SVEN STERKEN: NEW STORIES FOR BRUSSELS. STRATEGIES FOR A DISSIDENT IMAGINATION OF THE CITY

I.A: Intuitive analyses / subjective renditions
These authors are either part of or they consciously infiltrate into the Brussels’ context. Their main purpose is to bring the intangible logic and at times impenetrable codes controlling the city to the surface.

Sat, 16 Oct 2004
20:15 - 21:51

Brussel scherven van Geluk
Jef Cornelis

1995
video | 00:57:18 | col. & b&w
dutch

‘Brussels, fragments of happiness’, is no ordinary documentary on the Belgian capital. The aim of its makers was to understand why the city has become what it is: a transitory space, a city where every day many thousands of Flemish people arrive by train or by car to go to work, to leave in the evening. Why did Brussels change from a ‘dazzling city’ into a ‘forbidden city’ for so many Flemings and Walloons? The film does not want to offer a sound and definite answer to the question why Brussels has such a shabby look. Nevertheless, this documentary is founded on the clearly visualized proposition that the contemporary inhabitants of Brussels are living in a fantasy that has fallen into a ruin.

Few Royal Moments
Alexandra Dementieva

2000
video | 00:05:00 | col.
spoken | dutch, french

A documentary shot during a guided tour for the visitors of the Royal Palace in Brussels. An off-screen voice reads out loud the invitation letter.

Alors quoi?
Frédéric Mercier

2001
video | 00:03:00 | col.
spoken | english, french, sp

The European Parliament of Brussels. A group of deputies is receiving a guest, an Indian man from Ecuador. For some or other administrative reason, the man is denied access to the buildings. How to make him go in? A condensed story of a miscarried encounter and the sterile stir it causes.

Héron City
Frédéric Guillaume

2002

video | 00:31:16 | col.
spoken | french

In Ixelles, along the commercial axis of the Toison d’Or nearby the Hilton, there is an island made up of some forty-odd houses that have been in the hands of an English group of commercial financiers for several years now. Their aim is to establish a huge entertainment centre and shopping mall, thereby sentencing the mostly neo-classical houses to total demolition. Although in the meantime, the houses have been demolished, and the building permit granted, the investors got quite a nasty burn on the fingers for their trouble, though, thanks to the resistance of the neighbors

I.B: Intuitive analyses / subjective renditions
These authors are either part of or they consciously infiltrate into the Brussels’ context. Their main objective is to bring the intangible logic and at times impenetrable codes controlling the city to the surface.

Mon, 18 Oct 2004
17:15 - 19:49

Sans Titre, 1958 – 2003
Ann Veronica Janssens

2003
video | 00:00:52 | b&w
non spoken

For this film Janssens made use of historical B/W film material about the demolition of a construction (the ‘Pijl’ - the Civil Engineering Pavilion) by the architect Jacques Moeschal, which had been set up in Brussels in 1958 on the occasion of the World Exhibit. Because of the way the material was edited – acceleration and reversal of the film in combination with marching music –the often misplaced and manic urge for renovation of the fifties, as opposed to the contemporary realism, is criticised and even ridiculed. Prod: Ann Veronica Janssens

Ann Veronica Janssens
Ann Veronica Janssens (1956) was born in England and she’s living in Brussels. Perception, experience, space, emptiness, time, (im-)materiality and infinity are the key notions of her minimally inspired work – sculptures, videos and installations. She often makes use of light, how it moves, is refracted or stopped. Her work has been shown, among others, during the Venice Biennial, MuHKA (Antwerp), the Neue National Galerie (Berlin), SMAK (Gent) and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Poland.

Martini Ground Zero (The Trailer)
Yves Bernard

2001
multimedia | 00:06:30 | col.

From September 2001 to end of May 2002, a camera recorded, and webcast on the internet, the destruction process of the Martini Tower (International Center Rogier, Brussels) – the first skyscraper of Brussels, built in the late 1950s and famous for its audacious functional architecture and program. ‘Martini Ground Zero (The Trailer)’ is a shortened version (10 months in 6 minutes) of the time-lapse video resulting from this recording process, one that began a few days after September 11, 2001, and ended on Ground Zero Day (May 23, 2002).

Mission Mont des arts
Sven Augustijnen

2002
video | 00:53:00 | col.
spoken | french | subtitels: dutch

Two representatives of the commission for the revaluation of the Mont des arts in Brussels are followed here during a guided tour. Augustijnen observes their enthusiasm, their curiosity and amazement and lets his camera linger subjectively through the most surprising locations in and around the Royal Palace, the Palace of Fine Arts, the National Library and the Central Railway Station. This ‘documentary’ shows Brussels at its most elusive. In this city, there is always something beyond the door, around the corner, behind the tree. Augustijnen does nothing to ‘solve’ the enigma; on the contrary, he seems to take pleasure in confusing the spectator even more. The only conclusion one can draw from this work is that in the Belgian capital, things are not what they seem.

De Kunstberg
Sven Augustijnen
Barbara Visser

2000
video | 00:14:23 | col.
non spoken

This silent film shows how the austere architecture of the Mont des arts hides a complex underground labyrinth of spaces. More specifically, it shows a sequence of desolate storage rooms, garages and hallways that have never seen any daylight. Needless to say that such mysterious places provoke the imagination and almost automatically generate urban legends.

Sven Augustijnen
Sven Augustijnen (1970) studied at Sint-Lukas in Brussels and Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. In his videos he investigates – often with a generous dose of irony – the boundaries between fiction and reality, focusing on unexpected events from everyday life. He concentrates on making portraits, with the help of a wide range of genres and techniques – apart from his videos, for instance, he also published a newspaper of his own. His work has been shown, among others, at the World Wide Video Festival (Amsterdam), the MuHKA (Antwerp) and the Paleis voor Schone Kunsten (Brussels).

23 Storeys
Ilona Ruegg

1998
video | 01:20:00 | col.
non spoken

‘23 Storeys’ refers to the 23 storeys of the Lotto Building in Brussels. At the time of the shoot, the building was completely empty (it has by now been demolished). The camera first moves from the 5th level up the fire escape stairs and then down from the 23rd floor through the empty corridors and rooms, always using the elevator from floor to floor. At first it seems to have a labyrinthian structure but through the movement of the camera an orientation emerges little by little, from level to level, through memory, through repetition and difference.


II.A: Conceptual Approaches of Developed Environment
Here the city is not really perceived as a spatial, physical and architectural whole, but rather as a temporary conglomerate of (coincidental?) meanings, treated conceptually or rendered visually.

Tue, 19 Oct 2004
20:00 - 21:04

Occupied
Peter Downsbrough

2000
35 mm. | 00:18:37 | b&w
spoken | english

A thoughtful portrait of an exceptional location, the Cité Administrative. Downsbrough uses the emptiness of this place as a framework for a reflection upon the perception of space and the role of time in this process. In an interview during the early stages of this project, Peter Downsbrough said : " I use film to introduce time within my observation. Its very unfolding makes film the ideal means to do this."

Peter Downsbrough
Peter Downsbrough (1940) was born in New Jersey and he studied architecture and visual art in Cincinnati and New York. In his work, taking the shape of, among other things, sculpture, sketches, books, photography, film and video he uses minimal interventions to investigate (urban) space. Everyday shapes are observed, dissected and transformed; the order and disorder of architectural elements from daily reality is unbared. Downsbrough creates a link between language and space, managing to impose a clear orientation on an otherwise anonymous place. In his videos this almost tangible formal investigation into space between words and images comes forward as well. Furthermore this approach is interwoven with semiotics and linguistics, giving rise to reflective analysis and multiple interpretations. Downsbrough’s work, with his minimalist style and complex relations with architecture and typography, relates itself to such artistic movements as De Stijl or Bauhaus. Shape is reduced to lines and space, colours are only allowed very sparingly. With regards to content he distinguishes himself from his influences by merging various disciplines. One-man exhibitions took place, among others, at the Paleis van Schone Kunsten (Brussels), le Consortium (Dijon), the Neues Museum Weserburg (Bremen) and l’Espace de l’Art Concret (Mouans-Sartoux). Downsbrough lives and works in Brussels.

LUM Tôme 1
LUM
Christophe Terlinden
Chan Geeroms
Natalie Mertens
Frédéric Deswattines
Vincent Pinckaers
François Pirotte

2000
video | 00:16:04 | col.
spoken | french

Infiltration is one of LUM’s preferred artistic strategies. Most of all, he prefers to intervene in the urban environment, starting from existing, available elements. For example, by considering the windows as pixels, he transformed the facades of some office towers in the city centre into digital screens. Doing so, for a couple of nights, these towers were given a chance to finally play their (misunderstood) role of urban sign.

Installation #3
Michel Lorand

2002
video | 00:07:20 | col.
non spoken

“This film shows the route, both above and below ground, of the Brussels North-Midi connection. The film not only evokes the city with its strangely empty stations, but also transforms train travel into a game of lightning and reflections between camera lens, train windows that cross each other and neon lights affixed to the tunnel’s pillars. In the same way as rails are installed to achieve traveling shots or that a film reel resembles a railway line, Michel Lorand brings back his railway travel, filmed with a video camera, to a game of optical stimuli and urban traveling.” (Steven Jacobs)

Injonction III
Michel Jakar

2003
video | 00:15:00 | col.
non spoken

This video film is based on the installation ‘Jontion III’, in which Michel Jakar gave an audiovisual interpretation of a performance by twelve actors and dancers (part of the Compagnie Mossoux-Bonté) on the traffic junction between the Brussels railway stations Nord and Midi. The images were projected on three screens and accompanied by a sound environment; this allowed the spectator to push through the heart of the journey.

II.B: Conceptual Approaches of Developed Environment
Here the city is not really perceived as a spatial, physical and architectural whole, but rather as a temporary conglomerate of (coincidental?) meanings, treated conceptually or rendered visually.

Wed, 20 Oct 2004
22:00 - 23:23

No Ice
Simona Denicolaï
Ivo Provoost

2002
video | 00:14:20 | col.
non spoken

A funny yet intriguing choreography that takes as its starting point a couple of colored vans and the traffic chaos at a roundabout...

L’Occupation des sols
Marie-Françoise Plissart

2002
video | 00:28:00 | col.
non spoken

Seen from above, the city offers a entirely new, intriguing image. The kaleidoscopic way Plissart has edited these images is in itself a mise en scène of the city, inviting the spectator to invent himself the accompanying story. “In all the chaos, it draws lines, highlights shapes and unveils unexpected structures. The city you thought you know suddenly becomes to be foreign (…) These daunting, almost ethereal perspectives restore a sort of harmony. From these lofty summits, which are inaccessible to mere mortals, the city finds in flashes the coherence it had lost.” (Benoît Peeters)

L’Homme qui compte
Joëlle Tuerlinckx

1999
video | 00:38:15 | col.
non spoken

This film takes as a setting the de Ferraris administrative building, the Ministry of the Flemish Community. An actor, dressed in a grey suit and a tie, mingles with this background. He is equipped with some white-painted sticks, and for several days his assignment is to count everything he points at with his sticks: people and objects, different items in the canteen, countless records, … All of this during office hours, which means his activities cross with the activities of the personnel. All these calculations result in a film of 40 sequences, lasting several hours in the full version.

Joëlle Tuerlinckx
Joëlle Tuerlinckx (1958) uses her films to record intervals between two points, an environment which can take up several realities and they are often shown in relation to a spatial intervention. Her work balances on the verge of ‘nothing’, and sometimes it is hardly recognisable as art, among others because of the use of cheap, fragile materials and the minimal presentation. Nevertheless her work deals with art, with the realisation of a work and the relationship between seeing and being. Tuerlinckx considers herself a painter, but her body of work comprises drawings, artist’s books, videos, graphics and objects, and in exhibitions (‘machines’) these elements are composed into a composition of the space between things, the virtual environment seemingly piercing through to reality. Her work has been shown, among others, at Documenta 11, Manifesta 4, The Renaissance Society (Chicago) and SMAK (Gent). She lives and works in Brussels.

La Minute de silence
Paul Schillings

1999
video | 00:02:30 | col.

A city, its inhabitants and its rhythm take a halt for a minute. An abstract choreography of movements that could take place in any city at any moment.

III.A: Mental Topographies of the City
The memory of a city is realised in the discourse of its inhabitants and its users. Each conversation about a city generates a new, imaginary city. Precisely this process of mental appropriation and experience is being dealt with here.

Thu, 21 Oct 2004
15:30 - 16:45

Brussel 25 november 1995
Manu Riche

1996
video | 00:52:00 | col.

“How can a topical fait-divers become an image? How does one tell a fait-divers? Should we still make an image of the city? These questions were at the origin of the film, and the film attempts to be these questions” (Manu Riche). Little by little, and from several viewpoints – corresponding with the different persons concerned – facts are revealed that allow to understand what has happened on November 25, 1995. A moving and very personal approach to the urban reality.

The Dance of Roberte: a Saturday Night in Brussels
Peter Krüger
Gerrit Messiaen

1998
video | 00:23:00 | col.
spoken | english | subtitels: french

The rocking story of Roberte, 63, who dances way her sorrows on a Saturday night in a bar called ‘Metro Vivaldi’. The film is a tragicomic portrait of an old woman living in Brussels. This one evening reflects her whole life and portrays at the same time Brussels-by-night.

III.B: Mental Topographies of the City

Cadavre Exquis, Brusselle part: 1
Katleen Vermeir

2003
video | 00:41:49 | col.
spoken | dutch | subtitles: english

In Cadavre Exquis, Brusselle part: 1 Vermeir maps out the city of Brussels by making a tour with Pierre Querut, a B movie and documentary director from the seventies, of lost film houses in the former film district of Brussels. As Querut recollects on that era, he is always conscious of the proximity of the camera and he never stops commenting on Vermeir’s style of filming. Kathleen Vermeir does not only visualise the lively film industry in Brussels, roughly between 1970 and 1980, but she has also made a personal and humorous portrait of Pierre Querut.Prod: LTD.ED.VZW

Katleen Vermeir
Katleen Vermeir (1973) lives and works in Brussels. She studied at Sint-Lukas in Ghent and the HISK in Antwerp and has participated in study projects in Tianjin (China), Amsterdam and New York. She is working on a series of studies, usually with her partner Ronny Heiremans (1962), around the invisible topographical traces of a city, as well as a series of ‘tableaux vivants’, video paintings identifying those universal aspects of human attitudes and architectural models. Her work has been shown, among others, at the Brakke Grond (Amsterdam), Paleis voor Schone Kunsten (Brussels), PS1 (New York) and STUK (Louvain).

La Ville invisible
Philippe de Pierpont

2001
video | 00:55:00 | col.
spoken | french | subtitles: english

Brussels’ inhabitants tell of the privileged relationship they have with certain places in the city – ‘their’ places. They take us along to public spaces, places that in their eyes have something private about them. This film brings to light this invisible city that lives in the head of its inhabitants, the ‘Brussel-ites’. With the latter, we get to know the folds of the city, the ordinates where the intimate and the public, fiction and reality meet each other.

Philippe de Pierpont
Philippe de Pierpont (1955) is a genuine jack-of-all-trades. He studied art history in Brussels and he worked as a scriptwriter for comic strips and films (among them L’Héritier, Belgium, 1998) and on various editions (Journal Burundais, Hors la Boxe). He teaches at the Atelier d’écriture documentaire, he collaborated on theatre plays and he makes documentaries as well as fiction. His work has been shown, among other places, at the Festival International de Télévision de Monte-Carlo and Festival Vues d’Afrique (Canada) and he has won several prizes in the process. Pierpont’s documentaries take an anthropological approach. He lives and works in Brussels.

IV.A: New Myths for Brussels
In these works new stories are created out of the somewhat surreal disposition of the capital. New stories are created and projected onto the city in order to interpret a number of processes in the recent history of Brussels.

Fri, 22 Oct 2004
18:15 - 19:14

Little Figures
Sarah Vanagt

2003
video | 00:15:47 | col. & b&w
spoken | french, english | subtitles: english

In Little Figures the viewer listens in as children give voice to an imaginary conversation between three statues on the Mont des arts (Godfried of Bouillon, King Albert I and Queen Elisabeth). In their witty dialogues, the children allude to the country’s imperial past and the recent wars in Congo and Rwanda. A playful and intriguing mix of multiculturalism and experiment.

Sarah Vanagt
After her history studies at UFSIA in Antwerp and the University of Sussex, Sarah Vanagt (1976) studied in the ‘documentary’ department of the National Film and Television School in London. In her work she investigates how relevant archive material can be integrated into contemporary documentaries to put the historical context of specific subjects into perspective. In London she worked with young refugees, and in her films she also focuses on the life of children who are growing up in war territory. Vanagt’s films have been shown, among others, at the IDFA (Amsterdam), the Amnesty International Film Festival (West Hollywood), Tate Modern (London) and Les Ecrans Documentaires Val-de-Marne (Paris). She lives and works in Brussels.

Le Guide du parc
Sven Augustijnen

2001
video | 00:44:00 | col.
spoken | french | subtitles: english

An unusual visit of the Parc Royal in Brussels. The guide in this fake documentary introduces you to the habits of the park’s gay scene, taking his time, slowly making you discover the hundred details of the park’s ‘social life’. An educational film where you learn all about the historical facts of the Parc Royal, as well as a ‘sociological’ document, but most of all a humorous film around an amazing character: the park guide.

Sven Augustijnen
Sven Augustijnen (1970) studied at Sint-Lukas in Brussels and Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. In his videos he investigates – often with a generous dose of irony – the boundaries between fiction and reality, focusing on unexpected events from everyday life. He concentrates on making portraits, with the help of a wide range of genres and techniques – apart from his videos, for instance, he also published a newspaper of his own. His work has been shown, among others, at the World Wide Video Festival (Amsterdam), the MuHKA (Antwerp) and the Paleis voor Schone Kunsten (Brussels).

IV.B: New Myths for Brussels
In these works new stories are created out of the somewhat surreal nature of the capital. They are projected onto the city in order to interpret some processes in the recent history of Brussels.

Sat, 23 Oct 2004
19:00 - 20:28

Rookgordijn boven Brussel (het inno-dossier heropent)
Bram Van Paesschen

2002
video | 00:35:00 | col.
spoken | dutch

In this documentary about the most lethal department store fire in European history (26 May, 1967), the filmmaker tries to find the cause of this disaster, which – officially – still remains unknown. All the more reason to uncover some ‘forgotten’ or hidden traces. As the author suggests, the tragedy could well be the result of a conspiracy between a clever but unscrupulous investor and a powerful international organization, pursuing a cause of major political concern.

Le Dossier B
Wilbur Leguebe

1995
video | 00:53:00 | col.
spoken | french | subtitles: english

"Le dossier B" is the name of a book published in 1960, but untraceable today. It unveiled the existence of a sect composed of highly influential personalities (politicians, artists, architects, …), aiming at the destruction in order to build a new, parallel city: Brüsel. On several locations in the city, entrances to this mysterious counterpart of the capital would exist. The discovery of over forty kilometers of subterranean hallways makes a journalist start an investigation. The result is a journey between reality and fiction, which leaves a lasting impression, and leads to a surprising hypothesis concerning the symptomatic self-destruction of the Belgian capital.