Border Reverb
8 - 13 June, Clandestino festival, Göteborg (Swe)
Curated by Benoît Loiseau & Joanna Figiel
Preview/Performance: TBC
Screening: Friday 11 June, 18.30-20.30
Hey, It’s Enrico Pallazzo Banehagsgatan 1p, 415 51, Göteborg
A year ago, LDN/BRU started working actively towards what was going to be its first show and the beginning of a long, sometimes uncertain, but extremely exciting journey. This sucessful event at Congrès Station in Brussels in October 2009 saw a group of international creatives taking over the public space; turning Gare du Congrès into a collaborative lab for art, performances, music and debate.
Soon after, the collective was invited to work with Beyond Borders Network and the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths to develop Border Infection, an engaging series of workshops, debates and performances along with an art exhibition, held at Goldsmiths and the Amersham Arms (London) in March 2010.
Border Reverb is the last of a series of events that work with the themes of borders, activism and the arts. Once again, LDN/BRU will have the pleasure to raise its profile and work alongside Beyond Borders to present a collection of videos by international artists, in the context of Clandestino Festival in beautiful Göteborg, Sweden. The works function as a response to the theme of the reunion, investigating issues and limitations surrounding human flows, surveillance culture, ownership and the distinction between private and public sphere.
Workshops and talks will offer challenges to restrictive immigration laws and practices and the ways these intersect with creativity, performance and artistic and musical opposition. Border Reverb will include keynote presentations by Eyal Weizman, Julian Henriques, Abhijit Roy and Rangan Chakravorty. The five-day session will begin with a special evening event on Tuesday, 8 June, with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in conversation with John Hutnyk.
For more information regarding the talks, please visit Clandestino's website.
Border Infection Photos
Border Infection has been a great success, thanks to everyone who came down and took part to our activities.
Here are a few pictures of the private view of Border Infection exhibition, at Goldsmiths. More photos of the rest of the event will be posted shortly.
Border Infection
(click on the flyer for a close up)
We have had to move all seminars and workshops to a bigger venue (Amersham Arms upstairs). See below :
- TALKS & SEMINARS FROM MON 22 TO WED 24 AT THE AMERSHAM ARMS UPSTAIRS (TAKE COURAGE GALLERY)
- AFTER PARTY ON WED 24 AT THE AMERSHAM ARMS BACK BAR FROM 8PM ONWARDS
- PERFORMANCES ON MON 22 AT THE GALLERY (GOLDSMITHS SU) FROM 8PM ONWARDS
- EXHIBITION STAYS IN THE GALLERY AT GOLDSMITHS SU FROM MON 22 - FRI 26
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TALKS, EXHIBITION & PERFORMANCE NIGHT 22 - 26 March 2010, Goldsmiths, New Cross London
BORDER INFECTION is the result of an ongoing collaboration between Beyond Borders and LDN/BRU that originated from a shared enthusiasm for questioning and transgressing creative, cultural and geographical boundaries. The event includes three days of talks, panel discussions and workshop, along with an exhibition.
info & RSVP for talks : borderinfection@gmail.com
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Exhibition // 22 - 26 March // The Gallery, Goldsmiths SU
Exploring issues and limitations surrounding urban and city narratives, as well as ownership and dislocation, the exhibition includes multimedia installations, videos and performances by international artists.
Artists : Raul Gschrey, Nicolas Sauret & Ashley Wong, Moustache Collectif, Helen Turner.
Curated by Benoît Loiseau & Joanna Figiel
Private View : Mon 22, from 8pm onwards, The Gallery (Goldsmiths SU) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After Party // Wed 24 March, from 8pm // Amersham Arms
Neil Transpontine Will Martin + guests
Parties and Public Space
Walking somewhere in the city, on summer weekends visiting Brussels before I lived here, I came across street events with what seemed remarkable regularity. A few thousand people dancing to techno in the square in front of the royal palace? OK! A DJ playing Burial from a bandstand tucked away in the corner of a park, to a tiny crowd? Absolutely.
You often stumble across public events in London, from Trafalgar Square to neighbourhood high streets, but the difference in Brussels is that a fair number of them - by no means all - are things that have interested me, made me stay, got me dancing. Of course, for finding things by chance, it helps that to get anywhere here you're as likely to be using your feet as you are to be rattling directly there underground.
At least in the summer, it seems evident that people here do more living in public spaces than in London, and not just in the 'continental' manner of sitting out at street-side cafes, a Brit's stereotypical point of envy of the way of life in warmer climes. It’s important here, but the Brussels drizzle makes it fairly unpleasant, if not unfeasible, for half the year. Instead, what has caught my attention is the 'official' involvement in enjoyment of public space here: the mingling of municipal permission, even encouragement, with entertainment and creativity of a quality that interests me. In the winter, you won’t passively stumble across events in the same way, but they're still going on. And so one night you might find yourself wandering through a business district doubly desolated by the night and by the weekend, catching the distant, heavy four four beat, before finding the right edifice and being welcomed by buzz and vapour down the steps to a railway station that, for tonight, has become a party. This is High Needs Low at Gare Congrès - but first you’re going to get a little history...
Ripping Up the City
For the past couple of decades, Brussels has had an image problem. Part of this is down to the word 'Brussels' being a metonym for the institutions of the European Union: admire it, despise it, or not think about it very much, whatever your opinion on the EU, the picture of Brussels that you have in your head will be bureaucratic and not lively, a million miles from 'Berlin ist arm, aber sexy.' But the capital of Europe remains a European capital in its own right, a real city, with its own urban history.
In this history, one thread is the railway line connecting the main stations of Gare du Midi and Gare du Nord. Discussed for decades before eventual completion in 1952, this project ripped through the centre of the city, resulting in the demolition of 1,200 homes. In the subsequent decades, the areas above and beside the line developed in two main ways: as poor, grey, city centre housing projects, or as grey, concrete and glass business districts.
100 years earlier, the increasingly grimy River Senne (not Seine) was covered to form some of Brussels’ main streets: as you criss-cross the busy Boulevard Anspach, there’s nothing to indicate the once-noxious river running below. Similarly, the Midi-Nord connection might not be pretty, but it’s certainly functional – at least if you’re a commuter (or appreciate the old joke about Brussels). As Nicolas Hemeleers of a Brussels -based urban planning office says: “This space has been made with urban planning in the past – it’s here, and the challenge for urban planning now is how to use it.”
Two new stations were formed by the link, Gare de la chapelle and Gare Congrès. Gare de la chapelle is in a poor, largely North African neighbourhood. Since 1997, the station has been the home of a regeneration project for the surrounding area: Recyclart. The Recyclart bar, tucked beneath the station’s concrete superstructure, is the most visible part of a project with initiatives that range from an arts programme that draws people to the area from across the city, to training that raises the skills of the neighbourhood population. This integrated project receives city funding and is one of the city’s creative hubs.
By contrast, Gare Congrès sits between the former Ministry of Finance building, a car park, and a couple of other disused, broken-windowed office blocks. It’s a business district, but a dilapidated one that offers no accommodation and no attractions. With no local community, there is no need for ‘community’ projects. Instead, since 2006, the Bruxelles Congrès association has been finding ways to transform the space, with permission but without funding.
The conception of the project was, in part, driven by former deputy mayor Henri Simons when he was in charge of urban planning and culture. The Association is entirely voluntary: Hemeleers, a member, says that this means although arranging events can be exhausting, more risks can be taken with programming. Meanwhile, the station is always in use: the program has to work around the timetable, and features exhibitions, seminars, and parties – sometimes simultaneously. In October 2009, it hosted the first LDN/BRU event, coinciding with the annual Nuit Blanche. One of the exhibits turned the locked-up ticket office into something halfway between a projection space and post-apocalyptic vitrine.
© Installation by Moustache Collectif - Photo by Dan. J. Spinney
High Needs Low
At the most recent High Needs Low, I find the wood-panelled station bar heaving with people, filled with a sense of excitement alien to what is, in effect, a subterranean transit café. Elsewhere, you hand your coat over at the cloakroom table, and it’s taken to racks lining a long, brightly lit corridor that is only ever hurried through by commuters going somewhere else: keeping something in this space is a subtle shift of purpose. And in the main underground atrium, a DJ is playing some beautifully mellow techno in front of a double-time projection of lights flickering on a city river, and the dancefloor is surrounded by screens with static images that might be fireworks, sparks, or the ends of a bunch of fibre optic cables lit with information. Whatever they are, they provide a sense of movement captured and held, at once complementary to and in tension with the act of dancing. But being there doesn’t feel as if you’re in something conceptual, it’s not clever-clever: just as your dancing legs start to flag a couple of hours in, some guy with a big smile on his face bumps into you and insists he gives you one of the stack of shots he’s carrying, the DJ brings in a new beat, and everything adds up to a fantastic party.
A couple of weeks later I meet up with two of the organisers, Soumaya Dance Machine and Guillaume Bleret. Soumaya is the resident DJ, and Guillaume one of the artists involved. I learn that the stills were actually derived from something far from techno and railways. Bleret and fellow High Needs Low collaborator Luz Diaz were photographing in a tropical garden: a near-abstract photo of light falling on the surface of a small fountain was the one that most intrigued them, and became the basis for the look of this edition of High Needs Low. Cineaste Patrick Charpentier completes the team.
An ambitious party, the first High Needs Low was in October 2008, and Soumaya’s idea was that it would be an event where your eyes and ears are on an equal level – not just another party trying to invite the right DJs (though they certainly make some good picks) with a VJ ‘responding’ more or less successfully to what is played. And it’s a labour of love: they pay the guest DJs but take nothing for themselves, and for days before the event there are always at least two of the team around the station setting up, attracting occasional glares from commuters who they have mildly inconvenienced. Soumaya, who DJs across Europe, and Guillaume, who in addition to his own work assists Ann Veronica Janssens, are dedicated to High Needs Low because they felt something was missing in their hometown. The established Fuse nightclub, for example, is on the circuit for some of Europe’s finest DJs, and was the site of my first long Brussels dancefloor night, but some people are turned off by a macho culture that occasionally appears in part of the crowd. By contrast, Soumaya tells me that giving things away to people is central to High Needs Low: it turns out that the guy who had pressed a Jägermeister into my hand was one of the team, who had liberated a bottle from the bar and brought it out onto the dancefloor.
Guillaume adds another thread to my history of the city: in the 70s and 80s, Brussels had a strong alternative scene, with a continent-wide reputation. In the early 90s, when he started to experience things first hand, it was possible to find the sharper edges of creativity or entertainment in the city. But with the continuing growth of what he ambivalently terms ‘the European fortress’, increasing efforts were made to clean the city up, and through the late 90s and early 00s, most of the city’s creativity seemed to fall away. Yet even with the temptation for emerging talent to move elsewhere, to somewhere marked more indelibly in the 21st century European creative consciousness, Guillaume is convinced that things are starting to change now, despite the inflow of Eurocrats like me helping to push up rents.
Indeed, despite this population often failing to engage outside the Euro-bubble, Brussels’ dual position as both heart and crossroads of Europe results in a mix of people that is one of the reasons Guillaume wants to work and make things happen here. And, from what I’ve seen, the willingness of the creative community to engage with municipal space – in addition to spaces commercial, domestic , or abandoned, in which other cities might have their strength –is one of Brussels’ most distinctive aspects.
THANKS !!
First Event @ Congres Stations, Brussels - 2, 3, 4 October 2009
LDN/BRU aims to open a creative exchange between London and Brussels. For this first event, Congrès station will become a creative arena for exhibition, performance, discussion and music, with artists and creatives from both cities.
Alongside this, our partner space the apartment-gallery 105 Besme will house 'Vaudeville', a video installation by Cadi Hélène Rowlands.
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2-3-4 OCTOBER // EXHIBITION // DISCUSSION // PERFORMANCES // NIGHT
BRXLBRAVO & NUIT BLANCHE
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// NIGHT + PERFORMANCES // 3 Oct // 19.00 - 02.00 // @ CONGRES // FREE !!!
LADY JANE (CatClub) BRU
A LOVE SUPREME (Queen of Hoxton) LDN
DANCE MACHINE (High Needs Low) BRU
WILL MARTIN (Tsuba) LDN
Rhiannon Hunter (performance)
Neil 'Bestever' Edward (live street art)
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// DISCUSSION + PERFORMANCE // 3 Oct // 16.00 // @ CONGRES
'Breakthrough Cities : How cities can mobilise creativity and knowledge to tackle compelling social challenges'
John Hutnyk (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Monika Dziegielewska-Geitz (British Council - Creative Cities project)
Henri Simons (Former Deputy Burgomaster of Brussels - Culture & Urbanism)
Followed by a performance by Jean-Baptiste Biche (17.30)
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// EXHIBITION // 3-4 Oct // 14.00 - 19.00 // @ CONGRES
Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert (w/ Josiah Wolf - Why?)
Matthew Stock
Moustache Collectif
Helen Turner
Steve Jakobs
Rhiannon Hunter
Patrick Staff
Andrea Poulieva
Sarah Cross & Claire Caroll
Howard & the Urban Foxes
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// EXHIBITION // 2-3-4 Oct // @ 105 BESME (105 Av Besme, Forest)
Cadi Hélène Rowlands - 'Vaudeville' - Video Installation
Opening : Friday 02/10 // 18.00 - 21.00
Supported by the British Council
105 Besme Cadi Hélène Rowlands
BRXLBRAVO Art festival 2009
Cette année, la 3e édition de BRXLBRAVO et la 8e édition de NUIT BLANCHE auront lieu le même week-end, du 2 au 4 octobre. Le fait de joindre ces deux événements au sein d'un même partenariat dans le cadre de l'Année européenne de la Créativité et de l'Innovation ne peut que valoriser le dynamisme culturel et la richesse artistique de la capitale de l'Europe.
Dit jaar vallen de 3de editie van BRXLBRAVO en de 8ste editie van NUIT BLANCHE samen in het-zelfde weekend van 2 tot 4 oktober. Het samenbrengen van deze beide evenementen in een partnerschap binnen het kader van het Europese Jaar van de Creativiteit en Innovatie kan de culturele dynamiek en rijkdom van de Europese hoofdstad alleen maar extra in de verf zetten.
This year, the 3rd edition of BRXLBRAVO and the 8th edition of NUIT BLANCHE share the same weekend, from 2 to 4 October. Joining these two events into a partnership within the European Year of Creativity and Innovation can only emphasise the cultural dynamics and richness of the European capital.
BRXLBRAVO website
British Council celebrating 75 years of cultural relations
WHEN? Friday, October 2, 9am – Sunday, October 4, 2009, 11pm WHAT? British Council event at Brussels Congres train station
Join us for panel discussion on culture and innovation in cities with guest speakers from Goldsmiths University of London, the ULB, the British Council and participating artists. In Europe, where over 70 percent of the population live in urban areas, culture and innovation is central to addressing the challenges that cities face. Cities are cradles for innovation because they are where knowledge, culture and self-governance come together, and their ability to solve problems creatively now matters more than ever. It is fair to say that most of the big challenges, globally, are to be found in cities. So will their solutions. Join us for a panel discussion on culture and innovation in cities. With guest speakers from Goldsmiths University of London, the ULB, the British Council and participating artists. We are also supporting an exhibition which runs for the length of the festival, from Friday 2 – Sunday 4 October at Brussels Congres Train Station and at the house/gallery on 105 Besme. Participating artists include Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert (the artists that represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale) and a host of London-based artists including Matthew Stock, Helen Turner, Rhiannon Hunter, Cadi Hélène Rowlands, Sarah Cross, Claire Carroll and Eden Mitsenmache |
