Installation Performance for viola, masks & moving image
First try-out at the Tristero House (Schaarbeek, Brussels) on April 8 2022
There Here Now is a new project I’m working on with viola player Sigrid Keunen. The sculptural/music performance she was working on counterpointed nicely with an audiovisual version of the Marklin series I was developping. We put our heads together for the first time during a residency at Tristero House and currently planning new residencies to develop the piece further.
check the instagram account @byebyeleopold for an overview of all our adventures!
Somewhere before the summer of 2021, a call was made for a project with the title ‘ByeBye Leopold, Destination Simonis’. A group of neighbours of the Leopold II boulevard (between Sainctelette and Simonis) were looking for an action that could gather people. Questionning the renaming of the boulevard, since it’s namegiver is considered highly problematic in the (de-)colonisation context, but also about mobility and the use of public space on one of the busiest lanes of the brussels region, sitting on top of a tunnel. A tunnel carrying the same name but due to change… But mainly: it has been renovated to keep cars coming swiftly from the highway right into the center of town.
I got to work with visual artist and St.Lukas teacher Roel Kerkhofs. We quickly concocted the idea of a wooden replica of an existing statue of Leopold II that we would scale down to the size of a car and give it some wooden wheels. So that we could push around slowly from one end of the boulevard to the other, trying to park it every night.
After a construction period of about three weeks, we rolled out our statue onto the boulevard. Pretty quickly we adapted our plans of constantly rolling around to stay put on certain spots where we could reach out to the users of the space: inhabitants as well as passerbyers were sometimes perplexed, vexed, enchanted or enthousiastic to our action. We used the artifact to simply ask questions whilst not pretending to have any answers or preconceptions. Over a period of three weeks driving and hanging around, we also tried to engage people into taking part in a closing event with concerts, free coffee, tea and cakes that were ordered at several bakeries in the area, calling it a baking competition. After a few stretches along the boulevard, we had some regulars hanging around, helping us moving, painting and taking polls: Nourredine and Mouha in the end glued together a pinata, modelled to Leopold’s head that was cracked open on the last day, releasing a load of ‘napoleon’ candy.
As a final act of erasing the stains of history, the statue that was painted with red and black board paint over the course of the three weeks, the whole statue was crayed white and took its final journey down the boulevard, to end up in the freezone of Toestand/Allée du Kaai, next to Tour and Taxi.
The statue got reappropriated but eventually had to be taken down, as homeless people started using it to sleep overnight, while others were always talking of burning it to the ground. Surely a risk no one wanted to take…
A film of this action/project is in the making, check this space soon!
How to survive in the city, with Ann Van de Vyvere
The “Archive of Untold Stories” project landed at ZSenne Artlab again. This edition further investigated the the archive as a way of presenting stories. The Extinction Survival Archive started during a previous residency at ZSenne Artlab. The pandemic has turned the attention away from an impending problem: The tipping point of our climate, the inescapable ecological disaster if we don’t take action. The apocalypse hasn’t been repelled, so we might as wel think about survival in such circumstances. How can I leave my children, who only know the internet as a source of knowledge, the necessary information if electricity might not even be available?
Last edition the premise resulted in a naive humbling collection of books, for parents and children. Now, I’m looking for people who can share the knowledge to survive such an apocalypse. This week I had a walk and a talk with Ann Van de Vyvere. More than ten years ago already, she and Gosie Vervloessem setup workshops and walks in the city, to discover edible plants and kook up some food with it. Crucial information for doomsday preppers who want to survive in the city.
We kicked off with a stand off, using the theatre replicas Davis Freeman gathered over the years for several of his shows. (We met on his production of the Steven Sondheim musical ‘Assassins’) So he did an excerpt of his piece ‘What you need to know‘. But soon it got clear that the solutions for this doomsday scenario in the city will need a totally different approach of reflection and experimentation. Ann wholeheartedly joined our little plan to setup a group of people to reflect upon the issues and think about how we can setup experiments.
In the end we took her lessons to practice and composed a salad from the findings around our block.
From may 17th to 30th, ‘The Archive of Untold Stories’ was hosted again at ZSenne ARTlab examining the archive as a presentation tool and presenting projects in different stages of completion. The archive boxes, old and new ones, can be opened up again and reveal their stories. A live broadcast on saturday 22nd, presented the contents of a brand new box: the Aquarius story. It’s a story that wanders through the life of the artist, where the zodiac figure keeps popping up in the strangest of places and times and at the same time, a wobbly spiritual prophecy about the world and it’s future. We travelled through time and dug up memories about the musical, an old friend, a dead composer and his inspiration. And with some luck, we’ll find some hope for the future…
Looking back it was quite the experience digging into a piece of personal history, getting in touch with the family of a lost friend, Thomas. I had to realise parts of my memory are already gone, not having updated the memories for almost twenty years. A humbling experience. The conversation with Thomas’ brother Immanuel was a long, very heartwarming videocall and in the end, we set out some plans for the future! We’re getting together to go through the drawings Thomas has left behind. To be continued…
The Johfra poster of Aquarius that started this strange story…
‘Aquarius’, an opera by Karel Goeyvaerts. Directed by Pierre Audi Musical Direction by Sian Edwards Stage Design by Christophe Hetzer Produced by Holland Festival and Vlaamse Opera Performed by Nederlands Kamerkoor, Symfonisch Orkest van de Vlaamse Opera, Warre Borgmans Karel Goeyvaerts composed this opera, his magnum opus, commissioned by the Antwerpen’93 European Cultural Capital organization, but never saw the first staging, as he passed away shortly before. Visual Kitchen created the visuals for the backdrops. Photo credits: Vlaamse Opera
The Extinction Survival Archive is a spin-off archive of the ‘Archive of Untold Stories’ where we look into the possibilities of survival in a post-apocalyptic world.
The Extinction Survival Archive started during a previous residency at ZSenne Artlab. The pandemic has turned the attention away from an impending problem: The tipping point of our climate, the inescapable ecological disaster if we don’t take action. The apocalypse hasn’t been repelled, so we might as wel think about survival in such circumstances. How can I leave my children, who only know the internet as a source of knowledge, the necessary information if electricity might not even be available?
Last edition the premise resulted in a naive, humbling collection of books, for parents and children. Now, I’m looking for people who can share the knowledge to survive such an apocalypse. This time I was talking to (an) expert(s) (one had to cancel due to illness) and our findings were presented live on Saturday february 21st at 17h. With Ir. Geert Palmers, a founder of the durable energy study bureau 3E, we were challenging the energy question under those circumstances. Check out the full interview here:
With the collaboration of Davis Freeman and Stephy Maes who runs the multicam stream. The presentation is english spoken.
Funded by the cultural activities support by the Flemish Community
The Archive of Untold Stories is a research project on how to use the archive as a narrative, using ‘raw’ materials to tell stories. The numerous boxes contain a mixture of projects and idea’s, all in different states of completion, some merely a concept, others as good as ready to go into production.
For this live broadcast, we took out one of te boxes that connect to my heritage and talk about Molly English (°1880+1956): an independent woman who made her own life in a time such things weren”t always obvious. Through a box of pictures, postcards, obituaries, news paper clippings and objects – a donation by Hilde Verstraete I received in 2018 – we try to find out more about the life and times of Molly. While doing so we get an insight in the wobbly path collecting memories and describing heritage sometimes takes, with contradicting testimonials, stubborn misinterpretations or in this occasion even: overenthousiast fictionalising by my partner in crime.
The broadcast was funded by the Flemish Community via the cultural activities primes.
Errata: Was it the nerves or sheer excitement? I missed some accuracy in the dates I should have memorised, so here are some errata straigthened out:
– Henry English was born march 17th, 1853 (St.Patrick’s!), left Ireland in 1862 for London, and arrived in Bruges on januari 22, 1863. (the dates of decease of his father Thomas English, born 181?, and mother Judith Halligan, born 1813, are unknown but situated after 1860 and before 1862)
– The two pictures, one of Molly English and one of the marriage of Raf English and Marie-Josée Daele are to be situated in 1938.
