Stijn Demeulenaere – Nothing’s going to happen to us

Nothing’s going to happen to us... is an installation in which video and sound collide. It investigates how our perceptions of an armed conflict relate to a lived reality. For Nothing’s going to happen to us... Stijn interviewed people who had spent some time in contemporary conflict zones, and talked with them about the sounds they heard, and the emotions those sounds evoked. From these interviews he took one story and asked some sound designers with a lot of experience in designing the sound for action movies, to tell him how they would design the sound for this particular scene. By confronting these two perspectives Nothing’s going to happen to us... wants to research the no man’s land between imagined emotions on the one hand and real memories on the other.

Stijn Demeulenaere is a sound-artist, a radio maker and searching musician. He holds degrees in sociology, cultural studies and studied radio at the RITS school of arts. Stijn was the curator and producer of the free form radio show ‘Radio Eliot’ on Radio Scorpio. He worked as an editor for Jan Fabre and worked as a journalist for Belgian national radio stations Klara and Radio 1 and for the independent radio station Radio K Centrale in Bologna, Italy. He was a founding member of the improvisation collective Karen Eliot.

Roel Heremans – Duet A

Duet Ais an imaginationary choreography for two. Through headphones the participants are given the assignment to close their eyes and imagine specific situations. These mental constructions vary from abstract to very personal. The combination of this imaginationary trip with the spatial composition, constructed by the participants moving around, creates a game of introspection, reflection and projection. In this work the personal reconstruction and perception of time and space (and their connection) are central.

Roel Heremans started this artistic research and reflection after a severe accident he was in and of which he does not remember anything. Only by bringing together the declarations of the witnesses he could imagine what precisely happened. It seemed as if our brain could function as a nest in which reality, fantasy, observations, memories, information, truth or fiction live together and sometimes even intermingle.

Bryana Fritz & Christoffer Schieche – The Breakfast Club

Bryana Fritz (US) studied in Minnesota- Minneapolis, Essen (DE) and at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, Belgium. One of her most recent projects was Work/Travail/Arbeit by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker/R.O.S.A.S, a dance exhibition at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre.

Christoffer Forbes Schieche, born in Sweden, studied dance first at the Amsterdam School of the Arts and later at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. Since his graduation in 2014, he danced in Daniel Linehan’s Un Sacre du Printemps.

They will perform twice during the Bâtard Brussels Festival: Sixteen Candles in the Bâtard Brussels program and The Breakfast Club within the Kunstenwerkplaats Pianofabriek program.

The Breakfast Club takes place in a desert or a swimming hole. It relies upon its scarce scenery: a scarf, cups, tables, and a bit of water. The scenery is activated and activates the performance through physicality and imperfect text. Grammar is abused, tense is inconsistent, and style strays. These elements meet and work towards generating a stream of scenes interrupted by moments of song, celebratory toasts, and what could be considered as a narrative.

Jaha Koo – Lolling and Rolling

In South Korea, there was a big controversy concerning children’s tongue surgery for better English pronunciation. The surgery is known as a lingual frenectomy. Some people thought that it is possible to have better English pronunciation through the surgery, especially for “R” which is not an existing consonant in the Korean language. Therefore some parents have forced their children to go through the tongue operation, even though the children had a normal tongue. Lolling and Rolling penetrates Korean’s tragic social phenomenon related to English education. Theater maker Jaha Koo reveals the tragedy through a fictional story, video and sound work. It contextualizes not only contemporary issues but also historical events related to colonialism and imperialism.

► Credits:
Text, Directing, Video, Music and Performance: Ja ha Koo

Metahaven – City Rising

Metahaven is the research and design praxis of Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden based in Amsterdam. Metahaven's work - both commissioned and self-directed - reflects political and social issues in graphic design objects and media. In addition to international presentation of design and research projects, Metahaven has published numerous essays such as ‘Uncorporate Identity’, a design anthology for our dystopian age.

Metahaven’s City Rising is an homage to Constant Nieuwenhuys’s ‘New Babylon’; a utopian architectural project based on the idea of an alternative, fully automated society in which human labour has become unnecessary. The video is an exploration of the conditions of life, work, and intimacy under neoliberalism. City Rising uses the architectural models of Constant’s ‘New Babylon’ as its backdrop while proposing that through constant networked communication and the integration of work into every part of life, love is the most binding contract founded on mutual debt.

► Credits:
Metahaven, 2014.
Filmed, directed and designed by Metahaven.
Models by Constant Nieuwenhuys.
Words by Brian Kuan Wood.

ScriptedReality – The piece concerning the question of purposefulness

Tilman Aumüller, Jacob Bussmann, Bettina Földesi, Christopher Krause, Arne Salasse und Ruth Schmidt met each other at the Institute of Applied Theater Studies in Gießen. Specialized in different artistic fields (music, theatre, plastic art), but also philosophy, law studies or literature, this mixed group makes performances, films and happenings, under the name ScriptedReality.

The piece concerning the question of purposefulness
Behind every project, there is a larger project hidden! The project is private, it is one big secret with an unknown commission. In this piece the project developers set off on a wild Odyssey, looking for traces of the neoliberal austerity politics of Europe, project development and the relation between economics. To parody Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe: “How can we actually emerge from this mess again?”

► Credits:
Konzept, Text, Inszenierung, Bildnerisches etc. von: Tilman Aumüller, Christopher Krause, Arne Salasse, Ruth Schmidt
Dramaturgische Beratung: Jacob Bussmann
Produziert in Kooperation mit dem Mousonturm und der Hessischen Theaterakademie.
Eine Koproduktion mit dem Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, der Hessischen Theaterakademie.