In its 30th year of existence, once again the Kunstenfestivaldesarts continues to pursue its vision to connect the different communities that inhabit the city of Brussels by the means of theatre, performance, dance, and visual arts.
The fact of being a cosmopolitan city with two official linguistic and cultural communities, francophone and netherlandophone, should be cherished by all the citizens of Brussels as a value and an occasion rather than reason of strife and withdrawal into self; and this is the ultimate goal of the three weeks of the festival, putting in the foreground the variety and the quality of the cultural institutions that belong to the different communities.
Participating to the Kunstenfestivaldesarts is not only an occasion to attend to several shows and performance but also a way to discover Brussels and its diverse culture(s) through something like thirty venues scattered around the city such as theatres, cultural centres, museums and public spaces – but also venues that are not well known by the heterogeneous audiences of the festival, just to name a few: KVS, Beursschouwburg, Les Brigittines, Théâtre Varia, Rosas Performance Space, Argos etc…
This year’s edition revolves around the theme “The world begins at a kitchen table”, a phrase by the poet Joy Harjo which “describes that moment of togetherness as genesis. And the kitchen table is much more than a place to eat. It is where we can gather and engage in heated discussions about the present reality, the desires and violence that traverse it, and the possible forms of resistance and solidarity. It is a place where a festival starts.” With these words, the artistic directors, Dries Douibi & Daniel Blanga Gubbay set the tone of the festival in the editorial that gives a reasoned panoramic of the shows selected.
The kitchen table is a metaphor of the joy of getting together but also of the negotiations that come along with it. The kitchen table can be seen also as a place of storytelling, whether intimate or collective. Memory plays a pivotal role in the storytelling, its use (or misuse), its elaboration and, its role in shaping identities.
The kitchen table is also at the centre of the Free School which every year supports and presents “artistic projects that imagine new models for learning and transmitting knowledge.” This year’s programme presents “a series of practices gather around the kitchen table, a space for sharing food and the culmination of a history of domestic labour that is often invisible”. Among the lectures and talks, workshops like The School of Conviviality: Dumpling Tales with Mirra Markhaëva/Globe Aroma and ruangrupa/GudSkul, where a group of people learn about, make, and eat dumplings together shading lights on the potentialities of cooking and eating together in making communities.
It would be impossible and perhaps even pointless to discuss all the events that take place during the 3 weeks of the festival; that is why I will focus on three that can give our readers a glimpse of what Kunstenfestivaldesarts is all about.
La vertigineuse histoire d’Orthosia (The Breathtaking Story of Orthosia) – Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige (Beirut – Paris) at Beursschouwburg.
How to describe this show? An intersection between theatre, visual arts, documentary, geology, and archaeology. It’s the story of Orthosia, an important Roman town that in 551 C.E. was destroyed by a tsunami and disappeare, remaining buried for some 1500 years. Its discovery comes by chance because of another destruction, that of the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el Bared, in Lebanon. The discovery was exceptional, an entire city ready to be brought to light, and studied. Only small detail, the extensive excavation and exploration of the ancient city would have signified yet another displacement for the refugees. Following a heated debate, the choice of not to cause even more pain to the people was taken. After an intensive archaeological campaign of study, Orthosia has been buried again, protected by a white veil of a fabric that will preserve it and under a concrete armour, waiting for the archaeologists of the future to re-discover it, which will also mean that the refugee camp has no reason to exists anymore.
“We’ve always wanted to reflect the complexity of realities that didn’t meet the conditions for visibility”. Their work aims to unveil the context of stories that allows a perception, making them appear. The project Unconformities, visible at the end of the performance, shows how core samples can become storytellers of the “unexpected encounter between two distinct geological units after a natural disaster which sometimes causes regeneration”. This work makes the soil talk in a very evocative and poetic manner, testifying that in the hands of a good narrators even the rocks can speak.
Three Episodes of Mourning Exercises – Hsu Che-Yu (Taipei – Amsterdam) at Argos
I experienced the exhibition on a grey and raining Sunday afternoon in a rather silent Brussels, and I think this was the right mood that prepared me to experience these works that approach the theme of loss and mourning in such a profound and perturbing way. Before going a bit in depth with the topics touched by the three video installations, Zoo Hypothesis, Blank Photograph and Gray Room, I would like to emphasize the fascinating technique used to create them, which in my opinion is essential to the content of the works. Two types of 3-D scanning were used: one for architectural purposes and the other to create model data of objects and living objects. The videos were made scanning buildings, interiors, and the movements of people within. The data were collected, and the images extracted frame by frame and recomposed in one scene. This process and the aesthetic that came out, all played around a whitish/greyish palette, set the scenes in a somewhat irreal, suspended and rarefied atmosphere; the use of the VR headset for Gray Room puts the viewer inside the work but somehow in a crooked position, accentuating its estrangement within the claustrophobic atmosphere. The video brings the audience on a tour inside the artist’s late grandmother’s house. Sequences of shattered childhood memories, illusions, double vision etc… we could say that in the video reigns a sort of calm chaos, our senses are put in questions and a pervasive feeling of uncertainty prevails.
In the other videos the theme of mourning is intertwined with other aspects like Japanese colonialism in Taiwan and animal symbolism exploited by the military (Zoo Hypothesis). Or the thoughts of a farmer activist, and convicted, who planted bombs in Taipei to protest Taiwan’s membership of the World Trade Organization, his relationship with his suicidal brother and with his social activism (Blank Photograph).
