Canadian artist Martin Messier, a recurring act in L.E.V. Festival throughout all these years, will showcase his new project 1 drop 1000 years.

Martin Messier - 1 drop 1000 years, an original performance that reflects on a fundamental phenomenon for the balance of life: homeostasis. The Global Conveyor Belt is a huge ocean stream that stirs up the waters of the five oceans and conveys heat on a global scale. Seeking to highlight the finesse of our homeostatic system and the fragility of its balance, the artist proposes an artistic interpretation of these intimate and global currents that happens to be essential to the survival of our species and its environment.

Martin Messier
L.E.V. Festival

EXHAUST by A Two Dogs Company / Kris Verdonck is all about the execution of an internal combustion engine: over-revving a truck engine in a public space until it blows up.

Welcome to the world premiere of EXHAUST / Ajax: the execution of the very last internal combustion engine. The explosion of the heart of a monstrous truck. The death row inmate is pulled by his judges on a cart. In front of the NTGent main hall, the sentence is read and carried out. The combustion engine is sacrificed on the altar of ecological catastrophe.

EXHAUST follows the same steps as a medieval execution. The subject of the execution sentence, in this case a combustion engine, is carried through the city followed by a procession to a square where a scaffold has been set up and its crimes are read aloud from a balcony, after which the execution is carried out. The goal of EXHAUST is to bury the combustion engine once and for all. Its crimes are the broken promises of endless progress and endless growth. Violence is subjected to violence, so that catharsis can take place. 

Along the way, the procession stops at places where public executions took place in medieval Ghent or where the combustion engine caused irreparable damage, such as schools and busy intersections. Together with Ghentian citizens and climate action groups, the procession is burying the unbridled drive for economic growth and progress. As blinded and self-destructive as the venerable hero Ajax, the engine is succumbing to its tragic tunnel vision.

Execution of the combustion engine.
The procession leaves on 4 May 2024 at 10:00 at Kinderrechtenplein Gent.
The execution takes place at 11:30 at St-Baafsplein Gent.

ROUTE PLAN
exhaust.exposed
ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL NTGent

08.05.2024 - 20:00
Concertgebouw Brugge
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09.05.2024 - 20:00
Bozar Brussels
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10.05.2024 - 20:00
Palais des Beaux-Arts, Charleroi
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Elisabeth laureates join Europe’s most energetic orchestra.
Music connects people and nowhere is that more true than at the European Union Youth Orchestra. Every year, the very best young musicians gather there to learn, work and enjoy. The result is their legendary concerts. For this tour, three revelations from the Elisabeth Competition will join the orchestra as soloists. And before French conductor Alexandre Bloch unleashes a fiery Bolero, we get to hear the brand new work EUtopia by Annelies Van Parys.

About EUtopia 
"Europe: from ideal to utopia? That's pretty much the arch EUTOPIA casts. Conceived in one movement, it begins brightly and hopefully - like the European Idea - with harmonic, natural, high orchestral spectra. There is also a nod to dodecaphony, the twelve-tone system that underpinned the serialism that symbolised renewal just after World War II: Europe was the project of renewal to ensure that we could live in peace and freedom. 

But when I began writing the work in the summer of 2023, deals were being made to keep people outside our European borders, in ways I felt were no longer consistent with European values. This has had repercussions in the music: after the carefree beginning, distortion and noises enter the pure sounds. The tension rises, the texture becomes denser, and finally the sound mass culminates in the strokes of a bell. These quote Beethoven's Alle Menschen werden Brüder, like a kind of broad cantus firmus in a long, slowing time-stretch. Firstly, the original is heard, then repeated in the minor. Perhaps it carries somewhere within it a (forlorn) hope: Europe was not quite utopic after all, but music continues the message of An die Freude."  - Annelies Van Parys 2024

European Youth Orchestra

Barthélemy Antoine-Loeff in collaboration with Antoine Meissonnier
Ce qui disparait se transforme immédiatement en éternité explores the multiple questions of climate repair and technosolutionism using artificial intelligence. 
The installation stages a fictional laboratory for measuring the melting of symbolic mini icebergs which are generated in ice before being placed in an analysis cell with the aim of finding the ultimate iceberg: the one which, by its shape, will make a consensus, which one will take the longest to melt, based on the analyzes of the icebergs previously generated.
The installation uses a genetic algorithm specially developed to try to solve this problem of climatic optimization... Obviously, the starting postulate is absurd, and ironic. Just like the idea of ​​imagining being able to "repair" the climate by artificially prolonging the life of icebergs with the help of a genetic algorithm.

Mapping Festival
Barthélemy Antoine-Loeff

Volver meets Hiroshima mon Amour in this moving story.
Two women involuntarily share a prison cell: a young activist who was arrested after an illegal protest and a working-class woman who murdered her boyfriend. Their forced togetherness starts tensely, but as the nights go by, they share their fears and hopes. Notwehr brings together old and new music: a cycle of baroque madrigals by Banchieri provides a sort of echo of the past and of the outside world and intertwines with the new music of Annelies Van Parys.

The witty libretto is from Gaea Schoeters and the poetic staging by Sjaron Minailo. The opera is dedicated to Maria Kaleshnikava & all other brave women who lost their freedom fighting for a better world.
Soloists: Els Mondelaers & Johanna Zimmer

Notwehr was commissioned by Biënnale di Venezia 2022 
2024 production: Hermes-Ensemble, B’Rock Vocal Consort, Studio Minailo & Muziektheater Transparant.

Tickets O. Festival
Annelies Van Parys

Embracing the arts for systemic change, NaturArchy proposes to re-consider our imaginaries on nature and the non-human.

The exhibition probes issues of deep ecology, sustainability and the decolonisation of nature. A number of art and science works explore and query nature and law, the entanglement of human and non-human, green technologies and new materials, nature and law, ecology and economy, ancient and new knowledge. From global oceans to water flows, from contamination and bacteria to climate tipping points, pollinators, and landscapes of natural hazards; from natural and artificial intelligence to non-human values, forests, lands, soils, composting; from grief and mourning to rituals, wonder and collective action.

SEAGULL FOUNTAIN  by Lawrence Malstaf 
"Kittiwakes are a type of seagulls that are threatened with extinction due to climate change. They used to live in enormous colonies on islands far out in the arctic ocean. Recently the remaining birds are migrating to arctic cities like Tromsø in the north of Norway.
In the past 3 years the art museum has been invaded by an ever growing colony of kittiwakes. As a form of interspecies activism the birds took over the whole building with enormous noise, making hundreds of nests on window sills and ledges and spreading an intense smell. This resulted in an equally loud outcry of the people living and working in this otherwise peaceful town.
In collaboration with researchers we designed 3 light and mobile tripod structures with sculptural nesting modules on top and placed them right next to the facade. Once the birds started to make nests in their new hotels we moved them carefully away from the building, in small steps, a couple of meters per week. 95% of the colony followed and the local humans were happy too. By the end of next season we hope to arrive about 100 m further down the museum park. Here we will install 2 larger and permanent tripods that can welcome 2000 kittiwakes from other nearby buildings." Lawrence Malstaf

iMAL
Lawrence Malstaf