The C&H collective has set up three interventions in and around the festival centre:

By Lars Kwakkenbos

The following text is an excerpt from a conversation that Lars Kwakkenbos had with the C&H team – Christophe Meierhans, Heike Langsdorf and Christoph Ragg – on 10 April 2009. In this passage, the collective, which works out of Brussels, explores the status of the audience.

These three interventions are the result of a commission that the Kunstenfestivaldesarts gave you. What did they ask of you?

C&H: We were asked to do something with the area around the festival centre, and so what it came down to essentially was to intervene in the relation between this year’s festival centre and the surrounding neighbourhood. As we discussed how to do this, it became clear that our work would involve both the geographical surroundings as well as the social context. It wasn’t simple. An artistic project in and around a neighbourhood like this one soon comes to resemble social work, which is an impossible thing to do over the course of a three-week festival. Instead, the question emerged as to the status of the festival’s audience. How would that audience react to this area, while spending three weeks here taking in art, eating, drinking and chatting away?

We are in fact sitting here on a kind of artificial island, right in the middle of the Marolles. You can see it in the architecture. Les Brigittines is a small architectural showpiece, with on the one hand people who receive support from the authorities to make theatre, and on the other hand, people who receive support from the authorities to live here. Both places are called les Brigittines, and there’s this gap between the two. So we’re rather like aliens coming in here, but we don’t pretend to bridge that gap. Instead, we’ve studied the place and more specifically the kinds of audiences this place supposes and that will encounter one another here – roughly thirty meters separate them from one another: the people who live here, the people who pass by in those trains – 1200 per day – and the people who will attend the festival. We decided to do three interventions that would each address one specific audience, and we’ve decided to call them Brussels chapel, see you in les Marolles and trainspotters, respectively.

Let’s begin with trainspotters.

C&H: At the times that are mentioned in the festival brochure, the specific reality of the festival centre will be switched off in a sense, and the outside reality will make its way inside. Concretely, this means that the trains passing at that moment will be made more present in the festival centre thanks mostly to sound. The trains will in fact become performers, and that is also how we have listed them in the brochure. In yellow, as a kind of mix between the yellow timetables hanging in every Belgian train station and the announcements of the actual festival.

What is typical for us is that it’s an intervention in something that already exists and that will be presented as a spectacle. This is even more explicit in the other two interventions. The signs in the tunnel and the announcements in the Kapellekerk / Gare de la Chapelle station are neither spectacular nor exceptional per se. First of all, it’s all pretty much what you’d expect in that kind of place. Brussels chapel is based on the fact that this is a station in which people get on and off trains, and see you in les Marolles consists of thirty lightboxes set in the tunnel that the trains pass through and that look a lot like those on which the place names of Belgian stations are indicated. Except that in this case it’s not a place name or station on the sign, but words of welcome or a farewell. With our work there’s often the risk that it will remain invisible as art.

So, in a sense, you’re creating something that was already there?

C&H: That’s a somewhat provocative formulation, but you could say that, yes. We re-stage things that already exist or occur. We put them up on a stage. And each of these stages presupposes a specific audience. Except that in this case, a festival-goer could be a trainspotter, see you in les Marolles will only be seen by people on the trains, and Brussels chapel will probably work best with those who, unsuspecting, get on or off a train. Lastly, there’s also the question as to whether, and to what extent, you as a member of the intended audience have been informed about what is to be seen. Whoever reads this interview will more or less be able to imagine the three interventions. But this won’t be the case, for instance, with a commuter who on his daily train ride to Brussels suddenly sees a sign light up in a tunnel. After reading this, whoever takes the train especially for this purpose will never be able to experience that sign in the same way as the commuter. Their perception of the sign will be affected from the start, unlike the commuter whose routine will suddenly be interrupted when he sees the sign light up.