An evening on… is a thematic evening featuring live performances as well as screenings and installations.
Past Imperfect focuses on the interplay between recollections and the blanks in our memory. With delightful old super 8-films of Circus Family Togni, that find a second life in a 4-screen audiovisual performance by Home Movies and Gill Arno’s modified slide projectors, showing static images from found slides that fade into one another. Make sure you don’t miss Aki Onda’s collection of sound recordings, creating a 4-hour long sound diary – on location in Bank van de Arbeid from 6 pm to 22 pm. Full programme:
Cassette memories – Aki Onda (JP) – performance
Aki Onda uses field-recordings obsessively collected over a span of two decades to create a 4-hour long sound diary. He considers these recordings to be personal memories, composes by manually manipulating cassette players, re-collecting and re-constructing concrete sounds. What emerges is a sonic collage of ritualistic tape music. (Free entrance)
MPLD – Gill Arnò (IT) – performance
Arnò uses found footage and modified slide projectors, slides become films that refuse to get in motion in a flickering performance that recalls how isolated images are fixed on our memory.
Nothing is real (Strawberry fields forever) – Alvin Lucier – performance door Heleen van Haegenborgh (BE)
A pianist plays and records fragments from The Beatles’ song, Strawberry Fields Forever on stage and then plays back his/her own recording of it on a miniature speaker glued to the inside of a teapot. (Check out Margaret Leng Tan’s version of Nothing is real.)
Circo Togni – Associazione Home Movies / La camera ottica (IT) – met live muziek door Andrea Belfi (IT), Stefano Pilia (IT), Benjamin Franklin (BE) en Xavier Garcia Bardon (BE)
A series of 8mm films shot by the Togni family, the famous dynasty of circus artists, between the 1940s and the 1970s, were found inside a circus wagon in horrible shape. After being restored in collaboration with La Camera Ottica, Home Movies revives them on 4 screens accompanied by 4 musicians.
(Ghent) memory space – Alvin Lucier – performance door Thomas Smetryns (BE), Heleen Van Haegenborgh (BE), Kristof Roseeuw (BE) en Michael Weilacher (US)
Alvin Lucier’s instructions tell performers to go out into a city and capture by any means – electronic recording, graphic notation, or memory – its sounds and to return to the studio and recreate them using only their instruments and voice.
Paradise Recollected – Jasper Rigole (BE, 2008, video, 33’) – installatie
8mm films, found on flea markets and garage sales constitute the basis of this film, in which recollections are brought together in order to create a parallel world that refers to the ‘the land of Cockaigne’, a fictive land of plenty.
With: Aki Onda, Gill Arno, Home Movies (Mirco Santi, Andrea Belfi, Stefano Pilia, Xavier Bardon & Benjamin Franklin), Jasper Rigole, Thomas Smetryns, Heleen Van Haegenborgh, Kristof Roseeuw, Michael Weilacher. On the weblog Diagonal Thoughts you will find additional information on the artists involved.
The live performances start at 20:00, the installation works open at 18:30. Aki Onda performs on location – from 18:00 onwards in Bank van de Arbeid, Voldersstraat 1 (where Courtisane’s exhibition opens that night) – free entrance.
All info: www.courtisane.be.
Courtisane festival is organised by Courtisane vzw in collaboration with Vooruit and Cinema Sphinx. An evening on… is a coproduction with KRAAK. 
