In 2015 two participatory projects will take place over a three week period in and around the Saint Denis Place and the Abby of Forest/Vorst
RECOmmerce is a project curated by Lilia Mestre (Bains Connective) and Oonagh Duckworth (The Tinderbox) in collaboration with Duurzaam Wijkcontract Quartier Durable Abbaye Abdij and the Commune of Vorst /Forest department of Dutch Speaking Affairs. Supported by Le Brass.
RECOmmerce#2
BRUNE CAMPOS / PATRIMOINE POETIQUE
Forest based visual artist Brune Campos will begin an ‘excavation’ of the Place Saint Denis and its inhabitants. Her discoveries will create a collection that will constitute a very particular, poetical, local patrimony.
We need you – all inhabitants, strollers, gossipers, passers by, users, observers, admirers, hangers out of the Place Saint Denis.
Do you have something to bequeath? Something you don’t want to disappear along with yourselves? A treasure? A memory? No matter what the form: words, images, stories, objects deposit them in the Speedy Wash and help construct our community’s poetical patrimony.
Brune Campos was originally a circus artist. She trained as a clown and trapeze artist at the extension of the Centre of Choreographic development in Toulouse. Since September 2006 she lives and works in Brussels. She has worked as a performer for different choreographers and theatre directors (Pascal Rambert, Ulrich Funck, Karin Vyncke, Jean Marc Heim, and Didier Kowarsky,…), Since 2010 she works with the group ‘Tuning Band’ in Brussels that investigates Lisa Nelson’s choreography that is based on improvisation. She has also been involved in diverse choreographic and theatre projects in the world of story telling: ‘A bord de la mare’ (Cécile Delhommeau), ‘Ta bouche que j’aime tant embraser-est ce que tu peux la fermer?’(Oliver Villanove) ‘Cirque Si Quiero’ (avec Florencia Dimestri) and ‘Le parti pris des choses’ (with the collectif Petit Travers).
She has created her own work since 2008: a solos entitled ‘A banana is a banana’ in collaboration with Gertjan Van Gennip, a duo 1C1 with Ikue Nakagawa and the guitarist Cédric Castus in the performance ‘Marie/ qui suis je puisque l’ange’ with the visual artist Nina de Angelis in the performance installation Séance #.
Currently she is in the last year of a Masters degree course Art In Public Space at the Academy Royal of Brussels.
ELLE / Mobile MNSTRY
The Mobile MNSTRY (Monastery, Ministery, Monster-y) is a collective location project, organised in and around the previous Abbeye of Forest. The MNSTRY will install a temporary (monastic) community that lives and works within a limited area, following a shared time score and accepting the rule of poverty for the duration of the workshop.
During this time all activities of the MNSTRY will be organised within the public contexts of Forest, and developed as an open invitation to the neighbourhood and passers-by. During the workshop the time score of the MNSTRY will bit by bit start to change: the original ‘monastic’ score will be taken over by the members of the community, who will start to decide on what there is to be done, what we will spend our shared time on, and what is it that is needed today, here, and for whom.
The workshop is part of the larger project Cité d’Espoir (part of the REcommerce social-artistic initiative, organised by Bains Connective) which develops a constant practice for about six weeks (starting half October) with intense public moments during the weekends. The Mobile MNSTRY starts out with one member and through a call on the internet, the development of the workshop but also through local advertising the community starts to grow.
The ‘cité’ of the Abbaye will be renamed ‘Cité d’Espoir’ and will house the artists and their guests, supporting their ‘monastic’ practices. Cité d’Espoir will develop into a social meeting place, with a silent space to hang out, daily soup dinners, a library and regular ritual and other activities. The temporary monks start to develop their practices on the basis of poverty, social service and artistic transformation. Neighbours and interested people can pass by to have a personal ritual made for them, but we also want to involve groups and youngsters to develop group public rituals with us, based on their needs and visions. For example, we develop mourning rituals for pets or family members, light rituals for those who can not stand the cold anymore, love rituals for the lonely, political change rituals for the disengaged, etcetera.
We also give short-term ritual training workshops: how to develop your own rituals, how to gather material for your rituals, based on the Psychomagic methodology of Jodorowsky, or the artistic methodologies of the temporary monks. The silent café in the Cité d’Espoir offers free tea and something, and would become the starting point for all projects. The monks would sleep on the premises and be available most of the time for a talk or a ritual ‘guidance’. On Sundays there is also a kind of ‘service’, which is not religious but only aims at developing an alternative ‘common’ event for the neighbourhood in the margins of the market.
Elke Van Campenhout is an artistic researcher, and coordinator of the international research center a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies).
Formerly she worked as a free lance dramaturg and researcher on artistic research projects in nadine brussels, paf (performing arts forum) reims, TQW (tanzquartierwien), kunstenfestivaldesarts brussels, gasthuis amsterdam and many other places.
She was a critic for the newspaper De Standaard, the classical radio station Klara, and head editor of the performance magazine etcetera.
As research coordinator of a.pass elke van campenhout is in charge of long-term artistic research projects in the a.pass research center and for the public communication of research methodologies and results.
