walk · listen · create

Renate Zentschnig is a graduated theater scientist at the University of Amsterdam and is active as a theater maker since 1992. She obtained her Masters at Dasarts in 2004 and has since then worked as a filmmaker / visual artist / sound artist.

The boundary between art and reality
Her productions are always a new attempt to break open classical theater and to provoke the audience to make new connections with the world outside the theater. Her projects play with the boundary between art and reality and most take place on location. The actors are generally not actors but "real people" who tell about their own lives.

Collaboration with sound artists
Since 2002 Renate Zentschnig started making of sound walks in collaboration with sound artists such as Justin Bennett and Evelien van den Broek. She noted the sound walk is a relatively unexplored media form that still offers a lot of room for new experiments. She set up a structure in which colleagues and colleagues from other disciplines can work together on soundwalks and find new ways to develope the medium. It also seemed essential to her to simultaneously create conditions to properly convey the results to the public. Soundtrackcity was created in 2009 from this personal wish.

Together with Michiel Huijsman Renate Zentschnig is the co-founder and co-director of Soundtrackcity, a nonprofit artist-led organisation focussing on research and the developement of new collaborative artistic practices concerning sound and the urban milieu. Soundtrackcity developes new forms of media art and demonstrates new listening practices, initiates participatory research projects with local communities and produces soundwalks with and without headphones. Founded in 2009, Soundtrackcity is active in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Istanbul and Berlin.

The organization has developed from a curatorial collective producing sound art in public space to a participatory and artistic research agency that focuses on the social, political and cultural aspects of sonic urban environments. At the moment Soundtrackcity is involved in three research projects, each developed together with different communities and organisations: Sonic West, Crowdsourcing Mr. Visserplein and Urban Sound Lab.