memory of Tanburi Cemil Bey and has performed at many prestigious international festivals and venues. Her discography includes countless international albums within and outside of Europe.
Hye Young Sin (KR), a Berlin-based artist from Seoul, explores the dynamics between humanity’s instrumentalisation of nature and cooperative engagement with it. Her approach is rooted in the concept and practice of cultivation, not merely as an ecological process but also as a cultural, political, and technological act. Sin’s work has been featured in exhibitions and festivals, including the Deutsches Museum (Germany), Sound/Image 19 in London (UK), the Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival (South Korea), and INSONORA in Madrid (Spain).
Pepe Dayaw (PH) is a plurilingual movement artist, indie author and fashion maker. Since moving to Europe in 2010, siya* has been cooking performative situations and materialities that depart from a unique synthesis of a Filipino migrant fiction: queer, karaoke loving and a spiritual jack of many arts. Through the school of love/life, Pepe has drawn from themes sourced from their singular auto-ethnography: hunger, nostalgia, irony, translation, transits, borders, polyglottic memory, empathy, the unexpected, the invisible, the romantic and the ongoing quest for belonging. Armed with the lens of a dancer and theatre maker, they research the realm of taste and tactility as ‘queered’ and non-linear sciences that occupy the liminal spaces between life and art; between the mundane and the fantastic; between the you and the me.
Koen Gijsman (NL) researches, collects, improvises, composes, teaches, and practises music and sound. With a background in critical theory, enactivism, and performance studies, he finds resonance between decolonial aesthesis and improvised music. His artistic research (Codarts Research Prize 2023) developed methods to employ this knowledge in contemporary jazz practices. Gijsman is the bandleader of Epoxy Quartet, a Rotterdam-based instrumental improvisational ensemble that released its debut album Recollection in February 2025 on Challenge Records. In addition to this, he performs in a piano duo with Italian pianist Esmeralda Sella. His studies with exceptional artists such as Kris Davis and Dave Holland, combined with his experience as a scholar, have made him into an artist who listens carefully and carries responsibility towards both new sounds and echoes from the past.
Devon Gates (UK) is a bassist, vocalist, and composer. After studying both anthropology and jazz performance at Harvard University, Berklee College of Music, and the Royal Academy of Music (London) she has emerged in the jazz scene, working with esteemed artists and leads her own projects as a bandleader, collaborator, and composer, exporting her unique blend of jazz, chamber, and soul influences to the world. Her lauded composition Don't Wait was published in the Berklee Press New Standards collection of 101 lead sheets by female jazz composers.
A special word of thanks to meLê yamomo and Irene Revell for their guidance and inspiration; Esther Ursem for her leadership and care; Valentina Broes, Jonas De Roover and the entire team at Concertgebouw Brugge for their encouragement, patience, and boundless support; the teams at Musica Impulse Centre and SoundsNow for making this possible; and the OORtreders Festival in Pelt and Transit Festival in Leuven for their hospitality.
