Project Hessdalen

The Cologne-based duo AVATAR CURATORS performs installation-based and visual music. Verena Barié (recorders & electronics) and Rochus Aust (trumpets & spatial composition) create expanded artistic dimensions. Together, they weave an acoustic network that connects the disciplines of music and installation art.
They have presented joint concerts, performances, and public space interventions in Klaipėda, Buffalo, Detroit, Marseille, Paris, Auckland, Wellington, Singapore, Kolkata, New Delhi, Leh/Ladakh in the Himalayan region, Yogyakarta, and throughout Germany.

VERENA BARIÉ (*1994) is a recorder player, media artist, and curator of sound-based arts. She works on the foundation of a Master’s degree in Live Electronics and a Bachelor’s degree in Recorder from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Sound & Reality / Transmedial Forms in Düsseldorf.
From 2021 to 2025, she served as Chair of the Cologne Society for New Music (Kölner Gesellschaft für Neue Musik e.V.), where she realized projects in contemporary (ensemble) music and made a lasting impact on the cultural policy landscape. She is co-curator of LTK4 – Sound-Based Arts Cologne together with Rochus Aust and curator at the project space LTS4 at the Lichtturm Solingen.

ROCHUS AUST (*1968) · ARCM (Associate of the Royal College of Music)
is a German “soundtronaut,” media performer, and artist-curator for sound-based arts based in Cologne. Rochus composes, stages, writes, produces, and performs transmedial and interdisciplinary large-scale projects, unique performances, and installations in more than 50 countries, including 11 symphonies for power-plant orchestras.
Academically trained, tempered by grassroots democratic practice, shaped by a critical stance toward the canon, and awarded both as a creator and interpreter of works, Rochus acts with a future-oriented mindset, understands collectively, and assumes responsibility as a soloist. Aust is the artistic leader of the Society for Culture and Space Travel (Gesellschaft für Kultur und Raumfahrt).