6. Insect Hunt, ongoing research on ceramic collections
The Anxious Explorer was developed in the context of the collective writing of an Opera Libretto, "the Orphans of Tar". She is a porous character co-evolving in an factual-fictional plot. The footnotes she gathers are the only lyrics she would sing. These series of projects borrow methodologies and interests from the character as described in the initial portrait.
6. Insect Hunt
ongoing research on ceramic collections
Thank you to MRAH and the conservation and restauration department of La Cambre.
highlights in the text
5. the Ignorant Master
Reading Room #29: Fred Dewey and The Ignorant Schoolmaster
13/02/2024, 18-20h
The second in a new series of Reading Rooms around the library of the American thinker and organiser Fred Dewey, a collective reading and discussion around Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987)
The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation is a 1987 book by philosopher Jacques Rancière on the role of the teacher and individual towards individual liberation. Rancière uses the example of Joseph Jacotot, a French teacher in the late 18th century who taught in Belgium without knowledge of their language (Flemish), to explain the role of liberation after Marxism.
This Reading Room is proposed by Clémentine Vaultier
4. Vlinderstruik
side performance to the Opera PLOT
Who was invited on stage ? Before the Opera, a leaflet circulated within the audience, a manifestation of the invasive bush present on the plot.
Tomas Uyttendaele
3. Spinning PLOT
workshop organised with Vanessa Müller and Julien de Smet for Nomadic School of Arts, KASK
One week before the street opera PLOT came into place in the middle of Tondelier construction site, the workshop group of Spinning PLOT stepped “on stage”. The group observed, monitored and learned from ongoing processes and became directly and indirectly part of the play.
The workshop was based on the participatory open air opera PLOT by artist collective PILOOT. This opera was the grand finale of a trajectory of 7 years of social artistic research and exercises. By introducing and unravelling the works of PILOOT, Spinning PLOT entered the multilayered artistic practices which developed and are still running around Tondelier site – a highly gentrified area in the Rabot area in Ghent.
As Spinning PLOT, we set up a camp at Kunsthal Gent and made daily expeditions to Tondelier, where the artists and protagonists of the opera PLOT were active. We dug into archive material, invited the artists currently and formerly involved in the long term practice on site and exchanged on each other's artistic interests in this experimental context.
We started by engaging with the speculative opera libretto The Orphans of Tar, a factual-fiction co-authored by participants and contributors of a previous site-specific workshop in 2019, ourselves included. We looked into its characters and thereby introduced the idea of a co-conducted Tondelier opera.
Based on methodologies of co-narrating, we took an outside satellite perspective on opera PLOT, to realise scenes of our own. A scene being a moment, in which participants made their experience tangible in the medium of their choice, helped by the group.
2. The Orphans of Tar, a Speculative Opera
Art Paper Editions, Ghent, 2019
The Orphans of Tar, A Speculative Opera, Art Paper Editions, Ghent, 2019.
to order : here
co-authors: Katleen Vermeir, Ronny Heiremans, Stijn Van Dorpe, Filip Van Dingenen, Heike Langsdorf, Vanessa Müller, Julien De Smet
Epilogue: Danielle Van Zuijlen.
