An artistic practice is not only the result of what has been planned; it feeds on the unpredictable encounters and what cannot yet be imagined. The Brussels art scene has often been described as a network of formal and informal exchanges, collaborations, and cross-pollination. If even the pandemic has forced artistic processes to be more isolated, in this edition the festival has decided to open a temporary and shared artistic residency. For ten days, four artists – three of which are based in Brussels – work in four spaces in the Kaaistudios. While each of them works on different research projects, they have moments of collective discussion. Visual artist Dina Mimi investigates the story of her great-grandfather, who was subjected to medical tests at an Israeli military hospital in 1969. Nikima Jagudajev deeply studies choreography as a form of life. Salvator Calcagno immerses himself in researching cinema as a form of encounter, starting with Visconti’s movie Bellissima. Roland Gunst reflects on the legacy of rubber and its ability to provide a surface layer on colonial monuments in Brussels. The School of Contamination opens the way to another sort of ‘contamination’, and to its importance within the art scene and to its future.

Dina Mimi, Grinding the Wind

Dina Mimi’s performance navigates the missing parts of the story of her great-grandfather, who underwent medical testing and heart surgery at the Israeli military hospital Tel Hashomer in 1969. This event provoked a journey into archives, oral histories, dreams, and books. As she explains, “Like a surgeon who has wet dreams of inserting a finger into a heart during surgery, my research around the performative aspects of open-heart surgery is also motivated by desire. The heart of my great-grandfather, sealed behind more than one hundred stitches from his chest to his waist, was reduced to ashes as his final gesture of self-immolation.” Facing the mystery of this now inaccessible “archive”, for this new project the artist probes for clues to understand his descent into silence and protest, and eventually so even in death.

Roland Gunst, Moving monuments

The principle that organic containers such as human bodies or other movable structures are seen as a "place of remembrance" within Luba culture clashes completely with the Western construction of history and memory. Here, the past and often anti-democratic ideologies and authoritarian leaders are glorified through monuments in uncritical and static ways. However, fluid forms hold the potential to break open static, oppressive architectures. Trauma can heal through monuments in motion, which allow for a constant (re)positioning of identities.

'Lieux de memoires' are spaces in which the status quo is not simply accepted, but negotiated.

• Roland Gunst, Recto Verso, March 25, 2021

Salvatore Calcagno

Bellissima is a research laboratory based on Luchino Visconti's movie of the same name, released in 1951. A singular work, unknown to the general public, which tells the story of a mother ready to do anything so that her daughter becomes the next big screen star. Through a free adaptation of the script, Salvatore Calcagno offers a portrait of a working-class environment lulled by dreams and robbed of its illusions, a satire of the film industry, and an encounter with a city and its inhabitants.

Nikima Jagudajev

Basically is an ongoing live project by choreographer Nikima Jagudajev. Developed in collaboration, it is contextualized as a re-schooling in which space is made for the nurturing and sharing of our perversions. Together we will work on nonlinear choreographies that fold in on themselves like portals through time and fugue-like contrapuntal melodies. Daily I Ching castings will locate us in a shifty universe and unscheduled time will leave room for contingency. As visitors enter the studio, they become involved in making and remaking this environment; a sociality of difference in which all elements collectively make up the space and deviate.