Toni Brell

Toni Brell works across installation, sound, sculpture, and performance. Their work often engages Central European sonic traditions, asking what forms of togetherness they create, which landscapes shape them, and what exclusions they contain.
Grounded in affect, Brell creates intimate environments that hold shared attention where personal experiences can surface. Working through a poetics of divergence, the practice draws on histories and narratives related to divergent forms of experience, including neurodivergence, madness, cross-sensoriality, and animality, to subvert systems of categorisation that determine what is recognized as “normal”. Structured as a form of expanded theatre, Brell extends theatrical principles into installation as a means of rehearsing divergent modes of perception and relation. Sound gives access to emotional states and shifts attention toward expanded forms of listening. Handmade objects and everyday materials become instruments, broadening who and what can produce sound.
Recent work focuses on horn-blowing traditions, folk music, and sonic practices connected to landscape, ritual, and collective life. Brell approaches the horn not only as an instrument, but as an extension of the body: a prosthetic voice, or portal through which human, animal, and environmental relations can be reconfigured.
Since 2023, Brell teaches Narration in Space at Design Academy Eindhoven.