BELGIAN FOCUS (2005)

Proof of Life
Herman Asselberghs

video | 00:30:00 | col.
spoken | english

The interior of an empty, open space: the borderline between inside and out is thin. Human presence can only be found on the sound tape: a male voice recalls horrendous TV-images, a popular disaster movie, a long-term imprisonment. The tile alludes to the diplomatic negotiating jargon for the video recording of a live hostage. After a.m./p.m. Asselberghs continues his search for an audiovisual approach, playing on the spectacle of mainstream media, commenting on it, countering it. Associative and suggestive (in stead of formatted and explicit). The radical rift between sound and image reveals a film which needs to be listened to. A sound tape for watching. Or is this still-life even a self-portrait of the spectator
Prod.: Herman Asselberghs, Super!, Transmedia, Onderzoeksplatform Kunsten (‘Arts Research Platform’)

Herman Asselberghs
Herman Asselberghs (1962) is an artist and an art critic. He writes about audiovisual culture in de Tijd, he teaches in the film department at the college of higher education Sint-Lukas in Brussels and he is also a member of staff with the Transmedia postgraduate. He is a founding member of Square vzw and a co-curator of [sonic]square, an ambulant concert series for electronic music. He published the book ‘Wrapped’ (with Els Opsomer and Rony Vissers, GCAC, 2000), and the essay compilation ‘Het Museum van de Natie. Van kolonialisme tot globalisering’ (with Dieter Lesage, Gevaert Publishing, 1999). His installations have been shown, among others, by the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Documenta X (Kassel), Deitch Projects (New York), hArtware (Dortmund), the Rotterdam Foto Biënnale 2003 and MUHKA (Antwerp).

Une femme entreprenante
Sven Augustijnen

video | 01:12:34 | col.
spoken | french | dutch

After weaving a tempting web of reality and fiction around the Brussels’ Kunstberg (Art Mountain) during Mission Mont des Arts (2002), Augustijnen points his arrows in Une femme entreprenante on WIELS, a new contemporary arts centre in Brussels. Key figure is Sophie Le Clercq, building promoter and ‘la force motrice’ behind this cultural project on the former brewery site Wielemans-Ceuppens. Le Clercq, barely popping up onscreen herself, acts as a catalyst for the exploration of a number of historical and genealogical trajectories throughout Brussels’ city development, the downfall of the brewery sector and the story of the Blaton dynasty. In a saga full of unexpected twists, stories and intrigues various actors from the political-economical and cultural world in Brussels pass in review. As if by coincidence a complex tangle slowly unravels about art, brokerage and politics - ‘le marais de Bruxelles’. In this documentary form, which takes on the appearance of a ‘report’, without actually being one, Augustijnen achieves a wide-ranging combination of numerous realities and fictions. Conventional documentary codes are undermined or subtly eroded. This results in a blurry interplay between communicating vessels, in which the levels of brokerage, heritage, politics and art become intertwined.

Sven Augustijnen
Sven Augustijnen (°1970) studied at the high school of arts Sint-Lukas in Brussels and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. In his video work he explores the boundaries between reporting, research documentary and docu-soap. Appearance and reality shake hands, balancing on a fine line between revelation and concealment. His work has been shown, among other places, at the World Wide Video Festival (Amsterdam), International Festival of New Film (Split) and Bozar (Brussels).

There are many ways of saying Gleichzeitigkeit
Boris Baltschun
David Helbich

video | 00:07:55 | col.
non spoken

A performance concept by Helbich and Baltschun, which developed into an audiovisual installation. Two facing screens show simultaneous video recordings of a slide projector, being subjected to several manipulations. One or two hands switch the machine on and off, they change slides series, show slide windows etc. The two videos differ from each other with regards to the order of the actions and the subject matter of the slides. The difference becomes clear only slowly and it turns into the essential theme of the image material. This is reinforced by the soundtrack, an autonomous composition made from actual sound material, coinciding in turns with one video or the other. The stereo-effect, created by an intersecting set-up (speakers aimed from the sides to the middle of the space), keeps setting the spectator on the wrong track.
Prod.: David Helbich & Boris Baltschun.

Boris Baltschun
Boris Baltschun (°1974), born in Bremen, currently resides in Berlin. From a child he has devoted himself to contemporary and experimental music. He studied electronic music and composition at the Institute for sonology in The Hague. He is currently active as a freelance composer, improviser and sound artist, with a focus on sample-based techniques. He used to work, among others, with musicians and sound artists like Axel Dörner, Tetutzi Akiyama, Jim Denley, Mats Gustafsson, Elliot Sharp, John Oswald and Stevie Wishart. His music and installations were presented, among others, at the Sonic Acts Festival (Amsterdam), Klangwekstatt (Berlin), Documenta 11 (Kassel) and the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (Strasbourg).

David Helbich
David Helbich (°1973) was born in Berlin. He grew up in Bremen, studied composition and philosophy in Amsterdam and Freiburg and since 2002 he resides in Brussels. His work is situated in a transit zone between the domains of composition, choreography, audiovisual installations and literature. He wrote compositions, mainly electronic, and ‘musique concrète’, for several ensembles in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, England and Estonia. Since 2001 he also wages himself on stage as a performance artist and musician. His work has been presented in various forms in the Mediaruimte and Nadine (Brussels), the Freiburg dot df festival (Danmark), Logos (Ghent) and on the stage of the dance school PARTS (Brussels).

Portable stones
Orla Barry

video | 00:63:15 | col.
spoken | english

The work of Orla Barry is like a wall of words, constructed from images – or a wall of images, made up from words. One cannot exist without the other. Raised and bred in Ireland, she explores the semantics and the iconography of her mother tongue. Similarly to her former video work Portable Stones also sets up a fragmentary frame of reference around her texts, which share an unmistakable stream-of-consciousness approach. It’s as if the video is built around a piece of poetry, line by line, verse after verse; without any linear structure, but woven like a web of associative and intimate scraps of memories and voices. A girl escapes from the city; she wanders through an abandoned graveyard. Overwhelmed by silence she drifts off in some type of linguistic dream world. All kinds of voices, memory conductors, come over to her from across the sea, dragging her along with them through time. They discuss ‘not-speaking’, the loss of the body and communication problems in all its forms. The girl starts with a new life of waiting, longing and listening. Memory, fantasy and imagination are interwoven. With constant voice-over and monologues Barry achieves a humanisation of the open sea. The sea speaks and cries, embraces, seduces, gathers all the voices.

Orla Barry
Orla Barry (° 1969) is Irish, she studied at the academies of Dublin and Belfast and the Ateliers in Amsterdam and she lives in Brussels. Her work, spanning a wide variety of media, focuses on language in a poetical way, regularly drawing inspiration from Irish poetry and song traditions. She regularly works with other visual artists, among whom Els Dietvorst and the Portuguese Rui Chafes. Her work has been shown, among other places, at the Camden Arts Centre (London), Galerie Vasista (Montpellier), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin) and Gallery Canvas (Porto).

Onluqueur a eussanvaj ap euquacha
Franck Beaubois

video | 00:15:27 | col.
non spoken

This video is part of an investigation into the perception of movement in relation to time and space. The idea behind it is simple: an uninterrupted and unedited video recording shows a woman as she makes her way through a shopping mall, striding, dancing, sometimes in interaction with others. But: the sound and the image seem to be played in reverse order, creating a strange game of action and reaction between the main character and her surroundings. An illusory game with time and perception, mediated by the visible restrictions of gravity.
Prod.: Franck Beaubois

Franck Beaubois
Franck Beaubois (°1967) is French by origin, but for a considerable period time he lives in Brussels. He followed a training in plastic arts in Caen and Avignon, where he became part of the collective Faits Divers and he collaborated on a number of interactive installations and public performances. Then he devoted himself to dance studies, mainly focused on improvisation. Since 1997 he has developed several dance projects under the heading ‘Transition’, in collaboration with Patricia Kuypers and musicians like Barre Philips and Ninh Le Quanh. He also does more and more research into movement through the medium of video and interactive software like Max MSP. The live-project Delay versus Duo was presented, among others, during the Maïs festival (Brussels) and Musique Action (Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy).

Errances
Stéphane Bergmans

video | 00:12:45 | col.
spoken | french | english

Christmas time. A camera closely follows two young Muslims during their daily evenings out in the streets of Brussels. They wander around aimlessly past florid shop windows, along animated squares and sleazy bars. During these outings they can leave behind their strict Islamic traditions to share in an inkling of one another’s doubts; their expectations about women, somewhere between religiously determined reservations and unaffected boyhood dreams; their experience of religion and family, staggering in the middle of generation gaps and the blurring of moral standards. The Western world is so close and yet so far away.
Prod.: Marc Gillon

Stéphane Bergmans
Stéphane Bergmans (°1982) lives and works in Brussels, where he studied cinematography at the IAD institute up until recently. Errances/Night Walk is his graduation project, which has been shown, among others, during Dokufest Prizren (Kosovo), Festival Cinematografico Internacionale del Uruguay and the Prototype festival (Paris).

My Webgirl
Pascale Bernier

video | 00:04:00 | col.
non spoken

Three short video sketches made with minimal means and based on samples from various media (mainly the internet and pop music), creating a form of “garage-video”, with no other ambition, according to Bernier himself, than the generation of specific emotions which might also pop up when listening to loud rock music or watching pornographic films. Because there too beauty submerges: in the brutal, unpolished and obscene, underneath the rough and noncommittal surface of internet-eroticism, virtual shooting-games and punk rock. The video fragments, visibly filmed in real-time from a computer screen, situate themselves on the borderline between allegory and silent objectivity. Mixed in with pop and rock songs, the raw media lumps evoke a polarized universe in which game and death, sex and voyeurism, the extreme and the commonplace, imagination and reality are reflected into each other. Art, according to Bernier, turns into a possible way of redemption, a tragic-comic world in a phase of implosion.
Prod.: Pascal Bernier

Pascal Bernier
Pascal Bernier (°1960) lives and works in Brussels. He soon broke out of the narrow-minded views imposed on him during his visual arts studies and went on a search for his own visual language, characterized by a flagrant dose of humor, recalcitrance and ‘rock ‘n’ roll’. His artistic investigation draws formal inspiration from pop art, baroque and minimalism and it is built around a subject matter which relates to the morbid and the violent. It results in a form of synthesis which combines the tragical and comical aspects into a paradoxical state of perception, ethically staggering and liberating at the same time. His paintings, pictures, collages, taxidermy and video work was presented, among others, at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires), Galerie Christine et Isy Brachot (Paris) and the New York EXPO festival.

Countdown to nothing
Lucile Desamory
Kevin Blechdom

video | 00:13:14 | col. & b&w
spoken | english

A “surreal autobiographical self-activation musical around hypnosis and friendship”. Welcome to the world of Lucile Desamory. Countdown to Nothing was produced in collaboration with Kevin Blechdom, a kindred soul, no doubt, who shares her familiar preference for the absurd and a healthy dose of kitsch and insanity. This low-budget video unfolds like a Zappa version of a musical for children, telling the story of three characters in a preposterous world full of surrealist exploits, psychedelic adventures and musical madness.
Prod.: Lucile Desamory

Lucile Desamory
Lucile Desamory (°1977) is a genuine Bruxelloise, but since mid 2004 she has sought refuge in Berlin. Video maker, DJ, VJ, musician, jack-of-all-trades… As a self-educated woman she has built up a broad audiovisual oeuvre, ranging between slapstick and trash, electro and chanson, the absurd and the fantastic. Often she hangs around with fellow minds from the international DIY scene, like the musicians Kevin Blechdom and Lem. Her work has been shown, among others, at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris), cinéma NOVA (Brussels) and the British Film Institute (London).

Kevin Blechdom
Kevin Blechdom (°1978) was born as Kristen Erickson geboren in Florida. She studied classical piano and computer music, but in reaction to suffocating academism she soon developed a musical idiom of her own, with the help of specifically designed software, an eclectic set of instruments, an infallible sense of wayward melodies and a healthy dose of humor and kitsch. She unfolded her first feats of arms as part of the group Adult Rodeo and particularly the duo Blectum From Blechdom, who caused quite a craze in the domain of electronic music because of their plain, unpolished and theatrical approach. Currently she resides in Berlin, from there she never stops attacking the world with her catchy solo-albums, live-shows, cartoons and animations.

https://www.kevyb.com

R20 Brussels [inner] (Ring Roads in Belgium)
Maria Blondeel

video | 00:48:19 | col.
non spoken

As part of This Place is Dreaming, one of the programmes in the argos festival 2004, Maria Blondeel organised the performance R20 Brussel [binnen] (Ringwegen in België), within a series of audio and video experiments, in which car rides along peripheries are translated into sound. The light is caught in the ear, which in its turn produces a resonance In the brains. The tuning was based on the resonance theory of the scientists George Lakhovsky, Nikola Tesla and Royal Rife, from the beginning of the twentieth century. The audio and video in this registration were recorded on the R20 in Brussels in November 2004. The light was measured through electrical sensors, applied to various sides of the driving car and transposed through a sound generator in high and low tones. The tones varied according to the light and weather conditions and the traffic situation. At the same time a fixed video recording was made of the air above the road.
Prod.: Maria Blondeel

Maria Blondeel
In terms of technology, light and sound, inter-media artist Maria Blondeel (°1963) has an experimental approach. With the help of a system she invented herself, which can transform light into sound, she explores time-based concepts. Her oeuvre embodies an artistic investigation centred on light in both urban spaces and the countryside. In the form of changing bundles of sound, she draws, amongst other things, the meteorological variables of daylight and the transitions between day and night. Blondeel is cofounder of the Experimental Intermedia Art Foundation in Ghent, has exhibited and produced performances at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, the Glasgow School of Art, Puddles Tokyo (Japan) and the Lasalle-Sia College of the Arts (Singapore) and EMAF 2005 (Osnabrück).

https://www.mariablondeel.org

Vlaamse choc
Peter Boeckx

video | 00:45:47 | col.
spoken | dutch | english

During the run-up to the June 2004 elections Peter Boeckx follows the doings of Filip Dewinter over several months; the man is one of the heads of Vlaams Belang, the right-extremist political party in Flanders. Peter Boeckx makes clear that his report mainly focuses on the figure of “Filip the seducer”. He limits himself to a mere registration of his activities, with his family, his colleagues and his followers. What might turn into a slick portrait soon slips further and further into a wry story. More than once the public-friendly mask is torn, revealing an image of a power-mad person, who has trouble hiding his nostalgia for a brown past. After production, a lot of controversy arose around the report. According to some the portrait of Dewinter was overly human, and therefore dangerous, according to others it was revealing, and so commendable. RTBF, who assigned the report, hesitated for a very long time before they broadcast it, and even then they made sure it was surrounded by a debate. In Flanders hell broke loose when all the major networks declined Vlaamse Choc. According to some this was a typical example of hypocrisy, since the Flemish media are filled with Dewinter and co.’s flirtations with the cordon sanitaire.
Prod.: Jean Libon

Peter Boeckx
After a couple of Bachelor years at university Pieter Boeckx (°1961) spent his student days at the RITS in Brussels, where he graduated as a TV- and radio director. After a short spell with Flemish television he discovered the RTBF-programme Strip-Tease. He turned into one of the most avid followers of the "école striptease" and he developed a documentary style of his own, mainly recording, allowing the viewer to judge for himself. With regards to content he specializes mainly in typical Belgian subjects. Boeckx himself uses the term ‘cinema’ in this respect – he sees it as a cinema of everyday life. Both his short and his longer documentaries have been critically acclaimed and awarded, nationally and internationally. His two long documentaries Pas de plastique en business class (2003) and Une vie de chien (2004) were selected for the FIPA Festival in Biarritz.

Une fameuse journée
Jean-Marie Buchet

35 mm. | 00:10:50 | col.
spoken | french | dutch

A man leaves his home and he decides to visit his friends. A trivial, every-day moment develops into an alienating reflection on the commonplaces of cinematographic narration and role-play. Jean Marie Buchet wrote the scenario during the reading of numerous production proposals and the graduation projects of his course in screenplay writing. Aggravated by the numerous and irrefutable mistakes and imperfections, he decided to turn necessity into a virtue and start to apply these killjoys in a systematic way – especially the peculiarity of making characters say exactly what happened to them, or rather what they went through or are about to do. The project was realized in two separate versions, based on the same scenario, dialogues and actors, but with different editing modalities and use of language.
Prod.: PBC pictures – Patrice Bauduinet

Les vacances de Noël
Jan Bucquoy

video | 00:77:19 | col.
spoken | french | dutch

With this tenth part Jan Bucquoy calls his Decalogue on the sexual life of Belgians a day – even though parts eight and nine are apparently still in various stages of pre-production. Bucquoy made his way through some trying times: from his stylised cinema debut La Vie sexuelle des Belges (1993), as penetrating as it was outrageous, to Les vacances de Noël, conceived as a diary, fully handmade on video, with direct sound and a couple of friends as his actors. The result is a home movie about a humiliating trip to the film festival in Cannes. Bucquoy plays himself, with Noël Godin, the film critic and infamous cake-thrower, by his side, and during the first two parts they are joined by Belgian author Pierre Mertens. The film is announced as a tragicomedy about “deux vieux qui essayent de draguer des jeunes”, and at first sight this is precisely what we are getting: a twosome of soixantehuitards, trying to conquer the hearts of all kinds of girls on the Cannes patios and beaches with their camera at the ready. But underneath the thick layers of nonsense, kitsch and sex there is also a flourishing amount of cultural and social criticism and, most of all, self-irony. The subtitles are an important medium for wayward commentary, hesitating between satirical rubbish and poetical musings. Bucquoy turns himself into a caricature, fabricating a magnification of his own split personality: the older man, who tries to stay young, the womanizer who wants to preach the revolution, the provocateur with a weakness for absolute love, the filmmaker who would like to be a poet.
With this tenth part Jan Bucquoy calls his Decalogue on the sexual life of Belgians a day – even though parts eight and nine are apparently still in various stages of pre-production. Bucquoy made his way through some trying times: from his stylised cinema debut La Vie sexuelle des Belges (1993), as penetrating as it was outrageous, to Les vacances de Noël, conceived as a diary, fully handmade on video, with direct sound and a couple of friends as his actors. The result is a home movie about a humiliating trip to the film festival in Cannes. Bucquoy plays himself, with Noël Godin, the film critic and infamous cake-thrower, by his side, and during the first two parts they are joined by Belgian author Pierre Mertens. The film is announced as a tragicomedy about “deux vieux qui essayent de draguer des jeunes”, and at first sight this is precisely what we are getting: a twosome of soixantehuitards, trying to conquer the hearts of all kinds of girls on the Cannes patios and beaches with their camera at the ready. But underneath the thick layers of nonsense, kitsch and sex there is also a flourishing amount of cultural and social criticism and, most of all, self-irony. The subtitles are an important medium for wayward commentary, hesitating between satirical rubbish and poetical musings. Bucquoy turns himself into a caricature, fabricating a magnification of his own split personality: the older man, who tries to stay young, the womanizer who wants to preach the revolution, the provocateur with a weakness for absolute love, the filmmaker who would like to be a poet.
With this tenth part Jan Bucquoy calls his Decalogue on the sexual life of Belgians a day – even though parts eight and nine are apparently still in various stages of pre-production. Bucquoy made his way through some trying times: from his stylised cinema debut La Vie sexuelle des Belges (1993), as penetrating as it was outrageous, to Les vacances de Noël, conceived as a diary, fully handmade on video, with direct sound and a couple of friends as his actors. The result is a home movie about a humiliating trip to the film festival in Cannes. Bucquoy plays himself, with Noël Godin, the film critic and infamous cake-thrower, by his side, and during the first two parts they are joined by Belgian author Pierre Mertens. The film is announced as a tragicomedy about “deux vieux qui essayent de draguer des jeunes”, and at first sight this is precisely what we are getting: a twosome of soixantehuitards, trying to conquer the hearts of all kinds of girls on the Cannes patios and beaches with their camera at the ready. But underneath the thick layers of nonsense, kitsch and sex there is also a flourishing amount of cultural and social criticism and, most of all, self-irony. The subtitles are an important medium for wayward commentary, hesitating between satirical rubbish and poetical musings. Bucquoy turns himself into a caricature, fabricating a magnification of his own split personality: the older man, who tries to stay young, the womanizer who wants to preach the revolution, the provocateur with a weakness for absolute love, the filmmaker who would like to be a poet.
Prod.: Françis De Smet

Jan Bucquoy
Jan Bucquoy (°1945), inciting provocateur and artistic jack-of-all-trades, considered by some to be an heir of Belgian surrealism, studied Literature in Grenoble, Philosophy in Ghent, film directing in Brussels (INSAS) and Political Science in Strasbourg. His work – feature films, comic strips, theatre and literature – is mainly satirical in nature, with a slight touch of anarchism.

https://www.transatlanticfilms.be

Caminothérapie
Charley Case

00:01:25 | col.
non spoken

For an exhibition in the Hermès exhibition space (Brussels, October 2004) Charley Case created a circular metal construction. The structure contains glass plates, with a paint-brushed, Buddhist inspired, repetitive life cycle: from a chromosome to an embryo, from a foetus to a human being, who slowly starts to walk, gradually running to seed and turning into a bent old man, and finally exploding into the atmosphere, after which the cycle is repeated. The over two hundred images are brought to life in the mind of Edward Muybridge, in this video through editing. Case perceives society as a great Lifetree which links together all the branches, blossoming all over again after each winter – the symbol of death. In this cycle death is merely a reflection of life. The image of the tree we see above ground exists underneath as well, with its invisible root branches. Death and life are, therefore, two parts of a single whole. Even though we are both different and at the same time very similar in life, in death we are all perfectly united. It’s not durability, but rather transience, which sets us free. The title of the video is a reference to a term which was invented by the Belgian philosopher Yves Hamuont in order to refer to loop-therapy.
Prod.: Charley Case

The night before
Charley Case

video | 00:04:17 | col.
silent

Simulation of a birth. The video is inspired on haptonomy, a kind of physiotherapy which looks for a physical dialogue with the unborn foetus. When hands rub over the belly, the baby reacts by swimming towards them and following them around. In the video these movements are simulated by the projection of a film onto a pregnant belly. A couple of hours after the recording the baby was actually born.
Prod.: Charley Case

Charley Case
Charley Case (°1969) studied graphic design at the Brussels’ La Cambre and he has made illustrations and designs for various international newspapers and projects. After collaborations with different activist groups he began to work independently for the Sangam collective. He picks his medium – photography, film, painting, graphics and performance – in function of his objective. Most of his themes are marked by social awareness and rooted in conflict, between images and meanings, within contexts and among people. His work was shown, amongst others at The Fifart Festival International du film sur l’art (Lausanne), the Dallas Video Festival and the MACBA museum (Barcelona).

I love Kitty, Kortes Lynch
Robert Cash
Marc Vanrunxt

video | 00:08:27 | col.
spoken  | english

A huge source of inspiration in the oeuvre of Marc Vanrunxt is the work of Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), the figure head of Belgian symbolism. The atmosphere of dreams and evasion in Khnopff’s portraits is often an essential part of the recent performances by the choreographer. In the piece Unspeakable (2003) the dancer and actress seem to be moving around in a Hinterland, a transition zone between reality and a world of make-believe, balancing between the extremes of the familiar and the unknown, the visible and the invisible, light and darkness. The video I love Kitty Kortes Lynch constitutes a variation on that piece. Marc Vanrunxt does not see it as a replica, but rather as a souvenir of the intense working relationship he has built up over the years with the dancer. Masked Kitty Kortes Lynch wanders through the rooms of the Fine Arts Museum in Brussels, where an exhibition of Khnopff’s work is held. Similarly to the piece the movements of Kortes Lynch are very sober, tight and solemn. The dance, life seems to take place outside these scenic movements. Whereas the performance was based on a fragile soundscape by Morton Feldman (the opera Neither), ferocious noise-eruptions by the collective Spasm resound in the video. The overall visual and auditive framework, consisting of three temporal scopes, is conceived as a kind of masquerade, a game weaving itself around the contrast between an inner world of emotions and the outside world. I love Kitty Kortes Lynch is the first part of a trilogy. The following parts will be devoted to dancers Marie De Korte and Salva Sanches.
Prod.: Michel De Wouters Productions

Robert Cash
Robert Cash (°1963) lives and works in Antwerp, where he graduated from the Fine Arts Academy. In his work, which consists of paintings, films, texts and photos, he seems to be holding an intimate conversation with himself. This intimacy, however, is staged: he records his feelings and right in front of our eyes he moulds the image of Robert Cash the artist, both colourful and darkly humorous at the same time, both openly romantic and intensely fragile. His work has been shown, among others, at the Blooningdale Gallery (Chicago), Galerie Faubourg (Amsterdam), Semana de Cine International de Cine (Madrid) and the Alternative Film Festival (Bangkok).

https://www.robertcash.com

Marc Vanrunxt
Marc Vanrunxt (°1960) has been one of the key figures of the Antwerp dance scene since the beginning of the 1980s. He was taught by An Slootmaekers, but soon he began to develop a choreographic style of his own. He has worked as a dancer and choreographer with Jan Fabre, Catherine Massin, Truus Bronkhorst and the groups Fac’t and Nationaal Fonds. During the nineties he found shelter with De Beweeging. In his own productions, in which his predilection for symbolism, kitsch, baroque and mysticism becomes apparent, he is often inspired by artists and movements in music and the visual arts. He has collaborated with such artists as Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven and Robert Cash.

Catch-as-catch-can
Wim Catrysse

video | 00:07:56 | col.
non spoken

The work of Wim Cartrysse reveals a strong fascination with the human body and the way it relates to the environment. During his past as a theatre actor he discovered the possibilities and power of physical performance as a direct gateway into the spectator’s world of experience. With his video installations he elaborates on this, exploring the limitations and extremes of body language with simple means. The same holds for catch-as-catch-can, in which two men seem to be cornering each other on a revolving wheel. Even though their fighting positions seem to indicate that the battle might break loose at any moment, the first battle of these men is with gravity. With eyes constantly focused on their mutual opponent, the body looks for stability in its cramped position. The camera records the intense internal conflict from the outside of the arena, but he remains a passive witness, just like the spectator, empathizing with a feeling of disorientation and alienation.
Prod.: Wim Catrysse

Wim Catrysse
Wim Catrysse (°1973) studied Visual Arts at the high school of arts Sint-Lukas in Brussels, the HISK in Antwerp and the School of Art in Glasgow. His experimental video installations are concerned with ‘becoming’, as a term which leads to associations with active and reactive forces, ultimately determining the personal identity. The directness of his work can be perceived as the result of his fondness for the theatre and live performances. He has exhibited, among other places, at the Belgian Art Now (Athens), Le Lieu Unique (Nantes), Stedelijk Museum het Domein (Sittard) and argos (Brussels).

Combustions
Claude Cattelain

video | 00:08:08 | col.
non spoken

Deux tables

video | 00:21:00 | col.
non spoken

In his work Claude Cattelain tries to grasp the essence in the volatile. His short and personal flashes of astonishment and fragility offer a striking image of a passage from one place to another or a shift in frames of mind. Impulsive video sequences, not without a sense of humour, at times evoking an actual spatial escapism or on other occasions recording coincidental or purposeful emotional turning points. In Combustions blurry traces of bluish sparkles and rarefied gases slowly lead to the ignition of miniscule fire sculptures. In Deux Tables two stacked table blades lose their balance.
Prod.: Claude Cattelain

Claude Cattelain
Claude Cattelain (°1972) was born in Kinshasa and he works in Brussels and Valenciennes, where he founded l’Atelier, a school for painting and design. He writes children’s books and he experiments in various disciplines –painting, sculpture and video art – aiming at notions of instability, fragility and escapism. Has worlk has been shown at the Biénale de Liège, het Festival Jeune Création Paris and during the Island Art Film and Videofestival.

La sagrada familia
André Colinet

video | 00:08:20 | col.
non spoken

Colinet uses his direct surroundings as a source of inspiration and research material. He processes instances into absorbing little miniatures, evoking the poetry of everyday life. Fragments of time and space are rearranged into impressionist and contemplative musings on little enchantments and enigmas of Man and nature. As he declares himself: “life is mysterious, we are all mysteries”. In Sagrada Familia an old family picture is the starting point for an exploration into image and sound. The portrait is explored, layered, deconstructed and associated with images of mirrored landscapes and sounds of natural and homely scenes.
Prod.: André Colinet

André Colinet
André Colinet (°1955) works and lives in Brussels. He studied at the RITCS in Brussels and since 1990 he has been lecturing at the high school of arts Sint-Lukas in Brussels. His countless independently produced documentaries and video works exclusively treat with subjects and people who can be directly related to his personal life world. His work has been shown, among other places, during the World Wide Video Festival (Amsterdam), the Biennale Internationale du Film sur l’Art (Paris) and Filmer à tout prix (Brussels).

Un fou est un bijou
Jean-Philippe Convert

video | 00:05:00 | col.
spoken | french

Un fou est un bijou is the final part of a trilogy of videos (after De la par d’Arnaud, 2003 and Advise to iraki people, 2004) looking for the possibilities and the functionality of ‘voice-over’. Within this framework Convert explores the relationship between image, voice and text. Un fou est un bijou shows a scene of a man waking up on a bench in the park. The text does not offer any clues or comments with regards to the image. The actual topic of the video is the voice itself, as an environment in which the dimensions of text and image blend, concord and get meaning. Because of the total lack of analogies between what is shown and what is said, the voice seems to reveal itself in its pure musicality, rhythmical and harmonious like a jazz-composition.
Prod.: Jean-Philippe Convert

Jean-Philippe Convert
After his studies in Philosophy at the University of Toulouse, Jean-Philippe Convert (°1972) concentrated on making of video films and performances after his own texts. In his work he mainly tries to explore the possibilities of oral and musical expression, in relationship to text and image. He defines his video work as “objets-films”, in which the visual and the auditive converge. His work has been shown at the FRAC Basse-Normandie and the Haiku festival in Nantes. He lives and works in Brussels.

Nearly Present, Just Past
Cel Crabeels

video | 00:50:33
english | dutch

“If I were young, I would destroy a Dan Graham piece, I would smash the goddamn Dan Graham piece.” (Dan Graham in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2001)The public space contains the promise of paradise, but it will always be a battlefield. Governed by politicians, designed by urbanites and furnished with content by artists, it constitutes a utopian proposition for the ideal democratic environment. The audience has three options to deal with this proposition: accept it, ignore it or react to it. The latter can take the shape of civilised protest, improvements or destruction. That is what happened to the art piece Funhouse for Children (1998) by the American artist Dan Graham. In the end the glass pavilion moved from the St. Jansplein square to the green grass of the Middelheim museum. With a new title: Belgian Fun. Crabeels documented the allegorical metamorphoses of the work. Does the utopia of art in a public space lie shattered with the glass pavilion? The title Nearly Present, Just Past, is a reference to the notion ‘just past’, which characterised the experimental video installations by Dan Graham from the early seventies. During this period Graham made ample use of video recordings, played with a short interval of a couple of seconds, facing the spectator with himself and his surroundings as if it were a decelerated mirror. This is a metaphor for the adventures of the pavilion and how we perceive them. With his project Crabeels tries to offer a second chance to the project to acquire its place in our collective memories, among others through photos of the erection of the artwork, its short-lived existence and its remainders, and this semi-documentary video film with archive images and interviews.Prod.: Cel Crabeels

Cel Crabeels
Cel Crabeels (°1958) lives and works in Antwerp. In his videos and installations, which jump out because of their simplicity, he plays around with the idea of emptiness, as a space of meaning which opens up to a multitude of interpretations. His work has been on show, among other places, at the Museum D’Hondt-Daenens (Deurle), the Dirty Windows Gallery, (Berlin), The Waiting Room (Minneapolis), The Leeds Metropolitan Gallery and The Henry Moore Foundation (Leeds).

Y’a rien à voir
Laurent d’Ursel

video | 00:05:31 | col.
spoken | french

The work of Laurent d’Ursel might be considered a metonymy of art history, an amalgam of references from the domains of literature, painting and all the crossbreeds and the iconoclasts from the past century. Diverting linguistic elements into objects he strengthens the ties between literature and visual arts. In this video a young couple is filmed painting a plastered wall, meanwhile a contextualising text is read out in the background. There is a text hanging in front of the lens – a perpetuum mobile collage of words and letters. The way detailed images are focused upon turns into a game with fragmented words and phrases, in their new context they make out a whole story of their own. This results in a multidimensional composition of language and image.
Prod.: Laurent D’Ursel

Laurent d’Ursel
Laurent d’Ursel (°1959) lives and works in Brussels, where he studied Economy and Philosophy. He has published several books – or “loeuvrettes” as he likes to call them – even though he’d rather situate himself within the visual arts. In his videos, installations and performances he makes use of a wayward poetical form, manipulating the words and titles as objects (ready-made), as a resistance to the prevailing ‘prêt-à-lire’ mentality.

Sans titre - Parking
Aurore Dal Mas

video | 00:06:20 | col.
non spoken

Aurore Dal Mas is fascinated with the vocabulary which is used in popular music, as a peculiar reflection by and on mankind. Before this she made Show Room, a pseudo-autobiographical video clip based on a song by Julio Iglesias. The sweet, sensuous words take on a preposterous and cynical undertone in the mouth of a postiche chansonnier. In Parking the camera wanders through a gloomy, underground parking lot, where a lonely young man is singing the chorus from ‘Love Me Tender’ at the top of his voice in a game of questions ad answers with the cameraman. A fragile declaration of love to a shadow of the imagination in a cold and unfamiliar world.
Prod.: Aurore Dal Mas

Aurore Dal Mas
Aurore Dal Mas (°1981) lives and works mainly in Brussels, where she is studying photography at La Cambre. Her work, mainly photography and video, consists, among others, of self-portraits and generic images in which human beings are reduced to their surface.

https://www.techniquebeton.com

Light Body Corpuscles
Antonin De Bemels

video | 00:06:18 | col.

cor•pus•cle - (kôr p -s l, -p s l) (Physics, Biology) n. 1. a. An unattached body cell, such as a blood or lymph cell. b. A rounded globular mass of cells, such as the pressure receptor on certain nerve endings.2. A discrete particle, such as a photon or an electron.3. A minute globular particle.Intangible light particles dance around on a rug of darkness, like a spectacle of ionising particles. Gradually the countless sparks distinguish themselves as pieces of skin, illuminating in the middle of shimmering rays of light. Out of a cloud of frenetic light stimuli the shapes of a human body come forward - fractioned, intangible, illusive. Light body corpuscles shows how space disintegrates through time fragmentation, it dissects the body through the dissipation of light. The stereoscopic image, combined with a stroboscopic alteration of sequences, creates a splintered perception of movement. It’s as if the body we see is built from several layers, each of them enclosed in their own dimension of space and time. With this video Antonin de Bemels continues his radical cinematographic exploration of time, space and movement, this time in collaboration with composer Gordon Delap and dancers Ugo Dehaes and Melanie Munt.
Prod.: Antonin De Bemels

Antonin De Bemels
Antonin De Bemels (°1975) combines different media and genres into an idiom of his very own. His work stands midway between film, video art, dance and electronic music. The videos by Antonin de Bemels are – literally – attempts: explorations of the body and gestures, of rhythm and movement. He is fascinated by the importance of a single image and interweaves all kinds of visual stimuli in a complex associative network by means of the ‘scrubbing’ effect, the visual equivalent of auditive ‘scratching’, he also uses live when working as a VJ. Together with American choreographer Bud Blumenthal he has made three ‘video choreographic’ films, His work has been on show on a worldwide scale, among other places at the International Filmfestival Rotterdam, Dallas Video Festival, World Wide Video Festival (Amsterdam), ULTIMA (Oslo) and Moving Pictures (Toronto) and it has come in to the prizes at the Audio-visual Creative Fair (Brussels), Springdance Cinema (Utrecht) and the Grand Prix International de Video Danse (Paris).

https://periactes.be/antonindb

Sound Watch
Rik De Boe

video | b&w
non spoken

Nature is inherently synchronous; cinema, however, can create an imaginary vacuum between image and sound, where new meanings and metaphors are hidden. The bigger the distance, the more fascinating the interaction might become: sound reveals images to us in a different way and this new image, in its turn, creates a new way to experience this sound, resonating together in a reciprocating overall experience. In Sound Watch sound and movement revolve around each other, still they are separated, asynchronously but inextricably connected in a continuous game of attraction and rejection. Sound Watch is based on a soundtrack of the Japanese W Cube project, consisting of five sound fragments, interwoven with fragments from the Bolero by Maurice Ravel. The radio play is combined with fragments from various educational and publicity films from the Prelinger archive. Image and sound are layered into a musical composition, with an adagio, moderato and a finale. From the deconstructed ruins of sound and image new combinations are made, without losing a sense of coherent structure spanning the various scraps.
Prod.: Rik De Boe

Rik De Boe
Rik de Boe (°1964) lives and works in Ninove. After his studies at the Fine Arts Academy in Ghent he taught graphics and drawing. Mostly he makes large-format engravings, describing a certain reality, minutely presented in perspective spaces, as a hallucinating prose of an every-day life. He also works with drawings, pictures, objects and video. He is a co-founder of the artists’ initiative Voorkamer in Lier, together with Peter Morrens. As an artistic duo they develop projects with various media, balancing on the fine, fragile line between reality and fiction, tragedy and comedy. His work was presented, among others, at the Netwerk Galerij (Alost), the Thailand New Media Art Festival (Bangkok) and Gallery Surge (Tokyo).

https://www.voorkamer.be

Nature cleaner
Peter De Cupere

video | 0:03:40 | col.
non spoken

Peter de Cupere reacts to the disappearance of smells in society and the way it is underappreciated in contemporary art. Its visual work is complemented with an olfactive dimension, allowing for a deeper submersion into the singularity and the complexity of objects and environments. Even though his so-called ‘sniff movies’ are usually presented in an environment where the nose of the visitor is challenged, the purely visual representation also insures subjective and personal aromatic experiences. Nature Cleaner is a recording of the artist as he cleans a number of trees along the highway, giving them an attractive smell with a stick of deodorant, after which the trees are labelled. In the background the cars are speeding by in a smother of exhaust gasses.
Prod.: Peter De Cupere

Peter De Cupere
Peter De Cupere (°1970) lives and works in Antwerp and Berlin alternatively. He studied graphic and electronic design at the Phiko institute in Hasselt and the high school of arts Sint-Lukas in Brussels and visual arts at the HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts) in Antwerp. De Cupere associates his world of objects, his video work, performances and installations with scents, as an extension of their meaning. Their have been possibilities to see and/ or smell his work, among other places, at the SMAK (Ghent), Le Lieu Unique (Nantes) and the Akademie der Künste (Berlin).

https://www.peterdecupere.com
https://www.olfactormoviestudios.com

Half- Weg
Jan De Kegel

video | 00:21:15 | col.
spoken | dutch | french

The Halfweg (“Halfway”) is a hidden side street in Ghent, where Jan de Kegel himself shares a home with his 86-year-old grandmother. This seemingly dead-end street, without a final destination, serves as a guideline and a background for a Lynchian story about silence, confusion and astonishment. In his solitude an old man loses his grip on reality after the decease of his wife. De Kegel seems to be drawing his inspiration from the sensations and emotional traces of dreams, elements which can hardly be described as conventional narrative techniques, targeted rather towards logic than consistency. With an inventive visual idiom and sonory accuracy he creates an ominous world, between waking and dreaming. In this world of insecurity and Unheimlichkeit, with a total lack of orientation and balance, the familiar is gradually draining away.
Prod.: Jan De Kegel

Jan De Kegel
Jan de Kegel (°1979) lives and works in Ghent, where he studied, among others, at the Fine Arts Academy. He points to his direct surroundings as the major inspiration for his drawings, paintings and video work. Confusion and astonishment are recurrent themes in his oeuvre. His work has been shown, among others, during Courtisane, international festival for cinematic shorts, video and new media (Ghent) and the Skena Up International Film & Theatre Festival (Pristina-Kosovo).

Counter phrases
Thierry De Mey

video | 00:61:18 | col.
non spoken

This video, shaped as a triptych, was part of the performance by Ictus and Rosas with the same name, based on a choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. In Counter Phrases the traditional relations between dance, film and music are reconfigured. Thierry De Mey directed a number of short choreographies, some five minutes at each time, based on fragments from the piece April me by Rosas. They are not neutral dance registrations, but interpretations with an outspoken cinematic character and an intensity of their very own. De Mey situates the choreografies in gardens and parks: a stairway in the park at the castle of Terhulpen, the terraces with boxwood hedgerows of the Groentheater or a piece of industrial archaeology at the Provincial Domain of Hofstade – they all become active partners of the dance. The dynamics of the editing and split-screens betray a flawless sense of rhythm and a strong musical sense, the use of colour, light and costumes show a strong formal sensibility. Ten composers, among them Steve Reich, Magnus Lindberg and De Mey himself, wrote a score based on the choreografies and the finalised films. Most of them opted for a delicate support of the patterns and movements on the video, starting from a rhythmical approach or an evocative world of sound; others preferred a Cage-like autonomy for their music. In that sense film became a mediator in the search for a new dialogue between dance and music. A dialogue which isn’t always as fluent, as Luca Francesconi, one of the composers, points out: "Each language is a universe of its own, you have to struggle to find a relationship between them."
Prod.: Avila Productions

Ma Mère L’Oye
Thierry De Mey

video | 00:28:42 | col.
non spoken

Thierry De Mey
Thierry De Mey (°1956) is a composer and film director. A large part of his musical production is meant for dance and film, but he has another outlet through the casual collective of Maximalist!, which he set up with Peter Vermeersch, Walter Hus and Eric Sleichim. By now this has resulted in an elaborate body of work, which was once designated “minimal music goes jazz goes rock goes polyphonic!” To such choreographers as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Wim Vandekeybus and Michèle-Anne De Mey he is not merely a composer, but also a valuable collaborator during the invention of "formal strategies " – to use an expression he holds dear. ‘Movement’ is probably the main element in his work, which unifies and brings together various artistic disciplines he is fascinated with. He teaches at P.A.R.T.S., the dance school in Brussels and, among other places, he has been a guest at the festivals in Montpellier and Strasbourg (Musica) and the IRCAM in Paris. His compositions have been performed by ensembles like the Arditti string quartet, the Hilliard ensemble and the London Symphonietta. His work has been awarded both with national and international prizes, for instance International Rostrum of Composers (Unesco), the Filmfestival van Vlaanderen in Ghent, the Grand Prix International du Film de Danse in Nice and the Moving Pictures festival in Toronto.

Performing Space
Erki De Vries

video | 00:03:09 | b&w
non spoken

A first draught of this video was designed specifically for a performance festival at the gallery Galerij Jan Colle (Ghent). The video was projected onto a full surface, acting as an imaginary reflection or extension of the environment, as if its structure was constantly manipulated. Walls slide by; they shift along and tilt over, as if the architectural elements are subject to some peculiar mechanical locomotion. Erki De Vries explores the degree of performance of the environment; he choreographs the totality of his construction by means of virtual extensions and animated variations. It’s as if the actual space is decelerated in a confrontation of fiction and reality, of past and future. The spectator is incited to resituate himself, to withdraw from the conditioned situation and new physical relations and seek out experiences. What if space itself is an extension of our mental constructs? What if, at each step, each twist and change in perspective, we redesign the space all over again? Where does the actual architecture end, when do we start to become one with our surroundings ourselves? For the autonomous video the images were reedited and completed with a sound composition, in collaboration with Kris Delacourt (Building transmissions).
Prod.: Erki De Vries

Erki De Vries
Erki De Vries (°1978) got his Master in Spatial Arts at the Karel De Grote Hogeschool in Antwerp, after which he took a postgraduate in Visual arts in Breda, the Netherlands. In 2003 he was admitted into the HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts) in Antwerp. His videos are poetical explorations of the stratification of a specific environment. By making alterations in the spatial conditions he tries to interact with the location, an experience resulting in a reconsideration of this space, as well as our relationship to it. His work was presented at the International Short Film & Video Festival in Xiamen, China and the European media art festival, Osnabrück, Germany.

https://www.erkidevries.be

Jonas
Olivier Dekegel

16 mm. | 00:02:00 | col.
silent

A short portrait of and homage to the legendary filmmaker Jonas Mekas, generally considered one of the major exponents of the avant-garde movement in the American cinematic landscape of the 1950s and ‘60s. Similarly to his great example Olivier Dekegel tries to translate the aesthetics of home movies into a personal and biographical style, shaped as intuitive film diaries and subjective rushes. Snippets of everyday life are tied together into a lively and intimate mosaic of impressions and souvenirs. The work of Mekas itself was an important signal of the fading divide between an ‘œuvre d’art’, a product of stylised imagination, and what might be described as an introverted and poetical registration of events. In effect Mekas’ films marked off a new style of cinema, along the lines of what André Gide or André Malraux meant to literature.
Prod.: Tou Mouv ASBL

Pour la mère et la fille
Olivier Dekegel

16 mm. | 00:13:00 | col.
silent

An impressionist elegy about spring, water, light and motherly love, shot from the shoulder on Super 8. Connecting colourful snapshots and intimate scenes the film constitutes a homage to the candour, the cordiality and poetical nature of amateur films, home movies en domestic holiday shoots, which have developed over a couple of decades into conventionalised visual representations of the world. Similarly to those often overlooked cinematic styles a feeling of nostalgia and intimacy predominates here as well, a sense of affection in order to hold on to memories. Many of the stylistic characteristics are also adopted: speedy camera movements, abrupt shifts an time and space, over- and underexposure, variations in focus and exposure and jump cuts – an intuitive, musical approach to editing which transcends the lack of sound.
Prod.: Tou Mouv ASBL

Olivier Dekegel
Olivier Dekegel (°1970) lives and works in Brussels, where he studied film at the INSAS. As an assistant choreographer, light and sound designer he was involved in various dance and theatrical pieces. For the moment he is a curator at the Belgian Royal Film Museum. His self-produced films, made with 16mm or Super 8, always take an outspoken autobiographical angle, in the style of Jonas Mekas.

Alpha—Zulu
Edith Dekyndt

video | 00:02:11 | col.
silent

For this video Edith Dekyndt brought together images of all the flags she could find of nations worldwide, including the states the United Nations do not recognise, like Tibet, the states of the former USSR and the nomadic peoples. The flags are shown in alphabetical order at a constant pace of four images per second. A trip through the world, in the space of bary half a minute. The images can hardly be distinguished, it’s as if they poured out straight from the subconscious.
Prod.: Universal Research of Subjectivity

Provisory Object 03
Edith Dekyndt

video | 00:03:31 | col.

Just like the pieces Provisory Object 01 and 02, this video shows a membrane of a soap bubble, clenched between two hands. The membrane takes on all kinds of illusory, multicoloured shapes in the light reflections. In all its plainness and triviality it obtains a poetical dimension. This video was recorded in Kinshasa, as a result of which the gesture takes on a whole different meaning. The air bubble turns into a jewel, a treasure, a metaphor for the riches buried underneath the ground in the area. The hands seem to be shielding of the treasure, before it suddenly vanishes into air. The membrane, in all its fragility, seems to be evoking the precarious situation of the country.
Prod.: Universal Research of Subjectivity

Edith Dekyndt
use of space, on the experience of its meaning and content, the characteristics of space itself and the social-anthropological-cultural human context. Drawing source material from texts, films and photography, she questions the individual and global position of individuals within society from simple, everyday experiences. In 1999 she set up the ‘Universal Research of subjectivity’, which focuses on the disclosure of the several ways in which inconsistencies in the artistic use of the ground rules of minimalist/ conceptual art forms come about. Her work has been shown, among others, at the Thémistocles gallery (Mexico City), Museum der bildenden Künste (Leipzig) and the Banff Centre (Alberta).

https://www.universalresearchofsubjectivity.be

Sonia
Nathalie Delaunoy

video | 00:46:25 | col.
spoken | french | english

Sonia is 52. For 30 years now she has been a prostitute in the ‘Red Light district’ in Brussels. She has her own ‘salon’ with a window. Nothing in her lower bourgeoisie background indicated she would occupy this profession, but coincidence and her own, strong will turned out to be decisive. Today her retirement is at hand, but she continues to organize health care and juridical assistance for her colleagues. Nathalie Delaunoy creates and intimate dialogue in the enclosed surroundings of the salon. In this familiar and discrete atmosphere Sonia discusses the oldest profession in the world and the love she puts into it. She talks about the psychology and humanity her profession requires, about the narrow divide between professional and private life and about the necessity to expand your perspective and overcome the prejudices wandering around in our collective consciousness.
Prod.: Need Productions

Nathalie Delaunoy
Nathalie Delaunoy (°1974) lives and works in Brussels. She has a degree in applied communication. She has collaborated on countless Belgian film and television productions, getting to know the audiovisual sector and practice from the inside. Sonia is the first production she fully planned out and directed by herself.

https://www.wip.be

DJ reverse
Messieurs Delmotte

video | 00:03:17 | col.
non spoken

Francophones
Messieurs Delmotte

video | 00:04:31 | col.
spoken | french

Fränz ünd Kofön
Messieurs Delmotte

video | 00:02:53 | col.
spoken | ge

“My work is not a performance – and actually even less of a good idea.” The videos by Messieurs – or Monsieur- Delmotte spare nothing or no one and they trivialise anything that comes within his reach, including himself. His works are not self-portraits nor transpositions of the author in one or more imaginary characters. Maybe they can only be described as playful abdications of the subject, absurd and almost surreal one-acters. Dangling somewhere between reality and fiction – or maybe these are even one and the same, exploding in a multitude of disengaged fragments. Delmotte, a self-declared poser, sneers at the institutionalised art world with his mischievous and surprising actions, trivial in content and simple in form. The results are uncomplicated and unvarnished, but also pure and most of all irresistibly charming. Or, as Delmotte puts it himself: "Je le fais, je ne sais pas pourquoi, mais je le fais!".
Prod.: Messieurs Delmotte with the participation of Komplot

Messieurs Delmotte
Messieurs Delmotte (°1967) studied at the Liège Saint-Luc institute and he focuses mainly on photography, video and ‘performance’. His work fits in with the best Belgian surrealist tradition, somewhere between reality and imagination, between brilliance and dilettantism. In his videos he translates his unbridled boyish pranks, his sneers at the institutionalized art world in one-man actions, as simple as they are absurd, as reflections of the schizophrenic identity of the artist. His video work was presented, among others at the Museum of Modern Art Philadelphia, the New York Underground Festival and the museum for contemporary art MUHKA (Antwerp).

Chambre avec vue
Simona Denicolai
Ivo Provoost

video | 00:01:59 | col.
non spoken

A mosaic of small individual enamel stones sets out on a hellish ride on a skateboard. Every now and again it explodes on the tones of blaring hardcore, like pixels in space. In between you are presented on and off with shots of almost idyllic landscapes. The ‘freestyle’ behavior of the mosaic against an urbane background mediates the rural landscape images. The video incorporates the opposition between the agressive energy of the city and the peace and quiet of the countryside.
Prod.: Groupe Laura & Glassbox

Simona Denicolai
Ivo Provoost
Simona Denicolai (°1972, IT) and Ivo Provoost (°1974, BE) studied at BRERA in Milan and La cambre in Brussels respectively, and until further notice the latter is their take-off point. For the description of their work they often refer to the metaphor of the earthworm, which gulps down its context, digests it and casts it back out again in order to survive and be able to move about in its environment. Their installations, interventions and visual work were shown, among others, in the Museum for Contemporary Arts SMAK (Ghent), Frac Bourgogne (Dijon) and Collective Gallery (Edinburgh). In 2005 they were laureates of the Prix de la Jeune Peinture Belge/Prijs Jonge Belgische Schilderkunst.

A l’ombre de l’hyperboloïde
Lucile Desamory

video | 00:09:10 | col. & b&w
silent

In several respects the films of Lucile Desamory savour of the work by Stan Vanderbeek, who extracted a style of his very own from an amalgam of film, drawings and stop-action animation – and it’s no coincidence that this style became a source of inspiration for the absurd animations by Terry Gilliam. But whereas Vanderbeek was strongly influenced by certain aspects of Surrealism and Dadaism, Desamory sets up a personal and often emotional world of the imagination from elements in cinema and pop culture and, particularly, her own universe of dreams and the imagination. In A l’ombre de l’hyperboloïde, for instance, she has woven self-produced pieces of film and animation into an associative wickerwork, evoking childlike sensations of astonishment and dismay. The result is a world of reaching tentacles, hovering eyes and dancing organs, surrealist and impervious. Or as it was stated in a quote from the Belgian Mystic Marguerite Porete (1250 – 1310): “comprenez cela comme il faut, et non d’une façon humaine”.
Prod.: Lucile Desamory

Lucile Desamory
Lucile Desamory (°1977) is a genuine Bruxelloise, but since mid 2004 she has sought refuge in Berlin. Video maker, DJ, VJ, musician, jack-of-all-trades… As a self-educated woman she has built up a broad audiovisual oeuvre, ranging between slapstick and trash, electro and chanson, the absurd and the fantastic. Often she hangs around with fellow minds from the international DIY scene, like the musicians Kevin Blechdom and Lem. Her work has been shown, among others, at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris), cinéma NOVA (Brussels) and the British Film Institute (London).

Album / Window
Pablo Diartinez

video | 00:00:19 | col.
spoken | english

Album/Window is part of the Poemario Herido/Preludes to Stone, a collection of audiovisual Works which presents itself as a domain of research into as subject, the aesthetics, iconography and language of Stone/El Estruendo (A Hyperpoem), an upcoming project wishing to exploit the interaction between poetry, film and plastic arts. The result becomes an amalgam of various parallel and complementary Works weaving themselves around the dissection of memory, experience and perception. Album/Window is based on the poem ‘Ventana/Album’ from La Piel de la Memoria by Jorge Diaz. The memory is explored as a subjective and emotional instrument, constituting a starting point for changeable realities and identities, entering into conflict die in conflict at the experience of loneliness and loss. A process of confusion and conflict, translated into an écriture automatique of images, spoken and written words and phrases, fragments from the unsettled reservoir of memories and fantasies.
Prod.: Pablo Diartinez

Pablo Diartinez
Pablo Diartinez (°1976) was born in Cordoba, Spain but he currently resides in Brussels. He studied visual arts and graphic design at the universities of Sevilla and Granada and afterwards film and Transmedia at the Sint-Lukas institute in Brussels. At the same time he followed a wide range of workshops and he devoted himself to music. His work comprises a broad spectrum of media and angles, among them painting, graphics, animation, documentaries and video installations, which he often explores and develops in collaboration with other artists and producers.

L’île où dormait l’âge d’or
Isabelle Dierickx

video | 00:89:41 | col. & b&w
spoken | es &fr | french

This documentary is the account of a trajectory, traversing three Canary Islands, areas Isabelle Dierickx is familiar with by now. The pretext and the guideline of the round trip – as a homecoming - is an exploration for a lost copy of Bunuel’s L’age d’ôr, which was apparently buried in Gran Canaria after a vehemently contested and banned exhibition on surrealism, during the beginning of the Spanish civil war. During the investigation, however, the “unholy” grace of the island also rears its ugly head, the inclination of the inhabitants and communities to alienate themselves from realism, as if they were enchanted by the surreal masterpiece, located somewhere underneath their feet; a spell, nevertheless, in strong contrast with the incarnation of a chaotic brand of tourism.
Prod.: Cyril Bibas & Ana Sánchez-Gijón

Isabelle Dierickx
Isabelle Dierickx (°1966) lives and works in Brussels. She studied film at the ELICIT/ULB in Brussels and drama at the Liège Conservatory. She spent long periods in the U.S., Burkina Faso, Cuba, Mexico, Costa Rica and especially the Canaries, where she based the larger part of her documentary work and research. She took part, among others, in FESPACO, the International African film festival in Ouagadougou and the Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latino Americano in Havana.

https://www.cinergie.be/cba/

ET / C
Peter Downsbrough

video | 00:08:23 | b&w
non spoken

With his videos Downsbrough creates natural portraits of urban environments. Everyday surroundings are observed, dissected and transformed into architectural illustrations, with a proper sense of order and chaos. In long, steady shots and travellings space is reduced and abstracted into minimalist constructions, simultaneously they assume identifiability. His visual conceptual ideas are interwoven with explorations of semiotics and linguistics, in a well-considered play with the layered structure and meaning of time, space and language. In ET/C he presents a voyage between two cities, pointing out that the perception of urban space is determined by a multitude of dislocations and shifts. Space defines itself as a sequence of various contexts, not as a reality which might be considered from a single point-of-view.
Prod.: FRAC Bourgogne

GROUP – ED] AND,
Peter Downsbrough

video | 00:11:07 | b&w
non spoken

A video triptych (And, Here, As...) fully recorded in the area around Lille and Tourcoing, commissioned for the exhibition La ville qui fait signes at Le Fresnoy (autumn 2004). The trilogy is partly based on ideas around urban space, architecture, transport and the distribution of goods, which Downsbrough points out as a necessary element in the human environment. How can material be distributed without disrupting the planet we are living on? To mankind the city has become a more natural environment than the forest. Agrarian nature has been swamped by urban culture. Its naturalness cannot merely be refuted or contradicted, because centring around power and wealth is inherent to human nature. In his videos Downsbrough wants to show how these mechanisms determine the configuration and the government of cities.
Prod.: Le Fresnoy

GROUP – ED] HERE,
Peter Downsbrough

video | 00:12:53 | col. & b&w
non spoken


GROUP – ED] AS...
Peter Downsbrough

video | 00:12:21 | col. & b&w
non spoken

Peter Downsbrough
Peter Downsbrough (°1940) was born in New York and there he studied architecture and visual arts. He lives and works in Brussels. The work of Peter Downsbrough – from sculptures to graphics, from photography to video and film – articulates a complex relationship with architecture and typography. Affiliate to conceptual art and the work of artistic movements like De Stijl and Bauhaus, he only makes use of the the bare essentials: form is reduced to lines and negative space, colours are barred. In his video work movement and language are explored in relation to time and space, in this process a prominent place held by the modernist network in urbane architecture. His solo-projects have been shown, among other places at Le Consortium (Dijon), the Neues Museum Weserburg (Bremen), l’Espace de l’Art Concret (Mouans-Sartoux) and Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Genève.

Pour vivre, j’ai laissé
Gsara
Bénedicte Liénard
Valérie Vanhoutvinck
Güldem Dumaz

video | 00:30:26 | col.
spoken | interlingua | french

Applicant refugees at the Klein Kasteeltje in Brussels receive a camera of their own to tell the story of their escape and their quest, about what they left behind and what they hope to find, in their own ‘cinema brut’ style. By transcending the traditional dynamics of documentaries and workshops an audiovisual intimacy develops, past the oral account, filled with internalised images of the ‘void’ which surrounds the narrators. The ‘void’ shaping their new reality; a vague silence, hovering between echoes of memories and dreams. Ultimately we are presented with a mirror, questioning the limitations of our perception of the asylum applicants and our notion of the world. The poetical accounts in this film create all kinds of sensorial, metaphorical, political and empathic associations, stretching beyond our awareness through the theatre binoculars used by most of the classic documentaries. Pour vivre, j’ai laissi is a PAC initiative (Présence et Action Culturelles), co-financed by the European Fund for the Refugees (FER) within the framework of the campaign Terre d’Asile (2005).
Prod.: Gsara / PAC

Gsara
Since 1976 Gsara (‘Groupe Socialiste d’Action et de Réflection sur l’Audiovisuel’) has been active as an educational organisation in the field of audiovisual media. There is a strong accent on stimulating participation in cultural, social, economical and political processes and the provocation of reflections on the image, its ethics and its ways of representation. Apart from setting up educational programmes, the production of films and documentaries of outspoken pedagogic, political or social nature is supported. For the moment Gsara is structured as a network of various knowledge and service centres in the Belgian French-language community.

Bénedicte Liénard
Bénédicte Liénard (°1965) studied at the IAD (‘Institut des Arts de Diffusion’) in Brussels, after which she worked as an assistant on films by, among others, Jaco Van Dormael, Raoul Ruiz and the Dardenne brothers. Her own films show a strong social commitment towards the least visible, the most vulnerable layers of the population, in a style which fluctuates between the intimate and the political. She often sets out from direct action and communication: in 1997 and 1998, for instance, she devoted herself to the development of audiovisual workshops in the prison system; in 2004 she set up the "Salon des femmes du Petit Château" in Brussels. Her work has been shown, among other places, at the Cannes festival (in the ‘Certain regard’ section), the Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (Buenos Aires) and the Film Festival of San Sebastian. She produced the project Pour Vivre, J’ai Laissé in collaboration with the filmmakers Güldem Durmaz (°1971) and Valérie Vanhoutvinck (°1968).

Fossilization
Kurt D’haeseleer

video | 00:09:01 | col. b&w
non spoken

The video Fossilization was produced as part of the Memory Lane project, commissioned in 2005 by the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The traditional idea of soundtracks as translation and extension of moving images was reversed for the occasion: five video makers were requested to produce a work based on a composition by David Shea. Each individual filmmaker could draw out his own trajectory throughout the various musical layers. D’Haeseleer merged sound with image into an immersive panorama of fossilised shapes and traces. Images were distorted, layered and shaped into an apocalyptic spectacle in which vaguely recognisable shades and objects seem to be sucked up, into a parallel, enamelled world. Underneath all of these hermetical levels Fossilization comes forward as a meditation on the slip-off of Western civilisation to a pandemonium of mass-tourism, -media and –consumption.
Prod.: De Filmfabriek

Kurt D’haeseleer
Kurt d’Haeseleer (°1974) studied Modern History at K.U.Leuven and Audiovisual Arts at the high school of arts Sint-Lukas in Brussels. As a member of the artist collective ‘De Filmfabriek’ he has produced, various video sceneries for theatrical and opera plays, as well as his very own hybrids of video, installation and performance. Since 2003 he is working with Tuk (aka Guillaume Graux) on a series of audiovisual live-performances. In his work he explores digital effects as capsular environments for narrative experiences and controlled illusions. Among others with the aesthetics of minimalist electronic music as a source of inspiration, he shapes an organic world out of tactile sounds and pointillist images, far out and at the same time almost physically tangible. His work was shown, among other places, at the World Wide Video Festival (Amsterdam), the International Film Festival (Rotterdam), the Transmediale Festival (Berlin) and Les Rencontres Internationales Paris – Berlin. D’Haeseleer lives and works in Brussels and Bierbeek.

Q-02 Doundo
Els van Riel
Julia Eckhardt
Ludo Engels

video | 00:11:16 | col.
non spoken

Els van Riel composed the images of Doundo in conversation with a musical piece by Julia Eckhardt (alt violin) and Ludo Engels (recording and processing). Together the two composers have built up a sound reservoir over a one-year period, which consists exclusively of long tones. This reservoir is put at the disposal of wide-ranging (sound) artists, asking them to elaborate them further, purely electronically or with live instruments, as a concert composition or an installation, with or without image, improvised or written down. In an adaptation by Eckhardt and Engels the sounds, rich in overtones, are layered and estranged into an organic sound movement. Els van Riel added several visual layers, which can only be distinguished from one another by lighting changes. A dialogue arises of hesitant gestures and soft caresses. In this way the perceived relation between sound and image is questioned. How do visual accents and sound tones interact? How do movements in sound and image meet and cross each other?
Prod.: Q-02

Els van Riel
Els van Riel (°1965) studied photography and cinematography at the NaRaFi in Brussels. In her work she explores the relation between images, sound and space; an exploration of the fragile relativity of time in the twilight zone between presence and absence, between movement and immobility, between looking and seeing. She has made, among others, video and film installations, film sets for theatre pieces (e.g. Sarah Baud and Musica) and videos of and for various performances (e.g. DitoDito, Meg Stuart, Bronks). On a regular basis she works with Q-O2, a casual ensemble for contemporary experimental and improvised music, which also includes such people as Julia Eckhardt and Ludo Engels.

Clejani stories
Marta Bergman
Frédéric Fichefet

video | 01:53:44 | col.
spoken | romanian | english

Since the recent demise of violinist Nicolae Neacsu, one of the star musicians of the Taraf de Haïdouks, the atmosphere in Clejani, a Southern gipsy village in Rumania, is drenched in nostalgia. As if Neacsu dragged with him the last remains of a just about bearable world into the hereafter. The young musicians who stayed behind are out of work, they pass away their despair with drugs and dreams of the West, every day they sleep off their high on sofas in gaudy colours. As Marius, the accordionist puts it: "people live off promises and hope ". There is only one thing they can do: wander around during summer, in order to beat hibernation. Money won, stolen, borrowed or exchanged, it seems like the only means to turn the tide. In order to overcome their deadlock some are capable of anything.
Prod.: Cyril Bibas

Marta Bergman
Marta Bergman (°1962) and co-director Fréderic Fichefet (°1967) both live in Brussels, where they studied Film at INSAS. Marta Bergman, born and bred in Bucharest, draws her main inspiration from the stories of her native region. Even though her work might be considered a classic documentary there are always fictitious notes to be found. Both she and her characters are storytellers, rather than interpreters or witnesses of social and political topics. Her work has been shown, among others, during festivals like Filmer à tout prix (Brussels) Visions du Réel (Nyon) and the Festival International du Documentaire of Marseille.

Frédéric Fichefet
Marta Bergman (°1962) and co-director Fréderic Fichefet (°1967) both live in Brussels, where they studied Film at INSAS. Marta Bergman, born and bred in Bucharest, draws her main inspiration from the stories of her native region. Even though her work might be considered a classic documentary there are always fictitious notes to be found. Both she and her characters are storytellers, rather than interpreters or witnesses of social and political topics. Her work has been shown, among others, during festivals like Filmer à tout prix (Brussels) Visions du Réel (Nyon) and the Festival International du Documentaire of Marseille.

Lignes intérieures (1ère lettre)
Jan François

video | 00:02:50 | col.
spoken | french | dutch

The first part of a ‘suite’ of three video letters, from the viewpoint of three prostitutes who write to their mother. They take stock of their lives, report on their experiences, look for answers to the question of who is responsible, who decides, who educates. The concrete walls the women erected around them are beginning to show tears, the feelings of disappointment and bitterness make way to acquiescence and forgiveness. The static camera viewpoint and the simple text performance result in a sober confrontation of image and text, a residue of life traces, to the rhythm of the trains hurtling by, clearly visible from the window.
Prod.: Jan François

Jan François
Jan François (°1961) lives and works in Brussels. After his studies he spent a considerable amount of time working in the domains of archaeology and art restoration and he also made sets for theatrical and opera productions, before focussing from 1995 on several forms of visual arts. He calls his working methods predominantly architectural, in thinking patterns, design and composition. From 1997 he creates videos and performances in which he explores body and mind. Fed by a number of supplementary studies around audiovisual language, he currently produces mainly video work, including a series of ‘suites’, set up around specific themes, media or people. His work has been shown, among others, at the Jensen Gallery (Hamburg) and Espace Morichar (Brussels).

Fox
Michel François

video | 00:03:51 | col.
spoken | english | french

The video work of Michel François is often based on the isolation of interludes, tiny events and movements, the engraving of tiny sculptures in real time. He draws up an inventory of the world around us making use of antitheses: not merely formal, but also philosophical, social or political-economical oppositions. This video was recorded during a single night in the studios of the American TV-network FOX. The camera wanders around between abandoned cameras and illuminated TV-screens. In the background the dialogues resound, and the soundtrack of the program which was broadcast at that time – an episode from a police series. The duration of the film corresponds with the last minutes of the programme. The acoustic climax echoes through the empty, dehumanized studio.
Prod.: Michel François

Michel François
Michel François (°1956) lives and works in Brussels. He combines industrial and natural objects, photography and installations. In his work he conceives his personal perception on reality, he analyses everyday images and actions, tracing for the unexpected, the beauty and the familiar. He is fascinated by the small signs of life, the trivial movements and touches which are bestowed with every appearance of magic at the right time. Beauty is to be found in everyday life, where emotion and astonishment are waiting. In his work François tries to induce these experiences and to grasp the mobility and the elusiveness of perception. “L’art, de toute façon, c’est la vie que l’on sculpte“ , François says. His work has been shown, among other places, in the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the gallery Carlier-Gebauer (Berlijn), the Venice Biennial, the Kunsthalle Bern and the Haus der Kunst (München).

leçon sur le son
Alain Géronnez

multimedia

Alain Géronnez already conceived the CD-rom Leçon sur le son for the exhibition CONtiNENT by iMal, as part of Brussels 2000. Then Géronnez realized, inspired by, among others, Nouvelle Vague by Jean-Luc Godard, that hearing and seeing are strictly separate senses, that image and sound cannot always be isolated. His radio-phonetic poems were based on the idea that cinema might also be experienced without the presentation of synchronous, concrete images. Maybe the images growing afterwards in the eye of the mind are more interesting. Four years later the work was revised and published in book form, as an amalgam of sound, text and image. Géronnez, who considers himself to be a non-musician and an eternal dilettante, wrote multi-coloured, relational texts in eight different languages, which can be read and listened to simultaneously, about sound and language, music, sound and silence. Both oral and visual.
Prod.:Alain Géronnez

Alain Géronnez
Alain Géronnez (°1951), born in Brussels, studied painting at the Sint-Lukas institute in Brussels. For the moment he teaches graphic techniques at the ERG (‘École de Recherche Graphique-Bruxelles’). His own visual, conceptual and multimedia work, however, is not linked to whatever technique. He does not perceive himself as an active photograph or videomaker, but he is guided more by his recording equipment, he says. He records what his perspective tells him to and base don the raw source material he weaves a poetic associative network around image, sound and word, as a form of hypertext. He exhibits since 1974, first as a member of the collective Groupe50/04 (1973-1986), later under his own name. His work has been exhibited already at the Galerie Claire Brunnus (Paris), Galerie Tilman (Brussels) en Bozar (Brussels).

Jour de fête
Bernard Gigounon

video | 00:03:20 | col.
non spoken

In this video Gigounon ventures on the broad footpath between reality and the imagination. Science-fiction worlds are all around us, the only thing we have to do is allow our imagination to run freely. Gigounon backs us up with the assistance of a couple of simple video effects, so we can let go of the trivialities of reality, even for an instant. This results in tiny phantasmagorias, like Jour de Fête, in which skyscrapers seem to release themselves of their foundations, recreating the Brussels’ skyline with thunderous applause into a background for an elegant fairy dance, before they disappear behind the clouds– where they probably belong.
Prod.: Bernard Gigounon

Bernard Gigounon
Bernard Gigounon (°1972) works and lives in Brussels. Through limited technological means and the use of seemingly trivial materials, he usually unveils poetic and subtle miniatures. His videos have been shown, among other places, during the International Filmfestival Rotterdam, the Videolab Festival (Turin), Impakt (Utrecht) and in the Galerie des Beaux-Arts (Marseille).

Looking for Alfred
Johan Grimonprez

video | 00:10:01 | col.
spoken | english

"I thought I was safe until you guys came along, digging up all those other Hitchcock lookalikes. Now we will have to find ways of disposing of them." Ron Burrage, professional Hitchcock look-alikeConceived on the one hand as homage to Alfred Hitchcock, on the other as an exploration of an imitation culture, Looking for Alfred has turned into a multilayered deconstruction of notions of reality. A couple of scenes document the quest for a perfect Alfred Hitchcock look-alike. The doubles were used to weave some narrative lines around the famous cameos Hitchcock made in his own films. The actors were also asked to quote an anecdote from the famous interview series which François Truffaut carried out in the 1960s with the master – a typical story Hitchcock uses to describe the term McGuffin, the fact or object which serves as the guideline for a story, without having any relevance itself. During the recordings of Looking for Alfred it turned out that Hitchcock had become a McGuffin himself. The search for the ultimate Hitchcock, the making process of the film, surfaced a certain degree of emptiness. This void, represented by the McGuffin, unexpectedly turns into a major drive and ultimately the main idea behind the project. The film itself, recorded in the Paleis voor Schone Kunsten in Brussels, unfolds itself like a labyrinth of reflections, echoes and quotes from the work by the master himself, as well as those of that other great modernist, Réné Magritte. According to Grimonprez they share a similar iconography, often referring to ideas of cloning, mirror images, projections and mistaken identities. They both, as Grimonprez indicates, tried to create a kind of “Photoshop-reality”, in a sense an anticipation of today’s look-alike-culture and the osmosis between Hollywood cinema and reality. This twilight zone between reality and fiction, between ‘genuine’ and ‘fake’ constitutes the guideline through Looking for Alfred.
Prod.: Zapomatik / Film and Video umbrella / Anna Sanders Films

Johan Grimonprez
Johan Grimonprez (°1962) studied photography and Mixed Media at the Academie in Ghent, after which he spent several years in New York at the School of Visual Arts through the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He obtained a postgraduate degree from the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. He lives and works both in Ghent and New York, where he is a lecturer at the School of Visual Arts. Grimonprez is best-known for his video work DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, which became an international success after screenings at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) and during Documenta X in Kassel (1997), transcending the established delineations between visual arts, cinema and television, between fiction, documentary and ‘art video’. In this and other work Grimonprez mainly investigates the use of mass media as a political instrument and the construction of realities in an era of infotainment and media saturation. ’Zaptitude’ is the central idea – the surreal poetry of ’channel hopping’, which enables the spectator to write his/her own story. His work has been shown and awarded, among other places, at the San Francisco Film Festival and Images Toronto, on ARTE TV (Germany/France) and Channel 4 (VK), in the Whitney Museum (New York) and Tate Modern (London).

https://www.zapomatik.com

The Trustfiles
Gast Bouschet
Nadine Hilbert

“We absorb and filter out the things of the world, spit back their insecurities into the vortex. We treat the ambiguity of perception and question the impartiality of the written word. Our purpose is to dismantle symbols and codes of the power apparatus and transform it by means of artistic interventions.” The Trustfiles is set up as a relational network of photographs, video, sound and text fragments, gathered all over the world during residences and interventions. In this constantly updated web project Bouschet and Hilbert processed their fascination with the perceptive crisis piercing through our lives: how should we interpret the world? How can we develop our personalities? How can we define an identity in the abundance of models our media society offers us? Are they interested in the phenomena of religious craze, political and economical imperialisms as they appear in several continents? On the website possible consequences and forms of these phenomena are translated into a digital file structure. In the middle of 2005 a file was added to the site with audiovisual work consisting of collaborations with related artists like SkyRider, Jota Castro, Why and Sonic Attack.

https://www.gast-bouschet.com

Gast Bouschet
Nadine Hilbert
Gast Bouschet (°1958) and Nadine Hilbert (°1961) were both born in Luxemburg and for the moment they are living between Brussels and elsewhere. Bouschet takes and exhibits his photos and videos all over the world since the 1980s, particularly fascinated with the potential of the recorded image as a reflection, a comment and transformation of political and social-economic sign systems, visible within the morphology of urbane tissues and border zones. Since 1998 he has worked with Nadine Hilbert, who insured, maong others, the sound for projects like Radio Cosmos (1998), This Space Between Us (2000), Zona Del Silencio (2001) and the online projectThe Trustfiles. Their work was already shown (offline) in the Centre of Contemporary Arts (Glasgow), the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Muhka (Antwerpen), Forum d’Art Contemporain (Luxembourg), Busan Biennale of Contemporary Arts (Busan, Korea,) Camouflage, the European Satellite of the Centre of Contemporary Art of Africa (Brussels) and Krinzinger Projekte (Vienna) and (online) on Tank TV, Rhizome, New Media Art Festival (Bangkok, Thailand), Festival of New Film/New Media Split (Croatia) and Salon y coloquio Internacional de Arte Digital Havanna (Cuba).

https://www.gast-bouschet.com

The backhanders
Gauthier Hubert

video | 0:06:40 | col.
spoken | french

A number of paintings are presented as a slide-show. The author remains unknown, the works were found between the garbage, and that way they were just barely saved from oblivion and destruction. Gauthier Hubert wrote a text which situates the images within an exemplary situation. Read out by the art critic Jean Pierre van Tieghem, the text tells the life story of Greta Maria, an (imaginary) ageless artist. A form of testimonial, referring to actual situations within the art world.
Prod.: Gauthier Hubert

Gauthier Hubert
Gauthier Hubert (°1967) lives and works in Brussels. There he studied at La Cambre. His work, diverse in form and content, circles around the notions of fiction and reality, and often she goes on the lookout for the meaning of images, in relation to their social or political context. His work was presented, among others, during the Video Art Festival in Xiamen (China), at The Living Art Museum in Reykjavik and the museum for contemporary arts SMAK in Ghent. He won the Jeune Peinture Belge in 1999.

Effort square
Aglaia Konrad

video | 04:00:00 | col.
non spoken

The Tomorrow Square installation consists of two projection screens, each of them show eight respective hours of metropolitan cityscapes. The visitor takes place in between the two facing screens. The image sequences are built with lengthy shots: lateral registrations of skylines filmed from the highway, perpendicular perspectives of aeroplanes taking off and landing or registrations of human behaviour among the city rush. The predominant feeling of anonymity makes the images interchangeable. The long recording time challenges the spectator to watch closely, seeing becomes an almost physical experience. Konrad designates this work as ‘architectural videos’, the traditional iconographical and concentric starting point is traded in for a richer and rather more complex level of perception, focused on the unique combination of the visual uniformity and deviant characteristics of these cities.

Aglaia Konrad
Aglaia Konrad (°1960) was born in Austria and she is now based in Brussels. Formerly she worked as an advising researcher with the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. Her photography and video work can be regarded as a visual study of the different aspects of contemporary urban life, recorded in metropolitan cities spread out over the five continents. Her work has been shown, among others, in Roth Horowitz (New York), White Cube II (London), the Architektur Zentrum (Vienna) and during Documenta X (Kassel).

Liquid Space
LAb[au]

00:00:00

In the context of the ‘liquid space 01+ 02’ cycles dealing with the collaborative design of spatial audiovisuals, LAb[au] conceived a hypertextual catalogue transcribing these interactive 360° multiscreen and quadraphonic real-time constructs into a 2D concept. The book-dvd is a visual, theoretic and sonic collection of spatial audiovisuals created by LAb[au] in collaboration with over 30 differant artists from all over the world. Imagineering on the level of colors, degrees, keywords and time indexes an unfoldable modular 360° card book which contains in its center a dvd. The publication gives the overview of the likely named series of workshops, installations, lectures, performances and exhibitions using as starting point LAb[au]’s sPACE, navigable music - platform. The 360° and modular structure of the book – put together as data, as architecture and parameter design – allow several readings, according to the parameters of time, space and information. These different parameters structure the layout as they are displayed according to degrees and colors constituting the ‘space’ of the book in direct relation to the principles of the spatial audiovisual creations. The book is complementary with its containing DVD which has 36 minutes of video-material according to the different chapters and pages of the book. Upgrade-packages will be available for each future cycle, adding a new chapter to the catalogue.

LAb[au]
In its current form LAb[au] consists of Manuel Abendroth, Jerôme Decock, Alexandre Plennevaux and Els Vermang. Since its foundation in 1995 LAb[au] has been a critical environment for reflection and experiment. They investigate how the starting points and methods of architecture and urban development evolve under the influence of technological progress, and how this in its turn leads to the development and the definition of new practices – ‘metadesign’. Metadesign [meta= information about information] as a discipline is about the transposition of inFORMation processes, transmission and computation, , in textual, graphical, three-dimensional and biomorphic forms, in order to build up connectivity and effectiveness. In order to investigate the implications of new communication and computation technologies for spatial-temporal structures, LAb[au] develops a cross-disciplinary approach which leans on a broad range of artistic, scientific and theoretical methods.

https://www.lab-au.com

Pedestrian Levitation.net
Thomas Laureyssens

video | 00:09:49 | col.
non spoken

Pedestrian Levitation.net is a reflection on the movements of pedestrians in public, urban spaces. A camera records the trajectories of pedestrians on and around a zebra crossing. By processing the recordings image by image with animation software a pattern of movement is extracted, as if the pedestrians themselves draw lines through space. A dynamism is visualised which had not been anticipated by the urbanites, though it does reflect the actual circulation in the city, partly shaped by various physical obstacles. Which trajectories would arise if there hadn’t been these barriers, if gravity did not exist there? The actual patterns are used as a framework for the visualisation of these movements. Irregular white triangles are applied to the pavement, following the dominant routes, inspired by the way in which the engineers mark off force fields. These triangles, however, are continued onto a high wall and rotated, as if this wall hadn’t been there. The wall acts as an anti-force field, deflecting the movements into an imaginary trajectory in a virtual environment. This creates a graphical layer, on top of the existing architecture, as an interface towards visual, virtual conceptions. Pedestrian Levitation.net is conceived as a virtual network, its first node installed in 2005 in Brussels.
Prod.: Thomas Laureyssens

https://www.pedestrianlevitation.net

Thomas Laureyssens
Thomas Laureyssens (°1976) studied graphical design and new media at the high school of arts Sint-Lukas in Brussels, where he mainly did research into interactive storytelling. After his studies he also looked for synergies between graphics, narration and interface. He used to be a member of the Visual Kitchen collective; with these people he explored the narrative possibilities of video in collaborative live-performances. In 2004 he traded in his screen-based work for hybrid concepts of networked physical and virtual environments. In 2005 he received a commission from Rhizome.org.

https://www.toyfoo.com

Musée de l’homme (Post-Production)
Jacques Lennep

video | 01:05:47 | col. & b&w
spoken | french

Musée de l’Homme (Post-Production)
Allez les Zèbres! (Hommage à Ezio Bucci)
Imitation de Jésus-Christ (Hommage à Yves Somville)
Les vestons d’Alfred (Hommage à Alfred Laoureux)

Delirium Vidéo 1
Jacques Lennep

video | 00:28:03 | col.
spoken | fench

Le coup du lapin
Le calvaire de R. Mutt
La fin du monde
La derniere chataigne
Une taupe au soleil
L’oreille coupée

Delirium Vidéo 2
Jacques Lennep

video | 00:28:39 | col.
spoken | french

Bavures d’escargots
L’oiseau croqué
Dialogue avec l’invisible
Histoire d’un corps né en 1941
Le jeu de la grenouille
Peinture au blanc
Imitation de Jésus-Christ, etc.

Delirium Vidéo 3
Jacques Lennep

video | 00:23:56 | col.
spoken | french

Une brosse, une ramassette et la mélancolie
Dieu est une pipe
Message de l’ogre
La tour penchée
14-18 (peintures d’histoire)
Verdure ou la langue verte
Chatouilles

Delirium Vidéo 4
Jacques Lennep

video | 0:25:17 | col.
spoken | french

Jésus... Bordel!
Impression au fil des eaux
Repasser l’image
Les chiens devant derrière
Le pinceau et le pénis (éloge du singe peintre)
Chaussettes show
Tombeau pour M.B.
La soupe (à boire à l’envers)

Delirium Vidéo 5
Jacques Lennep

video | 00:25:14 | col.
spoken | french

L’aventure extravagante d’un poulet
Le semeur de pensées
Nadine
L’invention de la bouée
Parcours d’artiste

Jacques Lennep renews his fascination for the use of video with this series of short sketches, often recordings of performances. Elaborating on his work in the seventies and eighties with the artist’s group CAP, he continues the exploration of his Esthétique relationnelle - a theory largely prompted by the Structuralists. Actions, declamations, objects and the video medium itself are situated, from a social perspective, in a relational and contextualising framework, in order to strip down and revalidate the perception of narrative-visual art and its systems of reference.
Prod.: Jacques Lennep

Jacques Lennep
Jacques Lennep (°1941) followed a training in art history at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), after which he published several scientific Works, among them Art et Alchimie (1966). In 1972 he founded, as a self-declared “part-time artist”, the CAP (’Cercle d’Art Prospectif’) group, an artist’s collective for which he delineated the principles of a ’relational’ aesthetics. They were the first in Belgium to experiment with video. According to Lennep each artistic activity is the product of relations. Art, therefore, can never be considered a final truth or a universal judgment, but rather a relational and relative truth. In the meantime he has spent three decades on research into art as a language and structure, the perception of art and his relation to society. His work has been shown, among others, at Bozar (Brussels), the museum for contemporary art Muhka (Antwerp) and the Palazzo reale (Milan).

Quid Esperanza
Stéphane Manzone

35 mm. | 00:14:35 | col.
spoken | es & pt & it | french

Every year, around Easter, the procession of Semana Santa moves through the streets of Malaga. The parade of masked penitents, the glorification of the statue of Virgin Mary, … everything is targeted towards making the crowd, as if in a trance, forget about their own mortality. In Fatima, Portugal, the Virgin showed herself to three shepherd according to legend. Ever since pilgrims come back each year to celebrate this miracle together, like fireflies at night. At the Convento dei Cappuccini in Sicilian Palermo mummies of priests and aristocrats are hanging along the walls of the catacombs, some of them over four centuries old. These human remains, simulations of life, mirror the ambition of the visitors. This triptych investigates, supported by fragments read from La Nuit Mystique by Jean de la Croix, the role of insecurity, the occult at the origins of the Catholic religion in the Mediterranean world.
Prod.: AJC !

Stéphane Manzone
Stéphane Manzone (°1970) was born in Monaco and he lives in Brussels. After working as a script writer for film and TV, he made short and long fiction films, documentaries and experimental work. His work was shown, among others, at the Film festival in Milan, Festival International du Documentaire in Marseille and the Mediawave festival in Györ (Hungary).

SILENTcity: Taipei
Nicolas Maréchal

video | 00:20:40 | col.
spoken | chinese

A woman is looking for her past in the busy and noisy streets and public spaces of the city of Taipei, which she left behind years ago. The memory slowly opens, in the form of shreds of image and sound. As she wanders through her memories, the distinction between reality and the imagination, past and present, home and elsewhere, disappears. She dissolves in a transit zone, populated by a crowd of human shades, between transparent and translucent. “Taipei is Taipei, Taipei is not Taipei”. Her sense of identity is destabilized: the city sounds echo through in the silence of her body, the urban forms are engraved in the body. In the end she finds peace in the beauty of harmonious dance movements. The video, based on a text by Chou Shengfang, is built from nine sequences. The last one is a hovering sequence, cut in between the other parts according to an at random process.
Prod.: L’oeuf ALCHIMIQUE

https://www.silent-city.net

Nicolas Maréchal
Nicolas Marechal (°1971) studied editing at the Institut des Arts de Diffusion in Louvain-la-Neuve. In 2005 he made a masters degree in Electronic Imaging at the Duncan Jordanstone College of Art (University de Dundee, Scotland). He realized a number of credits and animated film shorts, in which he claims to have paid as much attention to the power of expression of an image as to the manipulation of time. For two years he has been looking for new angles, in collaboration with dancers, authors, musicians and visual artists. SILENTcity : Taipei is the first result of this investigation.

Du noir dans le vert
Patricia and Marie-France Martin

video | 00:10:58 | col.
non spoken

This video was created for the exhibition Speelhoven ’04 and was inspired by the cabane which artist Hans Op De Beeck developed in situ in 2001 for that same exhibition series. The work sits there like a drab observatory, with a view on two walnuts, lost in the middle of a vast, green meadow. One is alive, towering high above the caved-in remains of the other, dead tree. Around this almost romantic image the Martin created a story of their own, and as usual the idea of ‘duality’ plays an important role. Two sisters are roaming around in a meadow, around two trees. They chop the dead tree to pieces and take the wood to a pool, deep in the surrounding forest. At night, by the moonlight, they dress in hermetically white costumes and paint the stump that is left over, as if this were part of some ritual. They are observed from the window of the cabane by a(nother?) woman. Du Noir Dans Le Vert develops like a multi-layered exploration of the space between ‘them’ and ‘the other’, the confusion between ‘the genuine’ and ‘the copy’, between reality and fiction. Similarly to such directors as Lynch (Mulholland Dr.), Bergman (Persona) and Hitchcock (Vertigo) they explore the concept of ‘identity’ in their work, amidst an illusory world of reflections and fusions. The Electro-acoustic soundtrack is by the Brussels’ sound artist Arnaud Jacobs (Missfit).
Prod.: Marie-France & Paricia Martin

Patricia and Marie-France Martin
Patricia and Marie-France Martin (°1956) are identical twins. They grew up in Switzerland and after their Plastic Arts studies at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris they ended up in Brussels. Their inevitable duality, beloved as well as cursed, embraces every aspect of their work. With the help of various media (sound, photography, video, literature) they explore complex feminist and social themes. They have been exhibited, among other places, in London (Danielle Arnaud), Paris (Aline Vidal), Genève (MIRE) and Brussels.

https://www.alinevidal.fr

Lady Lique
Marc Meert

video | 00:02:35 | col.
non spoken

A recording of the installation Vertus Publiques, Vices Privées by Diana Bobolou, as part of an exhibition in the Fine Arts Academy in St.Josse-ten-Noode. What might seem at first sight like the working environment and daily ritual of a prostitute, is in fact merely an artificial installation in an exhibition environment.
Prod.: PTTL

Marc Meert
Marc Meert (°1954) lives and works in Brussels. He studied, among others at the ERG (‘Ècole de Recherches Graphiques’). He is one of the active members of PTTL (Plus-Tôt/ Te-Laat), a collective organising video workshops in the Brussels’ community of Sint-Joost-ten-Node, which makes use of audiovisual material to influence the policymaking process of local politics. His video work has been presented, among others, at Bozar (Brussels), Forum des Images (Paris) and the TV networks RTBF and ARTE.

https://www.pttl.be

N12°13.062’/ W 001°32.619’ Extended
Vincent Meessen

video | 00:08:25 | col.
non spoken

The title of this video is a reference, through GPS coordinates, to a specific location in Africa, which is abstract at the same time. Two men wander through a deserted site in the middle of the desert, at first sight it’s an archaeological ruin. As the images reveal more of the environment, it becomes clear that the construction was built by the twosome, hewn from the surrounding stone. It’s like a denial of any conventional view of a city. To Meessen this residual space reflects an inverted image of a planned, urban surrounding. Adding minimal fictitious elements what seems like an ordinary registration of an uncommon practice of city planning in Africa expands into a multidimensional structure, which should be read on a metaphorical level.
Prod.: Normal ASBL

L’empiètement du coton graine
Vincent Meessen

video | 00:07:26 | col.
spoken | bi, mooré & fr | english

Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Meessens’ ‘document brut’ records his actions in the busy streets of the African capital with a candid camera. Dressed and masked in a cotton tuft costume he silently moves between the crowds. The reactions soon follow: the white man as a strange, primitive apparition is faced with indifference, mockery and amazement. His use of Burkinabese ‘white gold’ as a garment turns the public space into a magnetic field, charged with poetry based on unspoken symbolical, political and economic meanings.
Prod.: Normal ASBL

Vincent Meessen
Vincent Meessen (°1971) was born in Baltimore, but he lives and works in Brussels. He studied journalism and cultural policies, he was active as a social worker and photographer and for the moment (2004-2005) he is a student at the HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts) in Antwerp. His work develops mainly around the idea of "disputed spaces”- territory as a political issue. Once preferring photography as a medium, he now explores a multitude of media, including video. His work has been shown, among others, during the exhibitions Pistes and Event #02 (Netwerk Galerij, Aalst) and Ename Actueel. He also published the photo book Qui-vive (La Lettre Volie, 2003).

https://www.normal.be

Vies nouvelles
Olivier Meys
Li Ping Weng

video | 00:48:05 | col.
spoken | chinese | french

In central China, by the borders of the river Danin there is a village, a family: the father, the mother and their four children. The river has turned into a lake. Half the village is flooded and abandoned at great speed. Soon the whole village will have completely disappeared. A couple of months after the inauguration of the ‘Three Gorge Dam’, considered to be the largest dam in the world – comparable in proportion to the Great Chinese Wall – the family is torn apart and bereft of a certain future, caught between tradition and modernity, between dreams and
Prod.: Limited Adventures / CBA

Olivier Meys
Olivier Meys (°1974) studied film direction at the IAD (‘Institut des Arts de Diffusion’) in Louvain-la-neuve and then he worked as an assistant-director for the production of fiction films and documentaries of, among others, Claudio Pazienza and Borhane Alaouie. Furthermore he realized several radio-documentaries for networks like France Culture, RTBF and RSR . He was awarded, among others, with the grand prize of the SCAM/SACD Radiophonic in 2003

Li Ping Weng
Li Ping Weng (°1959) was born in Shanghai and he has lived in Brussels since 1989. Ever since he has worked on a broad oeuvre, consisting of photography, multimedia installations, sound and video work. He worked as a stage designer, production and direction assistant on various film productions, before he started working with Olivier Meys on his own series of documentaries.

Taste the World
Wendy Morris

video | 00:04:20 | b&w
non spoken

Taste the World explores tourist notions of the ‘Third World’ as a playground for Europe. The title is derived from a promotional brochure in which travellers are encouraged to “taste the world”. The subtext makes clear that this ‘world’ is mainly there for the Eurostractrates with their unbridled leisure time and financial means. The (‘Third’) world is represented as an infinite domain for consumers with an unlimited offer: culinary, sexual, economic and cultural. This narrative line is intertwined with the story about the voyage and return of Sarah Bartman, the South-African Khoi woman put on display in Europe during the eighteenth century as an example of ‘primitive’ sexuality. After her death part of her body was made available to museums. Only in 2003 she was repatriated and buried in South-Africa. The film was made from charcoal drawings, filmed with 16mm, processed and re-filmed, allowing for a full sequence to be told by a single drawing. Similarly to William Kentridge the traces of the adaptations are not fully erased, they are like shadows, constituting a history of the image. In Taste the World a voyage is drawn out, from ‘modernity’ over ‘pre-modernity’ and back again, raising questions about the way in which Europe chooses to ignore non-European modernity.
Prod.: Wendy Morris

Wendy Morris
Wendy Morris (°1960) was born in Walvis Bay, Namibia and for ten years now she has lived in Deerlijk, Belgium. She studied visual arts at the University of South-Africa. In her work, mainly animated charcoal drawings, she investigates the way in which Africa is represented in Europe, as a separate, alien identity, as a ‘playground’. She always tries to situate her work within a framework, crossing with the theoretical explorations of European neo-colonialism. Her first film, A Royal Hunger (2002), an exploration of the other side of the Belgian colonial heritage, was shown, among other places, at the KVS and the Afrika Filmfestival in Leuven.

Labor Intus
Eric Duyckaerts
Joseph Mouton

video | 00:09:30 | col.
spoken | french

The story about how ‘the art of memory’ came about is used as a breeding ground for a playful reflection on ‘Ars Memoriae’ or the mnemonic techniques used already by the ancient Greeks, in which each idea is associated with a mental image, situated in an imaginary architectural environment. The Roman Cicero, for instance, claimed that he could remember a thousand sentences in his mental agglomerate using the metaphorical construct of the home, the street and then the city. This short, sober video presents the conditioning of the memory as a mental discipline, as “labor intus”, the laborious ontwarren of our labyrinthine world of thinking. Similarly to most of his video work, Duykaerts also makes use of the scientific discourse – Latin expressions, historical references and schemes. Improvising, with his partner Joseph Mouton, he conjugates them and questions them.
Prod.: Éric Duyckaerts & Joseph Mouton

Éric Duyckaerts
Eric Duyckaerts (°1953) was born in Liège. He studied law and philosophy and, after numerous wanderings through the academic world and the domain of the visual arts he started teaching at the arts academies of Paris, Bourges, Dijon and Nice. He made a name for himself in artistic academic circles with his “archaeological research into the art of painting”. With this multimedia project Duyckaerts presented himself as a scientist who made a suggestion to equip every hand with a second thumb. His work might be read as a parody on existing scientific, philosophical and artistic discourse, an often playful enquiry on the margin between truth and security. A considerable part of his work is inspired on the theory of Scheffer, who pleaded for an alternative to binary logic in 1914. Recently his paintings, installations, videos, performances and presentations have been shown at the École du Louvre and the Centre National de la Photographie (Paris), Frac PACA (Marseille) and the Galerie Française (Rome). He also published a series of writings, including the novel Hegel ou la Vie en Rose (1992).

Thoughts go by Air
mxHz.ORG

multimedia
installation

Thoughts go by Air is based on the experiments of computer scientist Craig Reynolds, who simulated the behavior of a swarm of birds on a computer screen in 1986. mxHz thought it could not be that hard to create a series of independently flying creatures, communicating among themselves and making use of human energy and presence – like Hitchcock’s The Birds: with a proper system of collective and collaborative intelligence, based on human mobility as a resource and an interface. mxHz conceived a fully artificial environment, a combination of the facial expression of robots and animal behavior. Thoughts go by Air consists of a group of balloons filled with helium, floating through an installation space. They react to their environment and over the internet they exchange their ‘experiences’ with other balloons in other spaces. Each of the groups act as an intelligent system, influenced both by the events from their immediate surroundings and by the behavior of their peers. Thoughts go by Air is a ‘work in progress’ and it is currently further developed in the TESLA laboratory in Berlin.

https://mxhz.org

Two Way Radios (2WR)
mxHz.ORG

multimedia
installation

Two Way Radios (2WR) is a project for interactive audio streams, inspired on the manifestos La Radia by F. T. Marinetti & Pino Masnata [1933], The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication by Bertolt Brecht [1932] and Imaginary Landscape No. 4 by John Cage [1951]. In the spirit of these utopian ways of thinking a simultaneous internet connection is made between several locations, allowing the free communication and exchange of audio. In the process Guy van Belle postulated the adagio "language is sound to my ears", based on Paul deMarinis’ dictum "music is sound to my ears". The performances are based on streaming and broadband technology. Participants on various locations each generate an audio stream at a specific moment in time, which they are all able to record in real time with their own soft and hardware setup, the streams can modify and visualise, add sounds of their own and rebroadcast them. This way loops are created which might be changed at each iteration. The number of performers and the locations always vary. Before performances had been set up, among others with Akihiro Kubota (Tokyo), Andrey Savitsky (Minsk), goto10.org (jk, chun, fbar, aym3ric - eu), Code31 (lahaag - Brussels) and Akos Maroy (Tilos radio, Nextlab - Budapest).

mxHz.ORG
mxHz (Machine Cent’red Humanz) is a multidisciplinary collective with alternating members, including artists, curators and technicians. They have one thing in common, however: they radically chose for technological art. Machine Cent’red Humanz fight, in their own words, “a slow battle against the antique 20th century”. Founding members are Chip-kali and Lahaag. Their performances and installations were presented in various places in Belgium and the Netherlands, on the medi@terra’s Festival in Athens, ArtBots in New York and the Excavating the Future conference in Prague.

https://mxhz.org

Het Onmogelijke Onderzoek
Ruud Verlaert
Stephan Novak

video | 00:51:25 | col.
spoken | dutch | french

In their neverending series of telefilms Verlaert and Novak mess around with the narrative and formal clichés of the soap format of television and cinema and they provide their characters with swollen, hollow dialogues and a stiff, stoical attitude. In all their theatrical minimalism they are a parody of the platitudes of tragedy and romanticism. In Het onmogelijke onderzoek the commonplaces of the crime genre are configured into a nonsensical plot, sliding by, nevertheless, into a recognizable and trivial sequence of lengthy shots and sequences.
Prod.: Jiang Yi / Etablissement d’en Face

Ruud Verlaert
Stepan Novak
Ruud Verlaert (°1973) and Stepan Novak (°1972) (alter egos of Loic Vanderstichelen en Simon Backès) both ended up in Brussels after all kinds of rambles. Their video work is presented as ‘téléfilm’ and in a playful and relativizing way it treats with the narrative conventions of the world of film en television. Before this they had already made the video Dood in Brugge on the occasion of Bruges 2002.

Loss
Hans Op de Beeck

video | 00:11:00 | col.
non spoken

The work of Hans op de Beeck always breathes an atmosphere of profound emptiness. Characters, without words and totally alienated, stride through desolate landscapes and situations, out of which all hope seems to have leaked away. This is a world, seemingly lavished in the acid of everyday life, drenched in the liquid of loss. Often nothing but vague traces of faded remains remind us of human presence. In Loss a fictitious window looks out onto dark, estranged images of late-nineteenth century garden landscapes and architectural shapes, slowly shifting into the blackened ruins of an environment, scorched by World War I. The inconsolable atmosphere which speaks from the digital animation images is further reinforced by a layered soundscape of voices, surround sounds and melancholy tones, scraps from another era, from a different place.
Prod.: Beeck Brothers Production

Hans Op de Beeck
Hans Op de Beeck (°1969) studied at the high school of arts Sint-Lukas in Brussels and the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam, and he now operates from Brussels. As a multi-disciplinary artist he makes use of various media, like video, installations, sculptural work, photography, text, animation and sketches. The medium is carefully selected, always looking for some kind of parallel world, an ageless nowhere. The world as it is presented by Op de Beeck is a unheimisch no man’s land, in which there is hardly any room left for human beings. Thematically he is looking for a (spiritual) ‘being in transit’, an in-between, seemingly without reason, the restrained, the chaos of the undefined. He has exhibited, among other places, in Milan, Chicago and London. In 2001 he won the prestigious Prize for Young Belgian Painters and in 2003 he participated in the PS1 project in New York.

Inch’Allah
Ria Pacquée

video | 00:18:40 | col.
spoken | english

An associative mosaic of tiny instances in image and sounds, zapping from east to west, from Belgium to Tunisia, from France to Israel, Morocco or Yemen, a reflection of everyday reality, believing, calm and solitude. In a logical way the video shows the next step in the evolution from Ria Pacquée’s older work, in which she headed out into the streets with a camera, arranging her images around formal elements. This resulted in visual and auditive puzzles with passing images of lines and colours, shadow and light, wind and sand, amalgams of random fragments, combining into a meaningful whole. Reality as an objective totality, after all, is an illusion: our perception of reality is narrowed down by the viewpoint we pick out, the place we live in, the expressions we see and hear, the life we live. All we see is fragments and pieces of the overall whole, which we refer to as meaning. In the work of Ria Pacquée the relative and the existential converge. Similarly to The Book of Questions by the French author and philosopher Edmond Jabés, which this video quotes from, she embraces the idea that life is not necessarily about knowing and understanding, but that it all starts with breathing, in and out, and the way we reach out to one another. The rest is an appearance of the moment.
Prod.: Ria Pacquée

Ria Pacquée
Already from the seventies Ria Pacquée (°1954) disguises herself in everyday life. As if it were pieces of social archaeology she records her presence in this world, first on photos and, for several years now, on video as well. During the second half of the eighties she won fame with her ‘Madame’-works, in which she takes on the character of a lonely middle-aged lady. From the ‘Madame’- and ‘It’-characters she has evolved into ‘street rambling’, from graveyards her fascination shifted to the desert, always on the lookout. Her work has been shown, among others, at Kunsthalle Lophem (Loppem), the museum for contemporary arts MUHKA (Antwerp) and Musée des Beaux-arts Tourcoing.

Inner Seascape (Principe d’incertitude)
Anne Penders

00:07:57 | b&w
non spoken | english text  

Since a couple of years Anne Penders is carrying out photographic and audiovisual research into nature elements. Inner Seascape is the first part of a project about water. The video is made from photographs, taken in Arlon. The sounds, in their turn, were recorded on the island Putuoshan in the South-Chinese sea and along the banks of a river in Luang Prabang, Laos. The water – photographed, registered, transformed – creates a mental landscape, hesitative, streaming, suffocating. The references to the locations and the data are not situated, as a result of which the connections are made elsewhere, maybe even inside. The ‘principle of insecurity’ plays here as well: letting go of your senses, so they can take you safe to shore or, maybe, even take you along to another place.
Prod.: Anne Penders

Anne Penders
Anne Penders (°1968) lives between Brussels and Elsewhere. She obtained a Ph.D. in contemporary art history and she studied photography, and she is a scientific collaborator at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and an assistant at l’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Visuels La Cambre. Her literary and audiovisual work explores the idea of a journey as ‘presence/absence’, the idea of a ‘home’ perpetually in transit. Traveling, as a life style, means constantly ‘disappearing’. It means that you are somewhere without actually being there, maybe even being present when you are not there; it is leaving without leaving a trace, or capturing the trace of others; it is being endlessly confronted to the fundamental impossibility to share the experience one has undergone. She has published some essays and novels and she has exhibited, among other places, in the Botanique (Brussels), the musée d’art moderne et contemporain (Liège) and the Provinciaal centrum voor Kunst en Cultuur (Ghent).

El hijo & el libro
Rafaël

video | 00:06:03 | col. & b&w
non spoken

Rafaël puts together his videos in the same way he creates a visual counterpart for musical expressions in real-time during his VJ performances: by tying together an amalgam of drawn, photographic and video images from his intimate surroundings, layered with a sense of humour and then edited according to rhythmical variations, from kinetic to almost static and back again. A visual idiom unequalled in the nether regions of the electronic music world: looking for beauty and recognition between all that’s drab, dingy and wayward, looking for an identity and personality among a stream of clawing and rending impulses. In El hijo & el libro Rafaël tangles an openly associative web of visual and musical references around two of the things he loves most: his son and the work of Korean artist Milk Pack, best known for his ingenuous, almost childlike illustrations.
Prod.: Rafaël

Rafaël
Rafaël (°1973) has been travelling to and fro all his life between Spain, his native country, and Belgium. For a couple of years he studied photography, then he exhibited his pictures and installations all over Europe. In 1998 he was awarded the "Prix Jeunes Artistes" Médiatine by the Belgian French-language community. From 2002 he devoted himself to the medium of video, realising installations, as well as single-channel videos and VJ-performances. In a grubby, kinetic visual idiom he creates associative networks around elements from his immediate surroundings and contemporary pop culture. His work has been shown, among others, at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and the London Island Art Film & Video Festival, as well as the Green Film Festival in Seoul.

De Politicus
Manu Riche

X’XX’’ | col.
spoken | dutch

Steve Stevaert is the most popular politician in Flanders. But why do documentaries about politicians need to be made? Why make another image of a man who is filmed each and every day as part of several television programs? Precisely this issue was a reason for Manu Riche to make a documentary. The film offers a glance behind the stage, where the official image-makers create the public image of the politician. It’s an observation of a man who is struggling with that artificial image, edited without commentary. The reality is shown to the viewer in an unpolished way, in a direct style, without fringes.Prod.: Offworld prod / Vivifilm / Riche

Manu Riche
Manu Riche (°1964) was born in Hasselt,but he soon relocated to Brussels, where he went to work as a director for the ‘Cinema Verité’ cult magazine Strip-Tease, broadcast on the French-spoken public network RTBF. In his documentaries he often offers a critical-analytic perspective on the Flemish cultural landscape. For the moment he is working on a series of documentaries for Canvas about Belgium today.

Pauvre Gwen
Gwendoline Robin

video | 00:05:09 | col.
non spoken

A recording of a performance, specifically conceived to be watched as a video, keeping after the spectator. It all starts as a game: a bucket of water is hurled at the artist at full force. Still dripping and gasping for oxygen, she barely gets a chance to breathe, since the offensive is repeated, time and again. The resistance of the body withers with time, the facial expressions turn to stone, harsh emotions are bottled up. When does the game turn into a form of aggression?
Prod.: Gwendoline Robin

Gwendoline Robin
Gwendoline Robin (°1968) is born and bred in Brussels, where she studied at La Cambre, more specifically in the workshop ‘urban and rural space’. This education brought her to the creation of spatial installations, which she kept developing further during and after her Erasmus studies at the university of Valencia – with its infamous fire celebrations – with playful and ephemeral characteristics, taking advantage of the tension that an undermined object might explode at any moment, combust and disappear. Little by little these various forms of expression converged into performances, in which she considers her own body as working material, as a measuring instrument of space, of time, resistance, fear and intimacy. Her performances, registrations and installations have been shown, among others, at the arts centers de Singel, Factor 44 (Antwerp), CCNOA and during the Maïs Festival (Brussels).

La revanche du sacristain cannibale
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

video | 00:45:45 | col.
spoken | french

“Le Cinéaste de l’absurde”, as he likes to call himself, has another go at the domain where, among others, young Peter Jackson used to feel at home, when he was still making low-budget instant-cult films with such catchy titles as Bad Taste and Braindead. Jean-Jacques Rousseau also weaves his stories around typical B-film topics, black humor, an unhealthy dose of madness and a grotesque vision of humanity. In La Revanche Du Sacristain Cannibale a sexton in a tiny, rural community develops a particularly morbid predilection for house women.
Prod.: Flight Movie

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Very briefly Jean-Jacques Rousseau (°1946) took classes at the conservatory pf La Louvière, after which he continued his training in photography by mail correspondence. Sometimes people refer to him as the Ed Wood of the Walloon - or the ‘Don Quichotte of French-language cinema’. His absurdist stories, on the verge of bad taste, persistently made with minimal budgets and untrained actors. Meanwhile he has made some twenty film short and features films.

De paardenkoers
Mieke Struyve

video | 00:46:45 | col.
spoken | dutch

This documentary offers a peak behind the screens of Waregem Koerse 2004. In the wake of the organising patriarchs of this Flemish popular celebration a disconcerting sketch of one of the main events of Flemish business life is shown. The commercial mechanisms surpass folklore, but at the same time the event is like an anachronism in all its aspects, a final convulsion of a showpiece of the Flemish bourgeoisie. A swansong, one might say, trailing along memories and values from a different time, a different world.
Prod.: Eric Goossens / Viviane Vanfleteren / Manu Riche

Mieke Struyve
Mieke Struyve (°1979) lives and works in Brussels. After her studies in non-fiction at the RITS she has worked mainly as a director of Flemish documentaries and docusoaps, including Opa zit op de Stopnaald, about Flemish burial rituals, which was nominated for the Lichtpunt Prize.

Feed Back Paint
Pascal Baes
Aï Suzuki

video | 00:48:19 | col.
non spoken

Feed Back Perf is based on a simple concept people have been experimenting with for several decades: video feedback, what happens when a camera films a screen surface in real time, sending back the signal to that very same screen. The technique is simple, its behaviour unpredictable. The echoes result in a complex dynamical system, which generates all kinds of non-linear, self-organising patterns. These figures might be compared to applications of fractal geometry, in which certain natural phenomena are visualised, demonstrating an infinite form of self-similarity: an image contains thousands of reduced copies of itself, as it were, each of them containing even smaller copies. Pascal Baes projects the feedback onto his life companion Aï Suzuki, radically interfering with the images through digital video effects, mutating forms, penetrating textures and designing his visual experiment as a psychedelic phantasmagoria of the ‘corpus humanis’ and distorted sensuality. Demographical lines merge with body shreds and facial features in a restless outburst of colour, light and movement, expanding into a claustrophobic experience in combination with an electronic composition of sliding and lashing sounds.

Pascal Baes
Pascal Baes (°1959), French by origin, lives and works in Brussels. After an education in biology, painting and photography he threw himself into cinema and video. He specialises in computer animation and the use of stop-action techniques, experimenting with the movement of image and body. Together with his partner Aï Suzuki he creates a visual world, looking for a balance between choreography and cinematography. His work has been shown, among other places, at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Centre d’art Santa Mónica (Barcelona), the Dallas Video Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Internationales Hamburger KurzFilmFestival.

8 (Demo 2 - The Theater Gallery Tragedy)
TALE OF TALES

multimedia

8 is set up as a poetical 3D environment, guiding the user through a narrative and interactive world of fairytales, inspired on the many versions of the ‘Sleeping Beauty’. A deaf-mute girl is lost in the palace of the Sleeping Beauty during the enchantment. When everyone is asleep, eight princes succeed in entering the palace. The player should help the girl to keep up the spell and prepare the princess for the arrival of the ‘true’ prince. In reaction to the hermetical and Hollywood clichés of modern games, Samyn and Harvey created a playful non-linear interactive environment, with an emotionally charged narrative structure. Contrary to the traditional game type, based on rules, levels, competition and specific goals, a choice is made for an explorative immersion in a colorful and astonishing virtual world.

https://www.tale-of-tales.com

The Endless Forest (Forest 1)
TALE OF TALES

multimedia

According to Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn, interactive media -and especially real-time 3D technologies - have so much more to offer than the childish games that form the bulk of the offer today. The Endless Forest is an attempt to try and do something with these technologies that does not need to inherit all those things that they don’t like in games. This online multiplayer game, probably one of the early steps towards a "jeu d’auteur", is not designed to offer any challenges that need to be overcome, or points that can be scored. The players just steer their deer through a virtual forest and see what happens. Currently The Endless Forest consists of a forest, a mysterious ruin and as many deer as there are players at any given time. It’s a very romantic little forest, with poppies, hyacinths and ferns. There is no end to the forest. And yet it is a cosy place frozen in a perfectly sunny time. The Endless Forest client as well as the multiplayer service are available free of charge thanks to the support of Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Design Vlaanderen, Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds, Entropy8Zuper! and Provinciaal Archeologisch Museum Ename.

https://www.tale-of-tales.com/TheEndlessForest

TALE OF TALES
Tale of Tales is a studio for the development of games, set up by Auriea Harvey (°1971, VS) and Michaël Samyn (°1968, BE) in 2002. They are both trained as graphical designers and, as autodidacts in hypermedia and game design, they have been active since 1999 as entropy8zuper.org, exploring the open space between interface design and web art, with a strong accent on narrative, emotion and sensuality. Their love of elegant interactive entertainment and the playful use of humor and irony finds its extension in the projects of Tale of Tales, as well as in 8, a single-player game inspired on the various versions of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ as the online multiplayer game The Endless Forest. Recently their work has been presented, among others, at the Innovative Game Design Symposium (Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht), ALT+CTRL Festival of Independent and Alternative Games (USC Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, California) and Villette Numerique (Parijs). Their work was awarded with the SFMOMA Prize for Excellence in Online Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2000).

https://www.tale-of-tales.com

The dynamite show
Koen Theys

video | 00:08:12 | col.
non spoken

Similarly to most of Koen Theys’ work, The Dynamite Show also shows a fascination with contemporary iconography. This video was built from video images of various explosions, developed by several American companies, who specialise in special effects for Hollywood films. Over a period of 8 minutes close to 200 different explosions are brought together, which results in a psychedelic panorama of shimmering explosions and seething eruptions of colour and form. In slow motion it’s as if these all-consuming eruptions do herald new signs of life; not a battlefield, but a courtship display of tiny organisms and illusive atmospheres, trying to escape from the screen at full force. At the same time the overwhelming sound wave, a layered composition based on professional effects and material of his own, is experienced as an eruption and an energy source, both terrifyingly desperate and unworldly fascinating.
Prod.: Koen Theys

The vanitasrecord
Koen Theys

video | 00:33:35 | col.
non spoken

For the exhibition Locus Loppem (15 January to 14 May 2005) Koen Theys built an impressive vanitas-still life (“the biggest in the world”), a wooden construction (20m by 16m) crammed with skulls, candles, books along with thousands of live snails. In the first part of the video – not a recording of the installation, but a work in itself – the camera slowly strays past the contraption, as echoes of press commentaries and interviews about the occasion resound on and off. This touch of self-irony takes on greater proportions in the second part, in which Theys layers images of the press hounds which ran up during the opening of the exhibition with elaborate speeches. In the process Theys exposes the erosion within the press when it comes to the content of, and reflection on, visual arts and culture: the critical text is pushed further and further aside by the ‘hype mechanism’ in the media. Exhibition makers and artists know perfectly well how to take advantage of this mechanism by orchestrating discussions and events. Often quite implicitly Theys also touches on this aspect in The Vanitas Record – as we become witnesses of a spectacular attempt on a record. Paradoxically enough this pump and circumstance is at odds with the original reading a Vanitas scene urges onto its spectators: a call for humility and an understanding of how life passes by at a glance and a warning about vanity.
Prod.: Koen Theys

Koen Theys
Koen Theys (°1963) studied at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent and Film and Video at the Hoger St.-Lucas Instituut in Brussels. His work is mainly characterised by a fascination with objects depersonalisation. In his videos and pictures he often explores issues surrounding ‘identity’, in relation to the image in general and the digital image specifically. Many of his characters (e.g. Hitler in Media studies, after Heinrich Hoffmann or Picasso in Painting with Picasso) have in common that they are identified with an image, that they are cut loose from their underlying personality and reduced to an icon. His work is bought and shown all over the world, among others at the SMAK in Ghent; ’Le Casino’ in Luxemburg, the MOMA and the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York, and MARTA in Herford (Germany).

Le cercle: épisode 1 "La chaise"
Harald Thys
Jos de Gruyter

video | 00:03:01 | b&w
silent

Two characters. Intangible minds or magicians of flesh and blood? One in black, the other in white. Or vice versa. They dispose of magical powers, they can make objects appear out of nowhere and make them disappear again, rearrange spaces, transform people. Sometimes they are fooling around, then it becomes murder, but magic is always part of the game. Once again De Gruyter and Thys inspire themselves on the dramatic jargon and formal language of theatre and television for children to develop a minimalist mime game, tiny, intimate B/W tableaux touched merely by the sober, intangible gestures of the characters.
Prod.: Harald thys & Jos De Gruyter

Harald Thys
Jos de Gruyter
Harald Thys (°1966) and Jos de Gruyter (°1965) both live and work in Brussels and they studied at the Sint-Lukas institute in Brussels. Thys continued his studies at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, de Gruyter did the same at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam. In their visual work, their installations and videos, they depict situations and characters on the border of alienation, farcical at first sight and almost naively simple, but always clinging to a dark domain of paradoxical emotions and critical reflections. Their joint work has been shown, among other places, in the galerie EOF (Paris), de Singel (Antwerp), the Middelheim Museum (Antwerp) and the Kunsthalle Basel.

Approximations/Contradictions
Ana Torfs

multimedia

In 2004 Ana Torfs set up her first web project at the invitation of Lynne Cooke, the curator of the Dia Center for the Arts (New York). Approximations/Contradictions is based on 21 songs from Hanns Eisler’s Hollywood Songbook, interpreted by as many performers. The first part of the title is a reference to the different interpretations. By Eislerian tradition they are more like personal approaches than literal interpretations. Its second part captures Eisler’s work itself, both dark and vivid at the same time. Torfs explicitly selects Eisler’s most political songs: his “war diary”, which he wrote during his American stay in the forties, with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht. This choice was also inspired by the occasion of the assignment: spring of 2003, during the peak of the crisis in Iraq. She consciously does not make use of the aesthetical and narrative norms proper to the internet medium, creating a more intimate cinematic approach, with a lot of attention for casting, camera manipulation, image quality and sound. Each song is shown in three versions: a preparation, a rehearsal and a performance. During each recording the interpreters are portrayed in close-up. Similarly to her earlier work Torfs demonstrates her fascination with the physical representation of oral traditions: ancient words echo through contemporary environments, they cling to contemporary images and create an intimate vacuum with reflections on ageless topics, such as war, exile and excess.

https://www.diacenter.org/torfs/

Painting and singing finger
Martin Uit Den Bogaard

video | 00:06:50 | col.
non spoken

A video recording of one of the experiments Uit den Boogaard has been carrying out for a couple of years, in which he, as a “relativizing materialist”, explores the no man’s land between life and death. A dead finger is linked to a computer, which converts the fluctuating electrical impulses in constantly alternating images and sounds. The invisible physiological and mineral processes which move about under the” skin in the dead tissue, are conjured up. Uit den Boogaard cultivates a sense for the extravagant and repulsive in order to deny the unknown. He creates from destruction and death is reduced in manageable art objects. With these ritualised transgressions, functioning as memento moris, he measures out life to death.
Prod.:Martin Uit Den Bogaard

Martin Uit Den Bogaard
Martin Uit den Boogaard (°1944) studied at the Amsterdam Hogeschool voor de Kunsten and the Gerrit Rietveld Akademie in Amsterdam. His work is situated in the transit zone between art and science and originates in a fascination for the often paper-thin distinction between life and death. His experiments start from the infinite number of radiations, vibrations and tiny floating particles which, often invisibly, influence our organisms. As if to neutralise death, Uit den Boogaard makes use of chemical and elektronical techniques to preserve ‘dead’ matter and bring it back to life. His work has been shown, among others, at the Museum Ludwig Forum in Aken (D), the Stadtmuseum in Jena (D) and the Vincent van Gogh Instituut in Venray (NL).

Wat magnetisme is
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven

video | 00:11:59 | col. & b&w
non spoken

Mar del Plata, October 2003. AMVK and the Argentinean artist German Scalona decide to confirm their collaboration and friendship by undertaking a ritual trip to a magnetic forest by the Argentinean coast. During the video recordings in the forest the colours disappear because of the high magnetic charges in the air. The forest is lifeless and very quiet, in spite of the piercing wind. Between the tree stems colored flashes light up. Their colour reveals a truth and predicts the future for those who see him. In a field near the forest there is a man who sells pieces of paper with the meaning of the colours. AMVK edited the travel report into a fragmented shadow game with shifting colors and layered images. The camera wanders through the woods, along the body of Scalono; time and place are dislocated and alienated; a game arises of appealing and rejecting, a feeling of loss of orientation and distance, which is confirmed by the lengthy soundscapes of Mauro Pawlowski.
Prod.: Club Moral

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (°1951) studied at the Academie in Antwerp. She has been displaying her drawings, paintings, installations, film animations and interactive digitalia since 1975. In 1982 she set up Club Moral, together with artist and life-companion Danny Devos, a project which explores the outer edges of industrial noise. In the beginning of the 1980s she was an ‘Artist in residence’ in the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence In Brussels, where her fascination for the way the brain works and the origin of language was reinforced. In this context she explored the domain of the subconscious and she situated herself in a tradition where science and art meet. She lectures at the Academie in Ghent and she is a permanent tutor at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam. In 1994 she represented Belgium in the exhibition Art and Electronic Media in Europe in Hong Kong, in 2004 she was awarded with the Prize for Culture of the Flemish Community. She exhibited, among others, at De Brakke Grond (Amsterdam), the museums for contemporary art SMAK (Gent) and Muhka (Antwerp) and the Kunsthalle in Bern.

https://www.clubmoral.amvk.com

Le troisième paradis
Frédéric Jacquemin
Lukas Stallaert
Gert Van Berckelaer

video | 00:56:35 | col.
spoken | en & fr

This documentary is an attempt to analyze today’s cultural system, in the light of the political and social trends developed during the direct aftermath of Documenta X. Using a series of interviews with artists, curators and cultural observers, a panoramic vision arises on the practices and lines of thought of the great, heavily subsidized cultural machines on the one hand and autonomous artistic and social processes and experiences on the other. What is the role of cultural institutions, what is their relation to the economic market mechanisms and how can new constructive environments and movements be created? The title is borrowed from the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, the founder of Cittadellarte, who predicts a ‘third paradise’ in an interview, which should come about from a fertilization of the original, natural paradise and the artificial construction we created around ourselves today. Le Troisième Paradis is part of Ittaca, a European project of the Marcel Hicter foundation, which carries out research into cultural projects with a social and political function, targeted towards the presentation of educational tools.
Prod.: Fondation Marcel Hicter

https://www.ittica.org

Frédéric Jacquemin
Frederic Jacquemin (°1973) lives and works in Brussels, where he studied art history and international finance. He is active as a cultural researcher in Europe and Africa.

Gert Van Berckelaer
Gert Van Berckelaer (°1973) leeft en werkt in Brussel, waar hij audiovisuele kunsten studeerde aan de Sint Lukas hogeschool. Hij is werkzaam als freelance videoregisseur, -editor en –designer en werkte in die hoedanigheid voor verschillende choreografen, scènografen en muzikanten, onder andere in het kader van producties van Damaged Goods, lab[au] en het Domino festival.

Zoonation
Filip Van Dingenen

multimedia

The closure of the zoo in Limburg meant a starting point for Filip van Dingenen to accumulate his favorite topics in an ongoing research project, which led him through an extensive international network, from Spain to Danmark, from South-Africa to Taiwan. In his visual research he unravels the imaginative and delusive language that is so characteristic of the zoo, and also maps even more similar patterns in our society. Cages designed with rocks or artificial floes of ice, hyper realistic desert landscapes, site maps, signposts, zoo shuttles with illusive panoramic views; they sketch an image of the evolution and ideology of a zoo and of its economic and scientific backgrounds. Tourism, for instance, dictates reports that might have an influence on our view on nature and it might be responsible for the dominating position of infotainment and disneyization. Non-sites and tourist hotspots as the only remnants of the eternal human desire of a Paradise Lost?

https://www.zoonation.be

Filip Van Dingenen
Filip Van Dingenen (°1975) lives and works in Diest. He studied Mixed Media at the Provinciale Hogeschool Limburg and Culturele Studies at the VUB in Brussels. Currently he is active at jekino, the Flemish centre for children’s films. Already in his first experiments he created parallel worlds, between dream and reality, making use of various media. He likes to take on several alter egos, like Billy Bluebird, who founded a museum as a co-director, making it into a free zone for anarchist freedom and offering trips to Utopia as a travel agent. The work of Van Dingenen always pushes us to (re)discover the imagination. To him places like Las Vegas, Disneyland, theme parks and zoos are ideal shelters for the imagination, reflections of a desire he tries to catch and evoke in his projects. He has presented his work, among others, at the university of Oulu (Finland), Matrix Art Project (Brussels) and Brakke Grond (Amsterdam).

https://www.fantaman.net

World Of Blue/ Land of O
Bram Van Paesschen

video | 00:52:24 | col.
spoken | french | english

Brussels, Belgium. A hospital in the inner city. Three patients in the infectious diseases ward. In this precarious and isolated existence the ill are involved in a fight with their own mind and body. The filmmaker is a privileged witness of an utterly personal event, but he consciously avoids the customary human interest approach. Van Paeschen reports on his encounter with the radical Other. Human confrontation turns into cinematographic confrontation: he denies himself, nor the viewer, any release.

Bram Van Paesschen
Bram Van Paesschen (°1979) lives and works in Brussels, where he studied film at the Sint-Lukas Instituut. His graduation project Rookgordijn boven Brussel (or Pas de feu sans fumée, 2003) was well received from the start on various festivals, such as FID Marseille and the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente. To his own surprise the mockumentary around the legendary fire in the Brussels’ department store INNO became a Belgian cult-hit.

The ephemerist
An van. Dienderen
Didier Volckaert

video | 00:36:15 | col. & b&w
spoken | dutch | english

“Ne détruisez jamais un document” Ferdinand Vander Haeghen (1830 – 1913) pleaded when he started the archive “ephemera” as a Ghent university librarian in the 19th century. It is a bizarre hotchpotch of a wide variety of objects, including a parrot’s wing, orange wrappers, bags for bread, but also books that were considered lost, fragile porcelain business cards and prestigious publicity pamphlets. Following In the footsteps of this somewhat eccentric, yet visionary bibliophile, the filmmakers plunge themselves into the abundant archive in order to evoke the Veldstraat in Ghent. Flirting with reality and fiction, Didier Volckaert and An van. Dienderen used old animation techniques and digital image processing. Patissier Bloch, workers of Inno Galeria/GB, managers of the many stores, the director of Monument Care, and the current directing librarian tell their stories about how drastically the daily life in the Veldstraat changed over the years.
Prod.: An Van. Dienderen

An van. Dienderen
An van. Dienderen (°1971) studied art history and audiovisual arts and she took classes with Trinh Minh-Ha in Berkeley (US). In 2004 she obtained a PhD in Comparative Cultural Studies at the university in Ghent. She realized such documentaries as Nachtelijke bezoekers (1998), a poetic piece about the matriarch community of the Mosuo-women in the province of Yunnan in China, and Site, a topographical portrait of José Besprosvany, and she gives regular lectures and workshops on visual anthropology. Her work has been shown on the Margaret Mead Film and Video festival (New York), Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), Belluard Festival (Fribourg) and Cultural Film Festival of Australia (South Melbourne).

Didier Volckaert
Didier Volckaert (°1971) studied audiovisual art at the Sint-Lukas in Brussels. He mainly made documentaries, largely inspired, both with regards to form and content, by experimental films and pre-cinema. He is also a curator, teacher and visual artist. He has presented his work, among others, at the museums for contemporary arts MUHKA (Antwerp) and SMAK (Ghent).

https://www.elektrischer schnellseher.com

Begin, Began, Begun
Sarah Vanagt

video | 00:37:57 | col.
spoken | interlingua

April: a month of mourning the new Rwandese calendar. While the country is commemorating the tenth anniversary of the genocide, children can only make up and tell worriless stories. Sarah Vanagt spends her Easter vacation in the children’s republic, a village inhabited only by genocide orphans and refugee children, in the border area between Rwanda and Congo, heavily affected by war. History has been erased from the school schedules for over ten years now. The words ‘hutu’ and ‘tutsi’ are banned from the dictionaries. History is being rewritten. Children build out a world of their own, a chain of stories beginning and suddenly ending… and starting all over again - a piece of history writing in which nothing is final.
Prod.: Balthasar vzw

Sarah Vanagt
Sarah Vanagt (°1976) studied History at the universities of Antwerp, Groningen and Brighton. Apart from a passion for history, there is one for film as well. Sarah Vanagt looked for a combination and found it by carrying out historical research from the practice of film. In order to develop a cinematic language of her own she started training at the London National Film and Television School (‘documentary direction’ department). During that time she worked mainly with refugee children from Rwanda and their perception of and relation to the past. This resulted in the graduation project After Years of Walking (2003).Her work has been shown, among others, at the IDFA (International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam),, the Amnesty International Film Festival (West Hollywood), Les Ecrans Documentaires Val-de-Marne (Parijs) and in Tate Modern (Londen). She lives and works in Brussels.

CITYSNAPPER_X & CITYSNAPPER_game_BRUSSELS
Olivier Vanderaa

multimedia

With the project CITYSNAPPER_X Olivier Vanderaa tries to achieve a proper sociological and visual approach of great Western cities. He puts together urban instances and statements of urbanites, which he configures over the internet into an inter-subjective vision on the city. Starting from a confrontation of the personal perspective of the photographer with the relationship between city inhabitants and their habitat- this bipolarity arises from his fascination with the physical as well as the mental construction of a city – the project is an attempt to map out the social context of the city. The citysnappers make use of three navigational systems. The chronological navigation allows the visitor to track the evolution of the project on a daily basis. A second navigation operates through keywords, the words the inhabitants used to describe their city. The most remarkable navigation system is the cartographic navigation. For each city Vanderaa has designed a specific interface, characteristic for that specific city. After Montréal, Rotterdam, Courtrai, Barcelona and Berlin Brussel becomes part of the project in June 2005, even though CITYSNAPPER_game_BRUSSELS does not take in the initial sociological objectives as much. In collaboration with LAb[au] an interactive system was developed, in which Olivier Vanderaa got instructions over a mobile phone. Following these instructions he put together a collection of photographs, presented in a 3D model of the inner city of Brussels as part of an exhibition in Maison d’art Actuel des Chartreux and the Mediaruimte.

Olivier Vanderaa
Olivier Vanderaa (°1962) lives and works in Brussels, where he studied sound engineering, photography and web design. This diversity is reflected in his projects: he was a member, among others, of the collective ‘Ici & Maintenant’, which explored the outer edges of photography. The last couple of years he has been experimenting with new communication technologies and web interfaces, often in collaboration with the collective LAb[au]. His work examines aspects of contemporary Western culture. He is mainly interested in urban structures and cultures and the description of spatiality through photography and digital media. He has created, among others, a two-dimensional digital fresco for the Potsdamerplatz in Berlin and for a couple of years now he has been working on a sequence of Citysnapper projects.

J.H. The Art System
Angel Vergara

video | 00:02:39 | col.
silent

During his search for zones of free communication Angel Vergara takes on the appearance pf characters in his public performances, sometimes disguised as a strange creature (“street man”), but just as often as stereotypes, complying with social protocols (“the King”). That way he questions the concepts and notions defining the domain of artistic practice. Using the words he puts into the mouth of his alter egos: “ah, if only I could be a work of art, just like everyone else”. J.H. The Art System is a photo series of a performance by Vergara, who was disguised as Jan Hoet during the celebrations of the five-year existence of SMAK, the City Museum for Contemporary Arts in Ghent, when he was celebrated as a retiring director. Amidst the prominent crowd of curators, museum directors, culture politicians and artists he takes on the appearance of the icon which turned into a caricature, pointing out the absurdity and the emptiness of the etiquette and codes of the arts system.
Prod.: Angel Vergara

Angel Vergara
Angel Vergara (°1958) grew up in Spain, but he has lived in Brussels for 30 years now, the home of René Magritte and Marcel Broodthaers. His artistic vision comes close to the surrealism of these masters, even though he approaches reality as well as art in a way of his very own. Vergara starts from everyday life and the popular and audience participation is very important to him. He is best known for his interventions as a "street man", an alter ego looking at the world from underneath a sheet in a different way. He focuses on the economic aspects of art, but also on its social involvement and spiritual vigor. His installations, drawings, sculptures, paintings and video works have been shown at the musea for contemporary art Muhka (Antwerp) and FRI-ART (Fribourg) and the Danielle Arnaud Gallery (London).

Desk peace
Sophie Whettnall

video | 00:03:53 | col.
non spoken

Desk Peace offers, in the same way as the related Shadow Boxing, a variation on the theme of ’violence’, from a somewhat divergent perspective. This time the camera is targeted only at the artist, on the verge of striking back. Whether she actually goes through with it or not remains unknown to the viewer. We can only imagine what we would do in her shoes. Both videos were part of the exhibition ECHO as an installation, in September 2004 it was shown in gallery Baronian-Francey (Brussels).
Prod.: Sophie Whettnall

Shadow boxing
Sophie Whettnall

video | 00:03:20 | col.
non spoken

In Shadow Boxing, the first work Sophie Whetnall made on (16mm) film, the pursuit of ethical coherence is expressed by the rejection of violence. The woman on screen, the artist herself, goes through a strong psychological dilemma: she is constantly attacked, but she absolutely refuses to defend herself or strike back. Her attitude is anything but passive, on the contrary, it implicates strong mental force. Presented as an installation the scene is shown in loop from various positions – the camera aimed at the attacker, towards herself, the eyes and arms resisting the stimulations – which intensifies the psychological intensity even further.
Prod.: Sophie Whettnall

Sophie Whettnall
Sophie Whettnall (°1973) lives and works in Brussels. She studied visual arts at the Sint-Lukas institute and painting at the Academie, both in Brussels. Her work includes photography, video and multimedia installations and it revolves around two central axes: self-portraits and landscapes. She is particularly interested in the relations between the intimate and the unknown and she often explores the confrontations between various cultures or surroundings. She was a resident at the Hangar in Barcelona (2001-2002) and she has exhibited, among others, at The Video Art Foundation (Barcelona), the ICA (London) and Video Underground Zero (Toronto)

Virtual World Of Art - deel 3 & 4
WORKSPACE UNLIMITED

multimedia

Virtual World of Art is the title of a series of projects, initiated in 2002, based on a mod(ification) of the Quake3 game-engine, creating a network of 3D virtual and interactive environments. The past years three different surroundings - so-called ’nodes’ - were developed, each with different content (video, sound, webcam footage other data, gathered In real-time or not) conceptually and thematically associated with specific places, also acting as a co-producer and presentation forum: the SAT (Society of Arts and Technology) in Montreal (’EXTENSION’), the DEAF4 festival (organized by V2) in Rotterdam (‘DEVMAP’) and Vooruit in Ghent (‘IMPLANT’). Each ’node’ explores a deviant model of a hybrid physical and virtual environment, based on an in-depth investigation in to the potential of digital architectural models and alternative narrative and social game-strategies. Visitors might enter these surroundings through terminals or possibly a high-speed internet connection in real-time. In the long run the three environments will be connected over the internet to a large public space for creation and exchange. For the moment IMPLANT is under development and Workspace Unlimited perceives him as the core of the project. The architecture of the Vooruit will be radically reconfigured into a theatrical, fictitious environment. In the virtual building real-time information will be combined with archive material and virtual installations. In this way a game is played with apparent oppositions like present and past, physical and virtual, real-time and with delay.

https://www.workspace-unlimited.com

WORKSPACE UNLIMITED
Workspace Unlimited was set up in 2001 by artist Thomas Soetens and architect Kora van den Bulcke as an independent and non-commercial environment for artistic and technological explorations in the domain of art architecture and digital culture. Their projects are carried out in collaboration with freelance programmers, sound artists, engineers, web designers and technicians. The largest part of their work is set up around the question what the impact of a physical architectural environment, with its specific history and context, might be on a virtual world – and vice versa. Their preliminary magnum opus project Virtual World Of Art would like to give an answer to the challenges cultural institutions are currently confronted with: how might aesthetical and emotionally fascinating online experiences be created? How do you develop a context for networked forms of cultural production and exchange? How can physical and virtual environments be connected?

https://www.workspace-unlimited.com

Made in Italy
Fabio Wuytack

video | 00:29:00 | col.
spoken | italian | dutch

The discovery of the film Train sortant d’un tunnel, made by the Lumière brothers in 1897 in the Tuscan city of Carrara, constitutes Fabio Wuytack’s starting point for a discovery of his own roots. This quest for an overlooked piece of history takes him closer to home than he might ever have imagined. Wit the help of some inhabitants of the city, a couple of faded pictures and blurry memories he does not merely discover bit by bit the forgotten location of the mythical tunnel, but also the places where the filmmaker was created and baptised. A moving and personal document, drenched in nostalgia and tender melancholy.
Prod.: Fabio Wuytack

Two hands
Fabio Wuytack

video | 00:05:55 | col.
spoken | english | dutch

Two Palestinian hands. In Palestine there are only four heart surgeons. Mohammed Tamim is one of them. In 2003 he came to Belgium to specialize in paediatric surgery. The second Intifada has turned Mohammed into a war surgeon. Each day he fights his own battle, trying to achieve his dream. There are times when he works in the operating room for seven days a week. Sometimes he is operating on a boy who was shot in the breast, while another boy is carried in with a similar shot wound. "But I only have two hands", the surgeon says, his voice shaking. In the film these hands symbolise the combat, putting humanity at the centre of a lagging conflict.
Prod.: Fabio wuytack

Fabio Wuytack
Fabio Wuytack (°1981) was born in Antwerp. In 1999 he was awarded a grant to go and explore his fascination for sculpting in the city of Carrara, the Mecca of marble sculpting, where he grew up. His sculptural work was awarded, among others, during the international symposium of Bas-Normandie. In 2000 he decided to gain more in-depth knowledge of another fascination of his: film. He studied at the high school of arts Sint-Lukas in Brussels. The subject matter of his first cinematic work has much ground in common with the world of the visual arts, dance and music. From 2002 he specialises mainly in documentaries, often with an autobiographical slant. His work has been shown and awarded at places like the international documentary film festival Visions du Réel in Nyon and the Cannes festival, as well as on Belgian and British TV networks.

https://www.fabiowuytack.com

This event is part of argosfestival 2005