• OPEN AIR#6 - Residency & Exhibition | AIR Antwerpen | September 2013

  • ENG

Dusting Off the Memory, 2013

AIR Antwerpen is a temporary work – and living space for visual artists from over the whole world. Fifteen artists a year stay between 3 and 6 months in five studio’s in the old lock-keeper’s house in the harbour of Antwerp. They use this time to research, produce, discover and meet. As part of the visual program AIR Antwerpen organizes every two years the OPEN AIR festival. For this project a curator from another cultural discipline is invited to react to the program of AIR Antwerpen. The curator has the opportunity to invite residents to stay in AIR Antwerpen for the summer and to work together on a public moment in the end of August.

This year BLOET vzw (Jan Decorte & Sigrid Vinks) is organizing the sixth edition of OPEN AIR, named: Maison Moderne. They invited the collective memymom, Johan Daenen, Gwendolyn Lootens and Stef Kamil Carlens to collaborate with them around “Bloetwollefduivel” a interpretation by Jan Decorte of Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. It was performed in 1994 by Jan Decorte himself, Sigrid Vinks and Lisa De Boeck (then 9 years old and now part of the collective Memymom). Bloetwollefduivel will be played on Saturday 24th of August in the lock-keeper’s house. Johan Daenen and Memymom will create new work inspired on this play and the location of AIR Antwerpen. The show and an audio reproduction of the play will be on view until Sunday 8 September.

  • memymom

With a series of images from 2013, Marilène Coolens & Lisa De Boeck (mother and daughter reunited in the intergenerational project ‘memymom’ look back upon a not so distant past. The picturesque, carefully staged tableaus refer to the performance Bloetwollefduivel by Jan Decorte, which was shown here in 1995. Decorte, enfant terrible of the Flemish theatre world and a regular in Beursschouwburg in the eighties, transformed Shakespeare’s Macbeth into a dark and stringing tragedy. This “ultimate play about evil” was performed by Decorte himself, his partner in crime Sigrid Vinks, and Lisa De Boeck, nine years old at the time. We meet the original cast again in the pictures, in their original props: De Boeck in the middle, flanked by Decorte and Vinks in several meaningful poses. The skeleton costumes, the rug, the lamp and the cage allude to former projects by memymom. The small black and white picture on the wall if from Jo De Boeck (Lisa’s father) and celebrates the intimate friendship that developed in Beursschouwburg between Marilène Coolens, Jo De Boeck, Jan en Sigrid. the text of Bloetwollefduivel, in a reprise for the Open Air festival in Antwerp, is presented as a radio play.

CREDITS

  • production exhibition: Air Antwerpen

  • coproduction exhibition: Bloet

  • production performance en audio recording: Bloet

  • text & direction: Jan Decorte

  • with: Jan Decorte, Sigrid Vinks, Smilla Dierickx

  • artists: Johan Daenen, Gwendoline Lootens, memymom

  • music: Stef Kamil Carlens

  • recording: Koen Roggen