Presentation Bâtard-publication, Tom Engels

19:00–19:45

What does it mean to perform today? What do we want to perform? What do we want to stand for? What matters? What brings us to doing what we do? Why do we keep insisting, fighting waves of incompatible thoughts? What do we lend our bodies and minds to? What do we want to be penetrated by? Shall we be relentless? Shall we embody that which never seizes? Lingering questions in a world facing crises – manifold and manywhere.
On the occasion of Batard 2016, Tom Engels publishes relentless, a volume of fierce pieces by Bojana Cvejić, Samlingen (Amanda Apetrea, Nadja Hjorton, Stina Nyberg, Halla Ólafsdóttir and Zoë Poluch), Göksu Kunak, Bryana Fritz, Hana Miletić and a pirate. During three consecutive evenings, Tom Engels invites guest to launch the publication.

© Gert Jan Van Rooij

Riley Harmon A method for blue logic

19:00-23:00

In 2012, Riley Harmon received an email from a conspiracy theorist. He was confused with a homonym, an actress who would have been created by the government to mislead the media. As an uncertain exploration of this mail he created the film A method for blue logic: in which you lose grip on what is real and what isn’t.

© Ilke Gers

Ilke Gers Chorus

19:30–20:00
Chorus is a performance by Ilke Gers, as part of a public programme put together by Hana Miletic during her exhibition Materials. On the opening night of the Bâtard Festival a group of performers will respond to the rhythm of the audience's movements through the building.

© Sylvain Chabloz

Adina Secretan PLACE

20:00–21:00 & 22:00–23:00 Well, spaces have multiplied, fragmented themselves, and diversified. There is nowadays all sizes and all kinds of them, for all uses and for any function. After all, life is moving from one space to another and possibly, without bump. – Georges Perec, species of spaces PLACE brings together six performers, a small shelter, and a big scream on a wall. This activist tale inspired freely by the Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard is about the happiness and the disgust to live together, and about the drive for closure, and spatial shutting down. Starting point of PLACE is the growing fear of population pressure, sharing space, and housing crisis. Nowadays in Switzerland popular initiatives or referendums are increasingly registered in order to "reduce population pressure" or to preserve the landscapes. It has strongly introduced the question of preserving the space in media discourses and in people’s mind. PLACE is a sensorial and critical journey about housing, about the right owning space and about to who the city belongs. How to make a place for yourself? Who has the right to own space? What does it mean to inhabit?

Anne Reijniers & Rob Jacobs – Échangeur

21:00-22:00

In the streets of the metropolis of Kinshasa, young Congolese imagine their version of the colonial past. While archival footage shows how the statue of explorer Stanley is being towed by a crane, a Lumumba imitator is looking for former president Mobutu. A man scrubs manhole covers until the word 'Leopoldville' becomes legible again. A boy with a whitewashed face, tropical helmet and whip, dances with ghosts on a roof. After the Democratic Republic of Congo gained independence, the Belgian colonial monuments were removed from Kinshasa's public squares. Today they stand side by side in the Congolese National Museum. In Échangeur emerges an imaginary city around an empty pedestal, where archival footage, performances and present-day Kinshasa interact.

Talk EMOTIONAL MATERIAL / EMOTIONAL LABOUR with Lulu Obermayer, Nadja Hjorton and Halla Olafsdottir

21:15–22:00

To open up a new space for encounters and shared thinking within the festival programme, this year, Batard would like to introduce to you the invited artists in a series of public talks. Each night two artists/collectives will join Maria Rößler for a conversation about concepts and questions that they are concerned with in their artistic research. These talks are a unique opportunity to get to know the international festival artists outside and beyond their performances. They will take place each night of the festival, in the time between two performances. Admission is free. Maria Rößler lives and works between Amsterdam and Berlin. She studied Theatre and Media Science in Berlin and Dublin. As a producer and dramaturge, she has worked for performing arts productions, festivals and conferences. From 2013 until 2016, she was part of the artistic programme team of Foreign Affairs festival at Berliner Festspiele. Besides, she pursues independent projects including an on-going collaboration with technologist Nathan Fain. Together they developed the performance “Right Is the Might of the Community. A lecture on future democracy“, commissioned by HAU Berlin, which was presented by Batard in 2015.

© Jaha Koo

Jaha Koo [CUCKOO]

20:00–21:00 & 22:00–23:00
One day in spring 2015, while eating a meal, it occurred to Jaha that he would be quite satisfied if he could lead his life making money fair and square, feed himself with that money and sleep comfortably. But the reality he has witnessed all his life was 고립무원(孤立無援) – which means ‘isolation without help.’ Then suddenly, his rice cooker, Cuckoo talked to him “Cuckoo has finished cooking rice. Please stir the rice.” Cuckoo is a Korean-style electric rice cooker designed to boil or steam rice for human consumption. This was how theatre maker Jaha Koo started [CUCKOO], his new performance.