Germaine Sijstermans is a composer, installation artist and musician. Her works combine ephemeral, often site specific installations with indeterminate music, open to the serendipity of location and time. She explores the phenomenological experience of a space and all that occurs within it through the use of silence, light, sounds, space, and embodiment, creating (sonic) environments, in which everyone present may find their personal itinerary of experiences.
For her music she creates open scores that hold the possibilities for abstract sound materials to unfold and move in organic textures, while inviting a non-linear perception and use of time.
Germaine is constantly cooperating with composers and performers, developing music and performances. Her performances have taken place in venues varying from traditional concert settings to underground stages, located from the Netherlands to Brazil.
Germaine Sijstermans is based in Heerlen (NL) at the heart of the historically rich Meuse-Rhine Euroregion. She is part of the education team for Marres (house for contemporary culture) giving and developing trainings in line with Marres’s focus on experience, the working of the senses and the language of the body. She is also the artist residency coordinator at Greylight Projects.
Germaine obtained her master's degree as a performing musician at Codarts in Rotterdam. Prior to that she did her bachelor studies at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague.
She received composition and artistic mentoring from i.a. Jürg Frey, Michael Pisaro-Liu, Antoine Beuger, Marcus Kaiser, and Joachim Eckl. In 2020 she received a New Creators grant from the Dutch Performing Arts Fund.
