Threnody - world première
31.05.2024 De Bijloke
Gent (B)
Saariaho uses beautiful imagery to describe her composition 'Solar': the basic idea seems like a sounding celestial body that forces the harmony gain and again back to its starting point, as if the music followed the laws of gravity. In 'Amers' (after the French for navigation points at sea), she paints the picture of a sailing boat trying to hold its course in defiance of the waves. Annelies Van Parys' world premiere Threnody adds a contemporary star to this sparkling concert.
Interview with composer Annelies Van Parys (in Dutch)
Ensemble: I SOLISTI en SPECTRA
Conductor: Filip Rathé
Soloist: Séverine Ballon, cello
Organism & Excitable Chaos at Biennale ELEKTRA - Illusion
31.05.2024 - 21.07.2024 Arsenal Contemporary Art
Montréal, Quebec (CA)
Organism and Excitable Chaos by Navid Navab in collaboration with Garnet Willis
The exhibit probes into nature’s form-giving tendencies by putting kinetic chaos in conversation with sonic turbulence. Organism is an investigative platform for stochastic co-patterning via the sono-ecological indeterminacy of turbulent processes of formation. It dismantles the far-too-clean tones of the pipe organ in order to excite its turbulent materiality, unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic repression.
Excitable Chaos co-directs chaotic patterns by modulating the transductive resonances of a triple pendulum, a physical system with nonlinear behaviour due to the rapid exchange of potential and kinetic energy among its moving elements. It highlights one of the more spectacular ways in which nature demonstrates how even the smallest scales of magnitude are key contributors to an overall behavior whose next state is rendered unknown. Excitable Chaos's generative movement is sensed and mapped to drive the turbulent sonic thresholds of Organism.
Seagull Fountain / Kittiwake Hotel 02022 in Naturarchy
24.05.2024 - 29.09.2024 iMAL
Brussels (B)
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
CE QUI DISPARAIT SE TRANSFORME IMMÉDIATEMENT EN ÉTERNITÉ at Mapping Festival
10.05.2024 - 26.05.2024 Le Commun
Geneva (CH)
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.
World premiere EUtopia by the European Union Youth Orchestra
08.05.2024 - 10.05.2024 Concertgebouw Brugge, BOZAR, Palais des Beaux-Arts
Brugge, Brussel & Charleroi
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
08.05.2024 - 20:00
Concertgebouw Brugge
Tickets
09.05.2024 - 20:00
Bozar Brussels
Tickets
10.05.2024 - 20:00
Palais des Beaux-Arts, Charleroi
Tickets
EXHAUST
04.05.2024 NTGent
Ghent (B)
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. (photo © da-kuk)
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.
SHRINK 01995
20.04.2024 Sismògraf Festival
Olot (ES)
SHRINK 01995 - Two large, transparent plastic sheets and a device that gradually sucks the air out from between them leave the body vacuum-packed and vertically suspended. The transparent tube inserted between the two surfaces allows the person inside the installation to regulate the flow of air. As a result of the increasing pressure between the plastic sheets, the surface of the packed body gradually freezes into multiple micro-folds. For the duration of the performance the person inside moves slowly and changes positions, which vary from an almost embryonic position to one resembling a crucified body.
At Sismògraf Festival there will be 3 Shrinks and the bodies of 3 performers.
Photography by Martin Argyroglo at Nuit Blanche Paris 2023.
Impulse
08.04.2024 - 13.03.2024 MUTEK / Roca Barcelona Gallery
Barcelona (ES)
Impulse is a suspended work of five juxtaposed parts. Each part is made up of two metal panels linked to each other by eight wires that light up in a computerized sound and light program.
In this project, Martin Messier proposes a poetic analogy with a technological twist to the functioning of the brain, in the form of the circulation of energy rendered visible by the paths of light travelling between one panel and the other.
Tipping Point & Ce qui disparait se transforme immédiatement en éternité
06.04.2024 - 07.04.2024 Nouvelles Formes
L’Entrepôt Besançon (F)
The installation Tipping Point by Barthélemy Antoine-Loeff is a sensitive and poetic tribute to those dying glaciers. It stages the (re)birth of an artificial glacier protected by a dome; a drip is feeding the glacier that will grow during the exhibition. The device invites the viewer to attend the birth of this artificial glacier. It is inspired by the “ice stupas” invented by the engineer Sonam Wangchuk and used to fight against water shortages during the summer in Ladakh.
Between a laboratory experiment, an attempt to repair the climate or an ironic collector’s item, the installation confronts us with time and scales; 10.000 years ago, the stabilisation of our cryosphere coincided with the first human traces we found in Mesopotamia, while the fist glaciers are disappearing in 70 years under the pressure of the human activity.
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.
1 drop 1000 years
05.04.2024 - 03.05.2024 On tour
The Hague, Barcelona, Gijòn
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.
Rewire Festival
5 April 2024
MUTEK Barcelona
11 April 2024
LEV Festival - Gijòn
3 May 2024