Hynek proposed three steps:

1. Visual testimony from a distance of less than 150 metres, on which a degree of detail becomes clear and an angle of movement can be deduced.
2. Physical traces of the event: impressions on the landscape, power failures or physiological effects on people.
3. The final step involves direct contact with a living entity.

***

Close Encounters: SLEMANI SOUNDS

In September 2023 Social Recordings — alongside local historian Chia Sadeeq — wandered the streets of Slemani (Kurdistan, North Iraq) to capture the movements of craftspeople and to record the noises they produce. These craftspeople’s lives and everyday labour create the rhythm of the city — a polyphonic sonic richness.

The project is an ode to the diversity of sound in a contemporary Iraqi city. It is a sound ethnography of a place, made in relation with its people who are simultaneously senders and receivers within a shared resonant space. It takes a pulse of the politics of a place where craft is disappearing due to encroaching capitalism.

How do the producers of these work-specific “soundtracks” listen to the daily soundscape to which they also contribute? How is the sonic output of the city degrading in the face of changing and dissolving working techniques and traditional labour in general?

A first presentation took place during the SPACE 21 festival for experimental music in Slemani, in April 2024. It was also a time to revisit the people who had been documented the previous September, in their habitats or workshops, and to play back the recordings that had been made of them, on location. This shared listening experience of the previous recording was recorded again, to commemorate a common recollection.

For the third chapter of Close Encounters, Out of Sight presents an audio-visual performance and installation, a new one-off edit of Slemani Sounds bringing into dialogue — as an act of feedback — the sounds and images recorded during both visits. Hardi Kurda and Ernst Maréchal give an improvisational concert, intertwining the sounds of the installation with live sounds, complemented by recordings of their previous Slemani/Space 21 duo performances.

***

Social Recordings researches the ethics and aesthetics of recording (with) others. How can listening be a relational and critical act? How can forms of open listening enter into dialogue with the unknown? And how do we contribute to the sonic space we share?

Through a process-based practice, Social Recordings produces a body of work that is a hybrid of field recordings, interviews, sonic encounters & ethnographies, improvisations, vocal work, electroacoustic situations, experimental journalism, found and archival sounds. It is often supplemented with photographic and filmic material — the last serving as a support, a silent witness or visual guide, of the sonic.

Exploring dialogical practices like feedbacking and playbacking (on location) as a means of communication, the act of listening triggers a sonic answer, and recordings are given an oscillating status of “transmitter” and “transfer agent”.

The act of listening (or re-listening) is an act of giving (back) to each other and a process of learning from each other’s ways of resonating.  As such, collective listening is a necessity for a non-conclusive practice which aims to transcend the individual act of making decisions, by resonating together again.

Practically, whenever possible, Social Recordings aims to return with sounds and images to their origins, in order to “give back” what truly belongs to those who appear in the recordings. By attending these playbacks together, a relationship is constructed between who and what is documented and the recording artist(s).

All recordings are made in a variety of social, pedagogical and artistic contexts, usually in collaboration with others, with artists and non-artists, with adults, teenagers, children, toddlers and babies.

It is an ongoing challenge to ensure that the people initially recorded are the first audiences of their documented selves. By making new recordings in the place where the original recordings are first played, choices are made together— instant processing and mutual editing of what is presented later for an audience.

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Kunsthal Extra City, MORPHO and Out of Sight are joining forces on Saturday, 28th September. We are warmly inviting you for a full day of events in our neighbourhood. For Kunsthal Extra City and MORPHO this day marks a start of Closing Sessions, a new collaborative ritual that celebrates the ending of an exhibition and an artist residency at their shared locations in the monastery. For Out of Sight it is the second chapter of the long-term project CLOSE ENCOUNTERS.

::: PROGRAMME :::

> Kunsthal Extra City | Provinciestraat 112

13:00-14:00
Curatorial walk with Joachim Naudts for the finissage of the exhibition ANCESTRAL CLOUDS, ANCESTRAL CLAIMS by Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman

> OUT OF SIGHT | Somersstraat 31

14:00-15:30
Diane Mahin — GUT / durational performance

15:30-16:00
Laila Claessen — BITTER / performance

16:00-16:30
Boris de Klerk — ER IS GEEN RITME, ER IS REGEN / performance

16:30-17:00
Break & drinks

17:00-17:45
Manuel Groothuysen — IN SOFT OUT LOUD / performance

18:00-18:30
Boris de Klerk and Finn Borath — CHAMBER PIECE / audio-visual performance
Warning! This performance contains strobe lights which may be harmful to photosensitive people.

> MORPHO Refectory | entry through Kunsthal Extra City, Provinciestraat 112

19:00-19:45
Judith Engelen — MELT / performance (by OUT OF SIGHT)

> Kunsthal Extra City | Provinciestraat 112

20:00-20:35
Melisa Yağmur Saydı — A STAIN OF LIGHT ON MY SCREEN, TRAVELING DOWN THROUGH YOUR PIXELS / audio-visual performance (by MORPHO, M HKA and Salt)

21:00-22:00
Drinks in the garden

Entry to all the performances is FREE.
Realised with the support of: Flanders — State of the Art, the City of Antwerp, M HKA, Salt

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. Chapter 2

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is inspired by Allen Hynek’s categorisation of UFO witnesses.

Hynek proposed three steps:

1. Visual testimony from a distance of less than 150 metres, on which a degree of detail becomes clear and an angle of movement can be deduced.
2. Physical traces of the event: impressions on the landscape, power failures or physiological effects on people.
3. The final step involves direct contact with a living entity.

***

For the second chapter, Out of Sight presents a series of audio-visual performances in which we taste and we smell, we see and then we hear. Through senses we meet each other and the world around us.

Diane Mahin, Laila Claessen, Manuel Groothuysen, Boris De Klerk, Finn Borath and Judith Engelen confront us with the materiality of the body while questioning the metaphorical meaning we ascribe to our perceptions.

In the durational performance GUT, Diane Mahin imagines how humans behave when their bodies are turned inside out. The intestinal sounds of a performer are amplified. A visceral and absurd experience that gains in vitality as the gut becomes more active.

Moving up to the mouth, Laila Claessen presents Bitter. We are invited at her dinner table to eat Brussels sprouts, while she recounts a tale of adverse family relationships. Drawing inspiration from Ayurvedic nutrition, she investigates how bitter tastes disappear from western diets while it actually has a positive effect on our physical and mental wellbeing.

er is geen ritme, er is regen by Boris de Klerk is a slow and rhythmical exploration of silence, speech patterns and the voice. Via a short repetitive reflection on how a day passes by, Boris slowly uncouples his voice from his body slowly merging it with the echoes of the space to eventually have it drowned out by rain and eventually silence.

Manuel Groothuysen investigates the synchronicity between the breath and the moving body in In Soft Out Loud. Through his physical motions, the rhythm and intensity of his breath is affected, the sound of which drives an acoustic composition invoking strange and uncanny worlds.

In their Chamber Piece, Finn Borath and Boris de Klerk create a direct relationship between light and sound, eyes and ears. A grid of fluorescent lights is manipulated, creating intense visual patterns while at the same time producing an electro-acoustic composition from the sound the lights make when switched on and off.

MELT by Judith Engelen starts from the visual and tactile properties of wax. As a material that historical played an important role in the development of writing and cast making, it is deeply entwined with how we as humans extend and share our memory. The transient nature of the material is used as an analog to the uncertainty of our recollection.

—

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. Chapter 2 is realised with the support of Flanders — State of the Art.

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Hynek proposed three steps:

1. Visual testimony from a distance of less than 150 metres, on which a degree of detail becomes clear and an angle of movement can be deduced.
2. Physical traces of the event: impressions on the landscape, power failures or physiological effects on people.
3. The final step involves direct contact with a living entity.

𝐎𝐔𝐓 𝐎𝐅 𝐒𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓 uses this framework as a way of thinking about connecting with artists, partners, audience and neighbourhood. Classic relations of spectatorship are expanded to include direct participation and collaboration.

*** PROGRAMME ***

Thursday, May 16

12:00-22:00 URSULA #3: THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS / Exhibition 
19:00-22:00 SHARED OPENING DINNER hosted by Hafsa Elazzaoui & Latifa Saber

Friday, May 17

12:00-18:00 URSULA #3: THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS / Exhibition 
18:00-19:00 IMAGES OF PAST AS IMAGES FOR THE FUTURE by Doplgenger / Lecture-performance

Saturday, May 18

12:00-18:00 CAR DECONSTRUCTION: THINGS NEED TO BE TAKEN APART. A LOT OF THINGS. by Dina Rončević / Durational performance
12:00-18:00 URSULA #3: THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS / Exhibition 

Sunday, May 19

12:00-18:00 CAR DECONSTRUCTION: THINGS NEED TO BE TAKEN APART. A LOT OF THINGS. by Dina Rončević / Durational performance
12:00-18:00 URSULA #3: THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS / Exhibition

:: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. Chapter 1 ::

In the first chapter we immediately set the tone with an extended weekend of diverse interactions, focusing on collective processes and different forms of collaborative practices. 

Ursula collective reaches back once again to a text by Ursula K. Le Guin: “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, also the title of their exhibition at Out of Sight. It tells the story of a seemingly perfect city, Omelas, where the happiness of the people is built on the suffering of a single child. The story raises questions about the ethical foundations of a utopian society and the individual’s responsibility in the face of collective well-being.

Artists in the exhibition: Meltse Van Coillie, Jana Coorevits, Lydia Hannah Debeer, Ans Mertens, Isabelle Tollenaere & Kathy Vanhout. 
The exhibition takes place on the first floor of the new Out of Sight venue.

SHARED OPENING DINNER is hosted by Hafsa Elazzaoui and Latifa Saber. As cooks, exploring how food is deeply intertwined within our relationships, our cultures, our identities and our politics, is their bread and butter. When hosting dinners, Hafsa and Latifa underline the importance of what it means to be one with the dinner table and those you’re sharing it with, while paying close attention to each ingredient that’s intentionally brought to the table. “Eating for research purposes” is a quintessential part of their practice. 

In collaboration with MORPHO, Out of Sight invites Doplgenger to present IMAGES OF PAST AS IMAGES FOR THE FUTURE, a part of an artistic research project called “Fragments Untitled” that examines the media’s participation in the construction of historical narratives. The lecture-performance discusses the problem of remembering, representing and giving voice to distant histories through images from the media, the politics of archiving, audiovisual experiments and the impact of this language on the viewer.

Over two days Dina Rončević together with a group of girls, calmly deconstructs a car. The durational performance/workshop CAR DECONSTRUCTION: THINGS NEED TO BE TAKEN APART. A LOT OF THINGS. gives a chance to girls to work with tools and learn to use their bodies in relation to heavy forces. Performed in front of an audience but lacking a need for its gaze, car deconstruction proposes agency over our own female bodies while relentlessly following our curiosity.

Out of Sight organises CAR DECONSTRUCTION in collaboration with Werktank.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is realised with the support of Flanders — State of the Art.
We would like to say THANK YOU to Cardoen Company, Matthias Gommere and Bert Cardoen.

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CoNec / 2019, FR, 11’
by Eden Tinto Collins

“I am those others, black bodies, lost in abstruse places, Abdoulaye, LayLa… They take possession of my I, of my role…Those haunting characters remind me of an origin to be embraced, delivered.” 

False Wife / 2022, ENG, 15’31’’
by Jamie Crewe 

False Wife is a poppers training video that leads its visitors through an ordeal of transformation. A poppers training video is typically a user-made compilation of pornographic clips, uploaded to adult video hosting sites. These clips are paired with text, hypnotic music, voiceovers, and instructions for action. Viewers are told to masturbate and sniff poppers, to let imagery and sensation meld, and reach a gooning ecstatic fervour.

False Wife’s material is obscure. Its narrative is drawn from a variety of folk tales in which transformation occurs, and relationships happen. Its footage is scavenged from sources that reflect these themes, reduced to slivers of significant imagery, rubbed together. These originating sources are warped or inflamed to say ambiguous things: to discuss desire, shame, transgression, and the longing for change, and the various ways we want—and don’t want—to face them. 

Perfect ride / 2012, 5’04’’
by Saša Tkačenko

In the interior of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, whose purpose was neglected for years (closed down for renovation for 5 years at the moment of making this video), a skater is trying to perform what is most important to him – a perfect ride. The atmosphere of timelessness that is dominant in the space of the “abandoned” Museum of Contemporary Art appears as the perfect scenery for an incompatible action that gives its endless reconstruction a new character. This way, the work shows the intimate and intense connection between a young man and his skills and the forgotten building of the Museum, thereby retrieving the grandeur of the building through a moment that, as the action unfolds, becomes a very important experience for the actor in the video. The work is essentially an homage to the building – a master piece of modernist architecture in Yugoslavia – which, despite all current technical shortcomings, remains monumental and incredibly powerful.

KKKK / 2018, 3’18’’
by Ibro Hasanović

A loose remake of Kenneth Anger’s 1965 film “Kustom Kar Kommandos” set in Kosovo.

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The exhibition will grow from the 28^th of October until the 25^th of November, presenting the outcome of participatory projects and site-specific performances in the neighbourhood by Corpo Máquina Society, Dina Rončević, Davide Tidoni and Zorka Wollny & Tevin Mulumba.

The exhibition is the starting point of a guided walk in Kessel-Lo with architect Koen Stuyven, who grew up in the neighbourhood.

Exhibited works:

The BUCKWHEAT TOWN by Py & Verde is made from bundles of buckwheat noodles colonised by drugstore beetles. The insects’ larvae dig galleries in the noodle bundles, while also consolidating the material with their droppings and saliva. It is an ecosystem in a closed environment, where once the resources are finished, it becomes a fossil. It is the story of a tiny world, inhabited by voracious and insatiable creatures. In a way, it is a vanity, a memento mori. The shape recalls the ruined facades, retained during the restoration of buildings by props and steel beams.  The serie is currently composed of four architectures: The Last Facade of Buckwheat Town (2013), The Theater (2016), The Court (2017) and The Aqueduct (2023). As other remains are discovered, the archaeological site of the Buckwheat Town expands.

TIME, SET IN STONE (2022-2023) by Sarah Smolders is a playful experiment, a question on labour, a poetic gesture of mapping time and a visual dialogue with the Hydraulic Research Labs of Flanders. In the time frame of one year, Sarah Smolders and her team took care of a sculpture that was at the same time the sculptor of a Noire de Mazy marble. What remains is a stone as a document of one year’s activity. Time, Set in Stone tries to grasp and translate the dedicated time given to a specific site and share this with an audience. By observing the working process with a focus on touch, care, rhythm and movement, the film unravels the heavy labour into precise gestures of creation, their impact on the body and how material transforms through time. Today, the Noire de Mazy marble is permanently installed in the gardens of the Hydraulic Research Labs of Antwerp. The site-specific action, the stone and the two pictures are part of an art integration commissioned by the Flemish Government.

BEAT HOUSE DONAUSTADT  (2019) by Anna Witt is a collective sound performance realised within Kagran and Kaisermühlen areas in Vienna’s 22nd district that concentrate a piece of the city’s history. Formerly a working-class neighbourhood and stronghold of council housing, it was one of the last bastions of the Socialist Party in its fight against Austro-fascism. What interested Anna Witt most about this history is the vibrant utopia, the belief in the collective and in solidarity. For Beat House Donaustadt Witt used an ultrasound scanner to record the heartbeats of the residents of a “council housing”. At the start of the Wiener Festwochen in 2019, the residents opened their windows, letting their individual rhythms drift out and join to form a collective sound performance.

The video-documentation of participatory projects and site-specific performances in the neighbourhood included later in the exhibition:

For the performance IT TAKES A CHILD TO RAISE A VILLAGE, Corpo Máquina Society organises workshops for children between 7 and 12 years old. In several sessions, overlaps between Freestyle Football and Choreography are explored in a playful way. Each day, on 2nd, 3rd and 4th November, the workshop ends with an open moment for the public to come witness their ongoing creation.

Davide Tidoni’s ATTACK-DECAY and EACH TOUCH IS A MARK are performed in the area surrounding the Koning Albertbuilding in Kessel-Lo. Attack-Decay performed on October 28th, explores the acoustic qualities of the area by means of an impulse-generator device. Developed in the form of a durational performance interspersed with long silences, the work aims to witness the presence of an acoustics that will disappear together with the demolition of the Koning Albertbuilding. Each Touch Is a Mark performed on November 25th, starts with a performer walking in a space holding a snare-drum in front of their face. A collaborator positions themselves opposite to the performer and sets off a number of fireworks aimed at hitting the snare-drum. Developed as a slow walk punctuated with bangs of varying intensity, the action aims to explore the sense of uncertainty one feels when faced with sudden changes.

The workshop NEIGHBOURS’ JOURNAL is led by noise music composer Zorka Wollny and rapper Tevin Mulumba. During several days, participants create a spontaneous orchestra, learn to use their voice in an unusual way and create and perform lyrics based on their experiences, questions and opinions. The result is presented in a form of a video diary, in which participants perform their songs together with Zorka and Tevin on various found stages in public space in Kessel-Lo.

The post ALL THAT WE HAVE HERE IS ALL THAT WE’VE ALWAYS HAD appeared first on Out of Sight.

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE FOR THIS EVENT HERE.
Reservation is necessary, thank you!

The event is FREE. There is limit of 60 people. Once we reach this limit, we won’t be accepting any more registrations. 

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I’M SORRY, CAN YOU MOVE, CAUSE’ I NEED THIS CROWBAR is a durational performance in which the artist Dina Rončević, together with a group of girls, calmly deconstructs a car. Girls get a chance to work with tools and to use their bodies in relation to heavy forces. Performed in front of an audience but lacking a need for its gaze, car deconstruction proposes agency over our own female bodies while relentlessly following our curiosity.

The post I’M SORRY, CAN YOU MOVE, CAUSE’ I NEED THIS CROWBAR / Postponed! appeared first on Out of Sight.

For the performance It Takes A Child To Raise A Village, Corpo Máquina Society organises workshops for children between 7 and 12 years old. In several sessions, overlaps between Freestyle Football and choreography are explored in a playful way. Each day of the workshop ends with an open moment for the public to come witness their ongoing creation.

Play together with dancers, footballers, musicians from Corpo Máquina Society.

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