‘A festival is not only a host but also a guest’

Interview with the new directors of Kunstenfestivaldesarts

Since October 2018 Dries Douibi and Daniel Blanga Gubbay form, together with Sophie Alexandre, the new directors of Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Since 1994, the bilingual festival brings performance artists from all over the world to Brussels. How does the new team deal with the relationship between the local and the international in a superdiverse city? How to make sure that international artists can really leave their trace and avoid exotification?

Lara Staal

conversation 17.05.2019

The soil beneath the stage

The performing arts and the terrestrial attractor

According to Bruno Latour, the defining cultural-political issue of our time is not the struggle between the Left and the Right, but that between the Local and the Global attractor. In Down to Earth (2017), the philosopher tries to put his finger on a new reference point: the Terrestrial. At the centre of his reflection is the question as to how, in times of global warming and increased migration flows, we can make habitable territories together, beyond splendid isolation and beyond the abysmal globalization impulse. What do his insights mean for the connection between the performing arts and their geographic context? An attempt at coherence.

Sébastien Hendrickx

essay 17.05.2019

Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season – Sachli Gholamalizad

I can give two accounts of Sachli Gholamalizad’s solo performance Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season, which premiered on May 11 at KVS in the frame of KFDA. First one: It is a show by a very virtuosic performer, sliding back and forth between semi-autobiographical storytelling, video interviews of Gholamalizad’s mother, spoken poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad’s verses, and singing; a show that is built on the hyphenations of the performer’s identity across Iran and Belgium, with the modular light and screen fixture as a material aid for, as well as a metaphor of, such division of sense of belonging. This account is not necessarily untrue, and it wouldn’t spoil the work’s pleasure for the potential viewers. The other story I might tell is less pleasant, and precisely about the problem of pleasure.

Eylül Fidan Akıncı

review 16.05.2019

The naked archivist

Tradition in the work of performance artist Pichet Klunchun

Contemporary art’s desire to be ‘contemporary’, for many practitioners, interestingly comes with the impulse, or some may say necessity, to bring back the past to the ‘now’. Major trends in contemporary dance, Yvonne Hardt observed, have seen not only reconstruction of or reference to historical dance pieces, but also conversion of the stage into a site for archiving dance performatively. But the nexus between the new and the old in performing arts is rarely considered in the context of globalization and postcolonial debates. This text wants to be part of a growing body of work aiming to fill this gap.

Rathsaran Sireekan

essay 07.05.2019

Cosmic Latte – Sonya Lindfors

In Cosmic Latte, Sonya Lindfors projects the audience into a Black future, while underscoring just how in and of the present Black bodies are, and have always been since the invention of racial structures and frameworks.

Isaiah Lopaz

review 16.04.2019

Performatik 2019 – Towards Indisciplinarity

The politics of (dis)association

The sixth edition of Performatik, the Brussels biennale for ‘live art’, this year continues with its legacy to explore the interface between performing arts and visual art in today’s artistic practices. While the fourth edition focused on the disruption of viewing positions inherent in cross-boundary practices, and the fifth on the shrinkage of social space and how live art could make use of the body to intervene with ‘social sculpting’, Performatik19 is more ambitious than ever. The 2019 curatorial, while keeping the preoccupations of the previous editions intact, foregrounds two related elements integral to the field. On the one hand, the performativity of performance and the possibility to intervene into that condition where authority governs articulations usually taken as ‘natural’. On the other, the unravelling of the disciplinary boundaries which separate different fields in the arts as well as the institutional spaces in which they are embedded, hence its emphasis on trans-disciplinarity. This includes the undoing of the dividing lines between stage, museum, gallery, the outdoor public space and the everyday life. 

Rathsaran Sireekan

review 10.04.2019

Black: The Sorrows of Belgium – Luk Perceval/NTGent & Flandria – Roland Gunst/LOD

A continuous conversation, not a hot topic

With the reopening of the Africa Museum in Brussels and the Same Same But Different festival in Ghent, Belgium’s colonial history and decolonisation have become much debated topics. Two recent productions (Luk Perceval’s Black: The Sorrows of Belgium and Roland Gunst’s Flandria) have been notable for what they reveal and add to the discussion.

Liam Rees

review 01.04.2019