Image workspace Auguste Orts Photographer Isabelle Tollenaere & Fairuz Cover: Auguste Orts Photo collection Liberaal

l Archief, Gent

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p.4

Auguste Orts and I.I. by Bart De Baere Auguste Orts Correspondence Pour une hauntologie de limage Herman Asselberghs, Sven Augustijnen, Manon de Boer and Anouk De Clercq in conversation with Dieter Roelstraete Sensing Politics by TJ Demos Lists of Works in the Exibition Works in the Exhibition Reference Images

II
p.10

III
p.22

IV
p.86

V
p.96

VI
p.113

VII
p.131

Works in the Exhibition: credits p. 146 Biographies p. 148 Colophon p. 150

Auguste Orts and I.I. Bart De Baere

Auguste Orts was a liberal politician and a freethinker. He was an ardent advocate of free education. It is said that he was a very competent lawyer, but he was also a historian and a professor of economy at the Universit Libre de Bruxelles; he concluded his career as a minister of state. Thats about as much as I have been able to find out about him. His memory resonates in a short street in the center of Brussels named after him, where the Beursschouwburg is now located. We would probably have forgotten all about him if it hadnt been for a small group of artists who decided to name their organization after him to be more precise (an all-important nuance, we should add): they named their organization after the street in which their office is located on, the same street that is named after Auguste Orts. Street names no longer function as memorial sites in the same way as they used to, just as bronze statues are no longer anything but tired bronze forms. The artists who, back in 2006, founded Auguste Orts are all highly regarded; they are Herman Asselberghs, Sven Augustijnen, Manon de Boer, and Anouk De Clercq. Asselberghs is also active as a critic and an organizer who, in the past, has often managed to render visible the sort of radical things that usually struggle to attain such longed-for visibility. Sven Augustijnens piercing view of the complexity of Brussels urban tissue has altered the scope of what can be imagined and envisaged both within and about the city. Manon de Boer has long been one of the foundational energies in that particular Brussels microclimate, which also included the presences of the gallerist Jan Mot and of the writer Oscar van den Boogaard. Anouk De Clercq, who will reanimate the ambitious, utopian spirit of renegade architect tienne-Louis Boulle for the 2010 exhibition in M HKA, has long been at the forefront of a more abstract cinematic exploration of the digital world. Their practices, in short, are exemplarily diverse, as divergent as their social and cultural presences diverse yet clearly twinned. These artists have achieved what a street name in the center of Brussels was unable to do: they have saved Auguste Orts from the ignominy of oblivion. They could have chosen a funkier brand name one label among the countless other labels that crowd our world but it would not have had this preservationist effect; it would have been as useless as the aforementioned street name. This does not alter the fact, of course, that Auguste Orts is a brand name of what is both a technical organization and, technically, just an organization. Its technicity is located in the primary goal of the

organization: to provide a sufficiently potent production platform that allows the individual artists to transcend their various organizational limitations. A powerful brand name and a technical organization all rolled into one yet clearly, more than the mere sum of its parts. As an organization, Auguste Orts represents an attitude, just as much as Asselberghs, Augustijnen, de Boer, and De Clercq do on their own behalf. The organization operates outside the scope of existing organizational forms, between the heavy-handed model of international turnover and the customary alternatives to this model, which favor a more developmentally minded course of systematization. Audiovisual art productions do not only operate at the intersection of different disciplines, they also have to negotiate different economic systems. Depending on the view that holds sway in the world of cultural politics and policy-making at any given time, and depending on the nature of the moves makers make with regards to the various cultural economies, the space of financial possibilities changes shape and with it the space of possibilities as well as obligations. After a short period of more developmentally minded thinking, the Flemish Audiovisual Fund has converted back to a more product-oriented mindset; in this, it has been motivated primarily by economic reasoning. In any case, state support is made to depend on the weight of a given application, not always unproblematic for artists who operate in the more mercurial realm of audiovisual art, which is characterized above all by the unruliness of its creative processes. Predictably, some of Auguste Orts colleagues have put their trust in the market, opting to format their work in such a way as to accommodate the demands of the higher echelons of the international art economy. Yet aside from this market-oriented trajectory, there is another option, resulting in a more peripheral relationship with the art market, promoted by innovative galleries that are not always able to provide a broad supportive platform. These trajectories of production at this point stimulate thinking in terms of management bureaus, which can go some way towards alleviating the complexities of production, but also necessarily bring their own limitations to bear upon the project at hand. The artists who make up Auguste Orts decided to seize control of this managerial aspect of their working lives collectively. This secures the continued centrality of the artistic project, while at the same time allowing for the necessary measure of flexibility

needed to counter certain unpredictable questions that may as yet end up at the center of things. The focus may shift, different rhythms are free to intersect; operationally, the focus no longer concerns the solitary burden of the small entrepreneur, but the shared choice for certain critical values and valuations, the sharing of critical experience and expertise. Thats what Auguste Orts now is, formally speaking: a structured and structural collaboration between four different artists who develop their own oeuvres independently within a framework of affinity, staying closer to the mercurial spirit of the artistic process than would otherwise have been possible. This peculiar, idiosyncratic quasi-collectivity ensures a surplus value of its own, although Auguste Orts, in a preference for an ethic of rhetorical restraint, chooses not to exploit this fact. Orts is more because more happens. And more happens because this is a story of elective affinities that bring together four audiovisual artists who all work in their own way, but also bring into the field compatible reflexive impulses, a compatible critical stance towards systems and structures, a compatible generous orientation towards the social world, compatible professional (though not strictly professionalized) ambitions No matter how much they and/or their work may differ from each other in formal terms, they share a basic set of values that concern processes and sensibilities values that either defy or simply dont need defining, lodged in an interstitial space of sorts, articulating themselves in graceful movements rather than hardened stances: a fine demonstration of what one of my colleagues has called Institutional Intelligence. Auguste Orts and I.I., in short, is an exercise in going public, in the public as such that which emerges when diverse elements discover what is shared rather than unique and does not have to be announced as such by the universalizing claims of the powers that be. This public does not automatically become a mass or multitude: it does not have the potential for endless growth, and cannot represent everything or everyone. Auguste Orts started with just four artists, the smallest possible group: more than a couple, more than a trio, four people sitting down at the table for a game of cards. Four plus one perhaps and so the public becomes the common. The starting point for the exhibition at M HKA isnt called correspondence for nothing. We could call it an exercise in commonality, in community in the building of a space or site of artistic possibilities where enough is retained around the individual

entities. Such a space, precisely, is what is being made here, clearly distinct from the crystal-clear profiles of commercial businesses (or their echoes in art organizations who believe that it is beneficial to conform to such models) as well as from collectives who require a constitution, security, alliance. A space like this comes into existence without feeling the need to explicitly declare itself as such. Language, like the adjacent realms of images and actions, is too precious, too meaningful to be marshaled to serve regulatory or public relations aims only its energies should be aimed at producing meaning instead. And so Auguste Orts has chosen Auguste Orts, the former saving the latter from certain oblivion in the process, from the arbitrariness of the empty signifier. This has not entailed a return to the positions represented by the historical Orts, whether as a politician, lawyer, historian or economist. Instead, Asselberghs, Augustijnen, de Boer, and De Clercq have charged this name with new meanings: it has become the name of a practice and a space, a place where we can attend to and care for that which will grow to become something important, where this attention and care can be reflected upon, and where this reflection can actively bring about certain results. So maybe Auguste Orts is not so much a brand name as it is the name of an event, not so much an organization as it is a public (and hence also, inevitably, political) space. The public as evolving from a gathering of four, plus one, potentially plus you, potentially plus me. The public that is also, always, precarious the source of both its strength and energy.

Auguste Orts: Correspondence

BerLIn 28 FeBruAry 2010

Dear Anouk, Herman, Manon & Sven,

When was the last time I really sat down to write a letter? Do emails qualify as letters? Lets say that, from a certain length onwards, they certainly deserve to be considered as part of the cultural history of corresponding not an honor I am ready to bestow on text messages just yet. And as for Twitter, well, I dont even know how that works (if work is the appropriate verb here Ive been told it most likely isnt). Finally, I also have personal reasons for cherishing the potential for literary import of emailing as such, for my private life would most definitely have looked very different without it. The art of letter writing correspondence. I almost feel like a cheat availing myself of a computer (a laptop, Herman) for that exact purpose! And this, in turn, reminds me of a conversation I had just recently about an apparently serious proposal to discontinue longhand writing classes in elementary school. The demise of the pen and the end of ink; in short, wouldnt that also signal the death of writing? These scattered thoughts on the (ironically, very fashionable) topic of obsolescence flit through my mind for various reasons one being that I have seen this exhibition grow, to my relative surprise, into an extended reflection upon timeliness and obsolescence per se (and I am not just alluding to your use of oldfashioned or analogue imaging techniques and technologies here). I do not necessarily regard nostalgia to be an important part of what you do (thankfully!), but there is a definite spirit of melancholy that permeates both your respective practices and the exhibition as such the mild taste of black bile. To be sure, black as a color plays a role in many, if not most of your work, and Herman in particular likes to refrain from showing or depicting anything at all, preferring instead to immerse (the viewer) and be immersed (him-, yourself) in complete darkness. That is certainly one reason why I have been interested in, and attracted to, the work for such a long time. There is an undeniable element of truth, after all, in opting for blackness, for black-and-white renditions of

For their exhibition at M HKA, the artists who make up Auguste Orts decided to continue a letter-writing practice initiated for an event organized at Lux 28 in London in 2008. The letters written by the artists to each other are included in the exhibition. What follows are the letters subsequently written between Herman asselbergHs, sven augustijnen, manon de boer, anouk de ClerCq and exhibition curator dieter roelstraete.

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the world both in- and outside, for a morose posture of melancholy, regret, and resignation, if not outright refusalthough this may be taking things just a tad too far. Morrissey penned many a great lyric for The Smiths, but my favorite fragment is still, I wear black on the outside / because black is how I feel on the inside. Just like my favored philosophical question, why is there nothing rather than something?, instead of the traditional Leibnizian question, why is there something rather than nothing? But I am digressing What else has this become an exhibition about? Attention is another word that has come up with certain regularity a strand within the work that I have grown particularly attentive to (if you pardon the pun). A couple of years ago, I thought about care a great deal a concept or word I sought to reanimate in my tentative theorization of mans dealings with objects, things. And although I do accept that films, projected images, and sounds are things (objects) as much as, say, sculptures are, I do think attention is the more appropriate term when considering our (my) relationship with such carefully crafted images as yours. Acceleration and speed or rather, deceleration and the critique of speed as an integral dimension of all critiques of spectacle certainly play a crucial role here, as your art certainly takes time. And this is perhaps the reason why your moving images do not completely alienate or even repel me, like so many other moving images, within art as much as outside of it, unfortunately manage to do (Ive come to regard the museum as an oasis of sorts because most things inside the museum dont move much). rather, they appeal to me; they move alright, but only slightly in some cases only metaphorically. I can, quite literally, attend to them (like caring, this verb has a decidedly Heideggerian ring to it maybe something for me to explore in another letter?). In any case, whether caring or attending to, it is clear that these notions are not without ethical overtones. And though I am of course, in the first instance, interested in the aesthetics of Auguste Orts, I am, in the final analysis, probably more interested in your ethics still. There probably exists a profound relationship between attention and obsolescence, wedded in the historiographers retrospective glance but I cant go into it right now. Maybe another time, another collaborative venture? For now, I can only point at these things, hoping not to overburden the work with my high expectations (though why wouldnt I expect as much? Im sure you expect just as much from me). Paying attention to something

requires a slowing down that inevitably relegates the beholder to the past what with the insane speed with which the world transforms itself before our very eyes every single day. Its a little bit like really serious, in-depth reading, the kind that will guarantee true absorption. Its not going to happen in the back of a car; it will require a stepping-out-of-time instead. (I should probably explore the comparison between looking at your work and reading some more, but will have to leave it at that that too.) And perhaps this is what lends some of the work a slightly gnostic feel not just a few of the works on show in this exhibition have to do with insularity, with capsules, absences, with pausing and retreating to the margins and peripheries. From which the views become so much clearer, less impeded and distant. Maybe thats why, as a critic, I find it easy to identify with the work distance and distantiation are at the very source of the critical enterprise after all. Well, you probably think Im rambling. youre probably right, and I should probably wrap up more letters will be coming your way soon in any case. That is to say, lets continue this correspondence perhaps with an eye on finally initiating the Martha rosler Library reading group in your Brussels headquarters, just like we talked about such a long time ago. Sincerely, Dieter

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BruSSeLS 13 MArCH 2010

Dear Dieter,
Imagine: reading your letter, I spontaneously thought of the word VITrIOL. Its letters form the Masonic motto that the guide of the park in my eponymous film comes across while on his stroll through the low-lying part of the royal Park in Brussels: Visita Interiorem Terrae rectificandoque Invenies Obscuram Lapidem. I guess you could easily write a whole essay about that one scene. A man in a bankers suit using late eighteenth-century philosophy to comment upon gay cruising on the former hunting grounds of the Dukes of Brabant! It could probably serve as a synthesis of your interests in both melancholy and the gnosis that you refer to in your writing. I must say I had to frown at one point while reading your letter: The Smiths passed me by completely. I was probably listening to records by Miles Davis at the time, such as Agharta, Live Evil or (fittingly) Dark Magus. And it was the memory of these exact recordings that crossed my mind when I first saw Hermans film Futur Antrieur, which you performed in as part of SPASM. It was very surprising to experience how, at some point, out of the darkness and the collision of noise, some melody appeared. Its probably going to be totally different, but hopefully some kind of transformation will also be experienced by those who will read Sale Flamand! the work I am producing for our Correspondence exhibition at M HKA. Although doused in vitriol, may my pen release some beauty at last! As you pointed out yourself with such apt clarity, this is not the moment to go deeper into the profound relationship between attention and obsolescence, wedded in the historiographers retrospective glance. But I will definitely come back to this point when my film on Belgian colonial history is finished In the meantime, Im sending you a first draft of Sale Flamand! I hope youll enjoy the taste of black bile! So far for now, Sven

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PArIS 10 MArCH 2010

Dear Dieter,
Im wearing a black T-shirt today and it says, in white letters: remember, the shadows are just as important as the light. Its something Charlotte Bront wrote maybe even during the years she spent living in Brussels. Once, after a screening, a woman in the audience remarked that my work reminded her of the night and the space underneath her bed. Whenever cars drive by, their headlights drag long bands of light across her bedroom. Her remark reminded me of the title of a Calvin & Hobbes album: Something under the bed is drooling. The darkness that I like is the darkness found in a movie theater. Where people watch a world come into luminous being on a screen. Thats why, for me, black does not have anything to do with an unpleasant gloom; on the contrary, it is related to a concentrated form of living. With essence and substance. Confrontational. revelatory. Immense, like the night; intimate, like the pupil of an eye. Just recently, I went to see an exhibition of Pierre Soulages, and I read the following quote in the accompanying catalogue: Jai invent le mot outrenoir, au-del du noir une lumire transmute par le noir et, comme Outre-rhin et Outre-Manche dsignent un autre pays, outrenoir, un autre champ mental que celui du simple noir. 1 now heres a man whos from the same planet as I am. youve called my digital landscapes desolate and deserted before. But how else is an audience supposed to wander into them if theyre full? How can the machinery of the human imagination be activated if everything has been defined beforehand? Of course, nothing hides underneath the bed at night but what if ? And speaking of phantoms: every time I try to imagine what Auguste Orts could have looked like, the effigy of Auguste rodin comes to my mind. They both share the same given name, they both have beards maybe that explains this particular spectrality. But there appears to be more. A couple of days ago I went to visit the Muse rodin, and found out that rodin is partly responsible for the ornamentation of the faade of the Brussels stock exchange. So the bust of Auguste Orts, located on the square opposite the stock exchange, eternally faces the ornaments of rodin. Et voil. nothing in my pockets, nothing up my sleeves, nothing underneath the bed. Anouk

1.
I came up with the word 'beyond black' (outrenoir), a light transmuted by black, which just as beyond the rhine (Outrerhin) and beyond the Channel (Outrerhin) designate other countries stands for another mental space than that of ordinary black.

BruSSeLS 24 MArCH 2010

Dear Dieter,
When we last met at M HKA you reminisced about the pleasurable emptiness of the current installment of the Flix Gonzlez-Torres retrospective at Wiels. I recently went to see it for myself and I was deeply impressed by what Danh Vo had done, both with GonzlezTorres work and the gallery spaces. your desire for the museum to be an oasis of silence is certainly satisfied there! In the first installation (courtesy of elena Filipovic), I especially loved the way in which relatively small-scale works on the walls or in the middle of the space were given enough time and space for the viewer to enjoy them. On the third and fourth floor, one could experience the spatial installations on a more physical level. now, in the second installation (curated by Danh Vo), the emptiness has become positively salutary. There is plenty of time to allow both the images and the space to work their magic on the viewernot just physical space but also mental space, that of history and memory. The terms emptiness and empty image occurred with a certain regularity in the many conversations we have had about our work and the Auguste Orts exhibition. This has led me to wonder whether we havent fetishized this emptiness too much. I dont care much for emptiness for emptiness sake as Im also not interested in the romantic preciousness bestowed on a small image or object in an enormous space. When I walked through the Gonzlez-Torres exhibition, I experienced this emptiness as a way to give space to time. And that, precisely, is what we want to do with our exhibition. It is striking to note how often curators (as well as certain artists I think) are overcome by a fear of emptiness; they also often fear that an exhibition takes up too much time, that the time required by a certain artwork cannot be regarded as a mere matter of filling space. Working on this exhibition, Im happy to have discovered that you love both emptiness and not too much movement (to be honest, judging from your hyperkinetic lifestyle, I had long thought the opposite was true). To give time space also relates to what you have called attention in your letter. For the last couple of months, Ive been editing a film that contains much lengthier musical fragments some are more than ten minutes long and cannot possibly be shortened. The attention I want to devote to the sound material does not always allow for an economic use of sound and image. The sound here forces me to use long image sequences and no cuts. For me, that makes for a highly enjoyable viewing experience, as it gives me plenty of room to let my thoughts roam freely, or listen very attentively to the music after which I can return to the image without having the feeling that I have missed out on something. Too bad the film is not ready yet, but as an artist Im at least allowed to take time. Till soon, Manon

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BruSSeLS 24 MArCH 2010

Dear Dieter,
I have to disagree: Ive done some serious, in-depth reading in the back of a car. I especially remember being completely immersed in DeLillos Mao II during an extended drive through the sunny Portuguese hillsides. I immensely enjoyed Lducation sentimentale in the course of a nightly return trip from Tuscany. now that I come to think of it, I have vivid memories of reading while sitting in moving vehicles: Saturday on the train to Berlin, Plateforme on the Thalys, Derek Jarmans At Your Own Risk on a flight from London I wont bore you with a long list of book titles related to travels that now readily come to my mind, except for one combination that I think somehow qualifies. I immersed myself alternately in the complete works of Michael Connelly and Empire while pushing Kobes buggy in the royal Park in Brussels at all hours of the day, including 6:45 a.m. As you well know, that, for now, is the closest I, Marie, Anouk, Manon (and you) will ever get to driving a car. Heres the one thing we all have in common at Auguste Orts: the absence of cars due to the lack of drivers licenses. Luckily, Sven has both. If not, this would sound awfully close to a manifesto... Cars or no cars, its all about movement for sure. I know that I produce my best thoughts when doing the groceries or while jogging. Thats how I wrote most of my reviews and columns for the newspaper. Thats how I develop the ideas for my films. I guess the same goes for the absorption of thoughts. Somehow my brain focuses best in medias res So, no table & chair or cabin environment for me! Still, youre right to state that reading (as well as cinema viewing, I would say) requires a stepping-out-oftime and that many titles in the Orts catalogue seem to deal, in one way or another, with the exact experience of untimeliness and insularity. I only recently read (at home, in a bath) Agambens short essay, What is the Contemporary? and I must say that it proposes a stimulating view on this special relationship with distance that you perceive in our work. Let me quote (Can one quote in a letter? We dont want this to turn into a piece, do we?): Contemporariness is a singular relationship with ones own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism. Do these words not resonate with some (if not many) of the topics that we addressed in our conversation? We could easily put this excerpt on the Orts homepage by way of a warning, that is. Agamben even muses upon our recurrent love for all things obscure, such as the black film frame or the monochrome pixel. So again, to conclude with a quote from the same essay: The contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness. As for your suggestion to start a Brussels-based Martha rosler Library reading group: yes! In fact, Im currently brooding on a plan to finally make it happen by next fall. More on this soon See you next week, Herman

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Auguste Orts: pour une hauntologie de limage

dieter roelstraete

A conversation between Herman asselbergHs, sven augustijnen, manon de boer, anouk de ClerCq, marie logie, and dieter roelstraete on the subject of binding agents, convergences and divergences and a specter called Auguste Orts.

Lets begin with the beginning. Ive often been reprimanded for referring to Auguste Orts as an artists collective, or a filmmakers collective, which you are not not in the strict sense of the word anyway. Still you have opted to leave your individual names out of the overall picture of the current exhibition as much as possible. Perhaps this tension is an appropriate starting point for the (inevitable) question of Auguste Orts genesis: how do you balance purely pragmatic, strategic considerations with a deeper sense of shared affinities and collectivities?
manon de boer

1.
The VAF (Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds or Flanders Audiovisual Fund) is the official funding body of the Ministry of Culture of the Flemish Government for audiovisual arts, most notably film.

It is true that Auguste Orts was originally formed and founded to meet a practical need first and foremost. I knew a number of artists such as Anouk, Sven, and Herman, whose work, like mine, could be seen in very different contexts and all of them had to deal with similar problems of production and distribution. These are all artists who work on projects the scale of which often transcends the limitations of the institutionalized field of visual arts funding, forcing them to look for funds elsewhere, such as the Flemish Audiovisual Fund.1 All these people seemed to be losing lots of time doing the same kind of things: applying for funding, starting up and administering associations and foundations, managing budgets and the like. Thats why we decided to start an association such as Auguste Orts, providing an overarching structure, managed by a coordinator in a single office a platform, if you will, from which to cater to various artists production needs.
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What was particularly important was that the artists would retain control over all stages of the production process thats how it all started, and only later was the question of distribution added to that initial mandate. This all happened in 2006, but we had been talking to each other for over a year as to how we should proceed, and what this would entail. Only when Marie Logie decided to join us as the coordinator did things really take off.
Herman asselbergHs

dieter roelstraete

It could not have been Antoine Dansaert, evidently that would have been all too tiresome, all too obvious.
anouk de ClerCq

2.
The nearby Antoine Dansaert Street is famous for its highend shopping, its (Flemish) cultural institutions, and its informal status as the hub of Flemish cultural life in predominantly francophone Brussels.

But where did the idea come from, initially? Were there other organizations much like it that functioned as a model?
manon de boer

I did have the model of an organization such as Anna Sanders Films in Paris in mind they produce for instance the films of Dominique GonzalezFoerster and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Another example of an organization founded by artists yet very different from Auguste Orts, in that we do not solely deal with questions of distribution an production (which is what they do); we also organize Auguste Orts Evenings here at the Beursschouwburg in Brussels for instance.
Herman asselbergHs

3.
Auguste Orts (1814-1880) was a Brusselsborn, Belgian politician, a lawyer and professor at the universit Libre de Bruxelles, and a tireless advocate of free education and the separation of church and state.

And the office is located on the Auguste Orts street, not the Antoine Dansaert street after all2 At some point we were just brainstorming, trying out different proper names, taken from films by Marguerite Duras or Jean-Luc Godard for instance. We were looking for a proper name; precisely we wanted the organization to become something of a character in and of itself the fifth or sixth member at the table. And of course, it also referenced the paradigm of Anna Sanders Films. So when it finally appeared that we were given office space on the top floor of the Beursschouwburg, in a street named after a certain Auguste Orts
dieter roelstraete

Sven, you as an avid amateur historian must have been aware of the historical associations of that name, no?
sven augustijnen

And Im sure we also see much more of each other than the artists youre referring to. In that sense, Auguste Orts is more like a stable.
dieter roelstraete

If Im not mistaken, the mans biography is posted on a plaque that hangs above a fountain right across the street from where were sitting3

***

And then you decided to settle for a name like Auguste Orts
sven augustijnen

That was Anouks idea.

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dieter roelstraete

So thats the story of Auguste Orts early days seen from the vantage point of the practical needs each of you felt had to be met. But one of the exhibitions primary concerns is of course to try to distill the outlines of a program from your very different oeuvres and practices, and this is obviously a matter of content and cinematic form. Herman, I read somewhere that Auguste Orts is not interested in the formulation of manifestoes, essentially an early twentieth-century form. Im not so sure whether I agree with your claim that the era of manifestoes belongs to (or should be relegated to) the past; on the contrary, I am interested in researching the possibility of new manifestoes Im inclined to believe that a little more programmatic thinking wouldnt hurt us, certainly not at this point in time. And this is where we should explore the many affinities that bring your respective practices together rather than the more obvious distinguishing qualities that set them apart. How do you view these affinities? It is interesting to see how two or three of your combined oeuvres can easily be brought together under one specific rubric, with the remaining fourth invariably standing out I could think of many such qualities
manon de boer

Anouk does. There are other elements that bind Anouks work and mine together most clearly a shared interest in music and sound. And with Anouk and Herman I share a programmatic fascination for that which is situated outside the image, that which happens or takes place off-scene. Another common interest shared by Herman and Sven certainly concerns the issue of language and communication and I am no longer considering this interest from a documentary perspective, but on a much more profound level: the three of us all ask the same question, namely what, in effect, is truth? What can be said or expressed in or by language, and what cannot? And what does it mean to confront the now as a filmmaker who is interested in using history? What does it mean to be present? Anouk and I, finally, share a very specific passion for the work of certain filmmakers Marguerite Duras and Chantal Akerman immediately come to mind here. But this is probably closely related to the question of the hors-champ. Anyway thats how I see it Im sure different people will tell you different things.
anouk de ClerCq

I feel strongly connected with all three Auguste Orts members for sure but for very different reasons, and in very different ways too. Svens work and mine, for instance, share an evident debt to the documentary tradition, and the documentary dimension certainly also plays a part in Hermans work but it seems wholly absent from what
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This reminds me of a conversation we Willem Oorebeek, Herman, Dieter and myself once had a while ago, one that revolved around the interrogation of the notion of an empty image. One of the questions we asked ourselves then was whether a peopleless image of desolation really is an empty image. What happens when there is nothing to be seen in the way of living persons, and what is it exactly that were looking at when were looking at a black image? Does that
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constitute emptiness? Can a black image depict (or be) a space at all, or is it always a two-dimensional plane? Those are some of the topics I discuss with Herman first and foremost and I am thinking here specifically of his Futur Antrieur (2007), in which you also participated4
dieter roelstraete

dieter roelstraete

Actually, I only very recently found out that you were originally trained as a musician.
anouk de ClerCq

4.
For much of its fifteen minutes, there is nothing much to see in Futur Antrieur apart from faint flickering lights traveling across the deep-black picture plane to the deafening sound of a noise band performing live on stage in the pitch dark.

I did hors champ.

Herman asselbergHs

Thats not quite true you were on camera, in the frame.

dieter roelstraete

Well, that is a very long time ago too! But of course these things continue to exert an influence of some sort. True enough, I did study piano, and I often think that there is some connection between what I do and the black and white pattern of a piano keyboard...
sven augustijnen

Maybe so but still invisible.

anouk de ClerCq

Well, those are exactly the types of questions that show up very regularly in the letters that we have been writing to each other the correspondence after which this exhibition was named Now, as for Sven, we talk about his film Johan quite a bit: what I find especially fascinating in that portrait in particular is the depiction of language as it escapes our grasp how humans can quite literally get stuck in between words.5 Johan cant seem to get ahold of language; it constantly eludes him, yet he still (very much) wants to communicate. And this space in between words, thats where it all happens for me. As for my affinity with Manons work, I could not have put it any clearer: we are both fascinated with what happens off-scene, hors champ, outside the picture frame. But what I think is the one quality that perhaps unites all of our practices is the following: we make films people can listen to, or for people to listen to. Sound is a very important aspect of all our work.
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And I am very happy to assure you that my next film, finally, will be very musical! So in that sense it looks like Im reconnecting with that particular aspect of Auguste Orts collective spirit Although I have made a couple of films in the past that were strongly musical in character theyre just not as well known: most people think my work really starts with Lcole des Pickpockets (2000). At any rate, it is true that, in my case, the soundtrack has also always been of the utmost importance and it is very satisfying to rediscover that partly forgotten or eclipsed dimension of my own practice.
manon de boer

5.
Johan, part documentary, part portrait, was shot during an aphasia patients appointment with a speech therapist. It records the patients quotidian struggle with language.

But when we talk about the soundtrack in your work, we mean the primacy, or at least the prominence, of the text and the voice.
sven augustijnen

Certainly, it is true that the process of editing my films is almost exclusively based on textual elements the image really only seems to perform a secondary role in this matter. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster once told me that, until she had seen one of my films, shed never seen a film
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as coherent and unified that didnt include a single bon plan. What happens to the image in my films could, in a sense, be called deconstruction on the basis of the text: the image takes its cues from the text.
Herman asselbergHs

dedication to small-scale action Thats what its about for me.

manon de boer

Which film was Dominique talking about?

sven augustijnen

To be able to retain control over ones own production is a very important element indeed and not just a pragmatic one: those are fundamental questions.
dieter roelstraete

une Femme entreprenante: the building, around which the entire film revolves, does not once appear in its entirety, that is to say properly.6 All we ever get to see of it are fragments, as a background of sorts to whoever stands in front of it to talk about it endlessly, inexhaustibly.
dieter roelstraete

6.
Une Femme Entreprenante is both a portrait of a contemporary art center coming into being (the present day Wiels in the Brussels municipality of Vorst) and a portrait of Sophie Le Clercq, the enterprising woman who is the driving force behind the steady transformation of a former brewery into the said art center.

Manon already mentioned the events you organize here at the Beursschouwburg for instance the so-called Auguste Orts Evenings. What motivates you to organize events like these?
Herman asselbergHs

Films to listen to, or films that should be read rather than viewed this is also something you have mentioned before, Herman.
Herman asselbergHs

For us they are opportunities (first and foremost, Id almost say) to screen and view those films that have inspired us, or matter to us in some way or other.
manon de boer

Indeed. And those are all formal aspects of the work which youre correct to point out as somehow shared, but for me personally it has been great to be part of a small group of people who want things differently, and who want different things people who seek to formulate an alternative to mainstream ways of producing and viewing images. This is obviously where my own formation or background as a writer and alternative film programmer comes into play. For me Auguste Orts activities are perhaps the most important element; the organization and its actions are of the very essence for me. To be in control of the creative process, whether personally or as a small group of like-minded people, the dialogical aspect, the
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And theyre very different events too. The first such evening, for example, almost functioned as one big multimedia installation.
Herman asselbergHs

7.
Pixelspleen, a collaborative project with Jerry Galle, revolves around two pixels floating in the dark a resolutely minimalist work.

Exactly, when Anouks Pixelspleen (2007) first premiered.7 We were looking to create an appropriate environment for the whole event, and ended up putting together a program of similarly minimal works mostly black and white imagery, that is.
anouk de ClerCq

What was particularly beautiful then was how seamlessly one thing flowed into the other, walking from a television interview with Marguerite Duras, originally aired on Belgian television ages ago, into Zen for Film by Nam June Paik And the evenings proceedings kicked off with a countdown of On
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Kawaras One Million years.

Herman asselbergHs

Herman asselbergHs

Yes, read out loud by an actor who was sitting in complete darkness on the stage, reading numbers for the entire evening, also while other works were being shown.
sven augustijnen

And the way in which our productions come into their own is very different from, that is to say much freer than, the world of mainstream filmmaking.
manon de boer

Id like to come back to this discussion of the manifesto though... To a certain extent Id like to think of the basic tenet of Auguste Orts program to seize (and retain) control over the production and distribution of ones own work as a fundamentally political gesture. That, for me, is already quite sufficient as a manifesto of sorts.
Herman asselbergHs

And thats perhaps the defining contradiction of an organization such as Auguste Orts: we keep telling ourselves, and we keep telling you, that there is no such thing as a manifesto, but perhaps the manifesto quite simply consists in the mere fact of our existence. Once again, for me Auguste Orts is all about the possibility of producing, providing, and participating in alternative models of image making to counter the standard procedures with which (moving) images are so often dealt with. There is a certain degree of bricolage to what we do; were miles away from the professionalism that reigns supreme in the established image industry, but of course that doesnt mean that were not aspiring after our own idea of professionalism
marie logie

And thats probably because most of us take our experiences as inhabitants of the system of visual arts as our point of departure... The world of film and the world of visual arts are two very different structures, and very often thats where a lot of practical problems take root. All of us either work as or identify ourselves as visual artists, but the nature of our work is such that were somehow forced to turn to the world of film in search of support, funds, and expertise. And so we become exposed to the world of professional film production and that can be a very alienating experience, to us at least.
dieter roelstraete

Well, perhaps this ambiguity is exactly what helps to define the spirit of Auguste Orts. But could you perhaps tell me what you have found instructive, having operated in these two distinct spheres for such a long time now? What has the world of film taught you that the world of art hasnt, and vice versa?
anouk de ClerCq

Auguste Orts is all about a different conception of producing there is a whole other idea at work here of what it means to be a producer.
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One qualitative distinction of course concerns the very different status accorded the physical space surrounding the moving image in the film world and the world of visual art respectively. Within the context of the arts, the space in which, say, a moving image is projected is (or can be) as much part of the artwork as the moving image itself. As an artist, you have an active part in shaping that
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space, in creating or determining the conditions in which your work is shown; if youre operating in a more traditional film milieu however, things are quite different. As soon as a film or video is shown within a visual arts context, it inevitably and necessarily becomes a spatial work, an installation even. Even if you just decide to show your work in a black box that is built for the occasion, you still engage a sculptural element. The space around the image becomes important, or starts to matter and I think that that is something that interests us all.
manon de boer

more conventional documentary tradition, it is very often considered too much of a stretch when you start asking these questions, or when metareflections such as these start to trickle into your scenario. In any case, for a visual artist it seems much more obvious to ask these kinds of questions; you automatically interrogate the medium in which you work. That, for me, is one of the defining differences from operating within the established world of film.
Herman asselbergHs

Another thing that is often lacking in traditional film culture is a meta-level from which to consider or comment upon the medium of film as such a certain kind of mediatic self-awareness so to speak. And thats exactly the direction our work is often inclined to take: towards such questions as what is an image?, what is sound?, what is film? That may all sound terribly formal or formalist, but asking those questions very often seems to lead (paradoxically, perhaps) towards a certain poetic treatment if we can still use such a tired term as poetic of course!
dieter roelstraete

Absolutely I think its a very important term that is in dire need of revaluation and redemption. But anyway...
manon de boer

And the sphere of visual arts is one that constantly encourages one to question the medium: to ask oneself what is film? is a very quotidian question and thats a good thing. Whereas in the documentary and feature film milieu the same rigid, antiquated ideas continue to hold sway. If you look at the art world, it becomes immediately clear that film can mean very different things: it can last thirty seconds, twelve minutes or a full hour and a half; it can be projected onto a wall or screen, but it can also be shown on a laptop. Why, it can even be screened in a cinema! Yet still I often get to meet people for whom all of this doesnt have anything to do with film at all. They plainly ask me what it is that Im doing, even though it has long been very clear to me and my colleagues that what Im doing is simply film
sven augustijnen

And for me this aspect of a poetic formalism or formal lyricism constitutes a micropolitics in this sense Id like to think along the lines of Suely Rolniks thought. The problem is that, within a
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Lets not forget, however, that the reverse is just as likely to happen still I very often get asked whether what I do should qualify as art at all. Many people within the art world think I just make ordinary, straightforward documentaries. . .
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Which just goes to show that the distinction between film and visual art is no longer a very relevant one, at least not for me. Of course things are rather different when it comes down to questions of production and financing, but thats about it. For me, all these things are just part of life culture is a part of life. I dont really know the problem of conflicting disciplines or contrasting media.
dieter roelstraete

Obviously, no one is ever really at home within one single medium. All cultural practitioners more or less operate in a twilight zone where two or more worlds collide or pass by each other that is the very definition of the wealth and promiscuity of contemporary culture.
anouk de ClerCq

Id like to add a nuance of a practical nature though. The film world has a much longer, and much more deeply rooted tradition of professionalism. And lets not forget that Auguste Orts was originally founded to meet a practical demand for more professionalism, or more professionalization. Perhaps thats the reason why, in the institutional sphere of visual arts, collectives are much more defined in terms of affinities on the level of content
manon de boer

something about both the image and life in general seems much more direct to me than what we get to experience in the more narrow confines of the visual arts world. I love painting and sculpture very much indeed, but it is the directness of the filmic language that draws me to cinema in particular: its subjects are much more easily situated in life itself simply because, as a filmmaker, you work with a living entity, you belabor life itself, whereas other media are by their very nature forced to rely on abstract translations of life. That said, I have to admit that I really enjoy showing my work in a visual arts context precisely because of the distance it creates the distanciation of the artwork, that which it represents, and from where it comes from.
Herman asselbergHs

For me, film as a medium offers an opportunity to talk rather directly about life, not just in the concrete sense of peoples lives, but also on a more abstract, existential level to talk about time, for instance, both formally and on the level of content. When you look at the films of Duras or Godard for instance the way in which their films tell us
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It seems to me that the moving image is much more deeply embedded in our daily life anyway, it is an integral part of our society much more so than the codes of contemporary art I would say. And thats why Im interested in film that is to say, Im interested in questioning the self-evidence of sound and image in sound and image, or with sounds and images. Im looking to render the familiar strange.
dieter roelstraete

Hmm... Ironically enough, it is the exact reverse that has always drawn me to art: its distance from daily life the fact that (as you rightly point out) art is never wholly part of society, that it always stands at a slight remove from the world and life in general. Now the fact of films perceived proximity to life may well be related to its essential truth claims.
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Manon, have you ever made a film in which people did not appear?
manon de boer

No.
dieter roelstraete

One motive Id like to look at a little more closely concerns the issue, if not the problem, of language and communication in your work or at least something that is closely related to it: the question of human presence. Manons and Svens films centrally revolve around human presence; you could say they are part of an almost classical tradition of portraiture. The work of Anouk and Herman, on the other hand, is marked by an almost complete negation of human presence: depictions of the human figure seem almost taboo in your work unless Im misreading the work, which you could say depicts human absence. In Hermans Altogether from 2008, for instance, we only get to see one actress and even there your picture of the human is limited to a couple of seconds looking at the back of somebodys head. The extras remain shrouded in quasi-invisibility; they are no more than a misty backdrop and that too seems typical of your approach to the question (or problem) of human figuration. And turning to Anouks filmography well, when was the last time you used a human being? I think that must have been Whoosh, from 2001. Why have you chosen to bid farewell to the human figure?
anouk de ClerCq

course my hesitation towards using people in my films has to do with the nature of my work, which is digital animation and that inevitably implies a measure of abstraction. I create virtual spaces, and I create them out of nothing so they are always also empty spaces to start with that is probably where the architectural element slips into my work, which is a strong one. They are also always mental spaces: they are depictions of what takes place inside my head, so to speak, and a human figure never really belongs there. The virtual equals the digital; I cant see how a human figure could ever fit in there, there simply is no room for him or her. All you can do is allude to human presence by way of symbols or symbolization. I gave it another try with Pang (2005) though, but there again I realized that the combination of digital abstraction and human figuration makes for a terrific battle.
dieter roelstraete

8.
For more information on Oops wrong planet, see page 111 & 129.

Id like you to talk a little more about Oops wrong planet (2009). In the accompanying publication the theme of autism is broached you could almost regard it as a paradigm of a certain refusal to interact or communicate with humans.8 Is there some causal relationship between your interest in the pathological condition of autism and your artistic preference for scenes of peopleless desolation?
anouk de ClerCq

Youre right about Whoosh but even there you can hardly recognize the figure in question, just because of the way he moves his head... Now of
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First of all, I should say I was invited to work around the theme of autism not an easy prospect of course, if you dont make documentary films. So what I did instead was to depart from a minimal concept of the autistic reflex that I think
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all of us can identify with (if not call our own) a little bit in the spirit of the traditional, and admittedly problematic, comparison of the artistic with the autistic personality: both tend to recoil from the world outside and prefer to live in a mental world of their own making... And if, like me, youre constantly immersed in the world of three-dimensional animation technology geared, precisely, at making worlds well, its easy to see how one can actually form some kind of inner picture of the autistic impulses of someone who cant deal with the daily barrage of perceptual input, with the exhausting complexity and heterogeneity of the world around him or her. Autism implies reduction, structuring abstraction. So there is definitely a comparison with what I do there. Building protective structures within which one can regain some degree of control over ones life, so that it becomes more livable, more tolerable thats not so terribly different from the manufacture of so-called virtual worlds. In the first instance, Oops wrong planet depicts the sensuous, undulating landscape of another planet where, if only for eight minutes, one can feel at home or at rest at least thats how I feel. An in-between that allows you to escape the excess of everything around you.
dieter roelstraete

treatment of the human figure.

Herman asselbergHs

For me there is a connection here with what Manon mentioned earlier with regards to film as a privileged medium for the investigation of everyday life. I completely agree, but for me this does not mean that I focus on the depiction of life. To show images or pictures, or even reveal the world does not necessarily mean youre filming all those things that are visible in everyday life that seems to me a rather naive view. A film reflects upon life by way of an elaborate construct, through shortcuts and detours, through the disjunction of soundtrack and image-track for instance, or any other bricolage of sounds and images and not simply by showing a slice of reality.
manon de boer

Obviously, thats also how I meant it.

Herman asselbergHs

Herman, in your work the problem of (the exclusion of) human presence is complicated by the emphatic role played by the human voice and very often an especially eloquent one too, one that invites repeated listening. There are plenty of voice-overs in your film, and they usually sound close rather than distant a jarring contrast with your visual
40

And that, I think, is my point of departure. I seek to problematize the presumed or self-evident transparency of the image, complicate it and the issue of human presence plays a key role in this delusion of naturalness, because anything that claims to be lifelike in film is usually embodied by people, by film characters. Of course, Im thinking of the human face first and foremost, traditionally regarded as the barometer of our inner feelings, the screen onto which the spectator can project his or her emotions, or from which emotions can be read. Manon, you make these gorgeous portraits of people you know or dont know; for me, these films touch upon the deeply problematic, genre-specific assumption that, by looking at someones face long
41

enough, youll be able to get to know them better, that you can read people by way of the camera eye and of course your films also cast doubt on the validity of such an assumption.
manon de boer

It is true that I am interested, ultimately, in a certain idea of illegibility the inability to truly decipher things. Sure enough, you can read something but it is important that whatever is read can also be doubted.
Herman asselbergHs

10.
For more information on Resonating Surfaces, see page 106 & 125

So here we appear to be using different strategies to achieve the same goal: you problematize certain concepts by showing; I problematize the same concepts by evacuating, by emptying the image or allowing the image to be eroded. Mine is a strategy of suggestion and evocation and this is where the voice-over comes into play: the disembodied voice of a human narrator, of an actor who never appears on screen, accompanying a depopulated picture of desolation, enables me to render the presence of absence as one of the central features of my work. This tension between the invisible and the audible, between evacuation and evocation, strikes me as an appropriate, honest approach to reality: it does not hide the facts of its own mediation.
dieter roelstraete

11.
For more information on Le Guide du Parc, see page 138. In Lcole des Pickpockets, Augustijnen records the initiation of a nameless amateur into the art of stealing by two apparent pickpocket professionals.

9.
In this 35mm film, de Boer follows violinist George Van Dam through five different takes of the fourth movement of a Bartk violin sonata, producing a seamlesssounding soundtrack but a disjointed image sequence.

In Manons work we witness the physical subversion of films truth claims through the disjunction of image and sound. Presto, Perfect Sound is an almost literal demonstration of the power of that discontinuity we could even call it the ultimate theme of the film.9 The portrait films often revert to using a similar technique, but less directly
42

or literally so: whenever we see Suely Rolnik in resonating Surfaces (2005), we dont hear her (even when shes speaking), and whenever we hear her speak, we dont see her, but look at something else instead.10 Never do the two aspects fully converge there is no closure, so to speak. As for Svens work, it seems that a similar discontinuity is at work especially in Lcole des Pickpockets and Le Guide du Parc (2001) in the gradual, compelling obfuscation of the relationship between truth and fiction. Both films begin on a very direct, didactic tone: filmmaker, protagonist, and spectator set out to explore the park together, or to learn the basics of robbing people.11 And so the film moves along until it reaches a certain point where it seems to break in two halves, which leads the viewer to question the good faith with which he or she has watched the first part of the film how authentic were the documentary truth claims initially made? So the initial impulse of the work seems rooted in the tradition of reportage: we are ready to be instructed, to learn something and the suggestion that we are ready to do so as a collective seems rather important. And then all of a sudden something happens: the gay cruisers in the park continue to increase in numbers until a critical threshold is reached where youre forced to ask yourself: what am I looking at exactly, and what have I been looking at so far? The same notion of discontinuity is displaced, in other words, to the (highly variable) contrast between intricate staging and straightforward registration, whereas in Manons work it is often simply a matter of decoupling sound and vision the material facts,
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if you will, of the very medium of film. Or else language enacts this process of decoupling, of disassembly: Rolnik, who is Brazilian, speaking about Brazilian songs (so sung in Portuguese) in her adopted French; Sylvia Kristel, who is Dutch, reminiscing about her life in Los Angeles in French... This is probably a good moment to talk about your relationships with the protagonists of your movies, whether they are actors or not obviously a crucial distinction.
sven augustijnen

manon de boer

Your characterization of the work certainly seems apt enough. And I certainly dont share Hermans reservations with regards to the depiction of people quite the contrary. The deeper my involvement with the film medium, the more Ive come to understand and realize that the question of human presence is a very fundamental one for me.
Herman asselbergHs

But you really use people, whereas Manons films seem to revolve much more around ideas of intimacy and reciprocality.
dieter roelstraete

12.
The reference here is to de Boers Sylvia Kristel Paris, a portrait of the eponymous Dutch actress still best remembered for her role as emmanuelle in the 70s soft porn classic of the same name.

Intimacy is a big part of Manons work, but there is no denying the strong sense of distance and distanciation that likewise informs the work.
manon de boer

Many of the people in my films I know very well, yet there is an important quality of distance in the image I make of them.
Herman asselbergHs

Im interested in the fact that, even though you hear or see someone tell his or her story, and even though this may well be someone you know well or you think you know well, you still end up realizing that you dont know the person in question at all. Here again, I believe film simply reflects the facts of life: were all very familiar with the unsettling feeling of knowing someone, only to accept that we actually dont know him or her because people change, because we change And what matters most to me is a readiness or openness to accept such a fact: that people can be very different from who you think they are or were. Sylvia Kristel is obviously a strong example: we all have some picture or other of Sylvia Kristel, and its very often a rather rigid one what is crucial to me is that this certainty can be dislodged, that we are forced to cast doubt on that which weve held fast to for the longest time.12 She may be telling two very different stories of her life, but there is no way of telling which one is true and truth, in the end, is not what this is about. As a viewer, you are thus inevitably led to review the image you have formed of someone over the years. This is a recurring dynamic in most of my films, though it obviously takes on different shapes. In any case, this is also something that is of great importance to me on a personal level: to take into account the possibility that someone can, may or will change to accept that we cant allow ourselves to have too static an image of someone.
anouk de ClerCq

That I understand but Im talking about your modus operandi first and foremost.
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When I look at Manons films of people saying nothing, of just blankly staring into space or looking
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out of the window, it strikes me as very intimate. Much like watching someone who is listening to music and is completely enraptured, almost literally carried away thats when people are often most vulnerable. And thats exactly what I often think about when I see the people who feature in your work: its like catching them unaware, in their most private moments of inner contemplation. That, for me, is the very height of intimacy.
manon de boer

until you reach a point where your actors nonverbal behavior starts to undermine and contradict whatever they say. And the more you zoom in on them, the higher our expectation that something has to happen becomes.
Herman asselbergHs

Yet there remains a certain distance; I am not interested in voyeurism. You could say, instead, that the people in my films become projection screens: we project all kinds of moods and emotions onto their faces and bodies. Moreover, they know theyre being filmed, and theyre very much aware of that. Now as to continue the discussion of discontinuity and disruption of sound and image: for me, the human voice is a very powerful symbol of bodily, human presence. By limiting human presence to that of a voice, this voice itself becomes a body it certainly invokes the body. So here I am not merely interested in what this voice says or has to say, but also in the way it speaks, in the many meanings within timbre: its not only about what we see, but also about what we dont see in the portraits I make of certain individuals, that is.
anouk de ClerCq

And thats precisely what I mean when I talk about using people, abusing them even. And thats why I linked Sven to Belgiums own version of Sasha Baron Cohens Borat character a couple of weeks ago
anouk de ClerCq

If you film people long enough, theyll just end up unmasking themselves.
manon de boer

Yes, but does that mean we get to see the real them? Thats the question I would like to ask.
anouk de ClerCq

Well, you can at least give it a try. And Sven definitely has a way of gently pushing people to a critical edge where they seem ready to disclose some secret or other, if only the secret of their personal motivations. At least thats what it looks like
manon de boer

This inevitably reminds me of Marguerite Duras: I can no longer read her books without hearing her voice in my head to the point where I can hardly hear my own voice anymore. She really is the only author who gives me that sensation. Sven, you also film people for extended periods of time,
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And that is obviously related to issues of power. Because that is one thing that I see reappear in most, if not all of your films a preoccupation with power.
sven augustijnen

With discourse parading as power, thats for sure.

Herman asselbergHs

It always looks like the people in your films are not entirely clued into the films master plan or am I wrong?
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sven augustijnen

To be honest, Im not even clued into the master plan and I make those films!
Herman asselbergHs

Lcole des Pickpockets these hesitations and ambiguities are even more emphatically present.
sven augustijnen

I mean to say that you often interview people who end up telling us things they should probably not have told anyone.
anouk de ClerCq

Shock and awe!

sven augustijnen

Hmm If you look at Le Guide du Parc, youll see that the film is carried along by the movement of two or more bodies, and the gentle directions that the guide of the park appears to suggest begs the question as to who is guiding whom along: am I leading this strange little dance (what with being the maker), or is the guide in charge? Is he the object of my film, or rather the subject? It is a deeply ambiguous interaction, devoid of a clear idea of intention or intentionality. To paraphrase the title of the film Im currently working on, Le Guide du Parc is haunted by a specter, an autonomous spirit of sorts that seems to lead somewhere. But I wonder about this direction as much as anyone else, and I dont really know whos leading who either
manon de boer

But we shouldnt overestimate this tactic of dissolving the frontiers between fiction and reality Im not so sure whether it is really a useful distinction Im starting to doubt its relevance, at least. My interest is triggered, first and foremost, by the fact that reality as a whole is nothing else, in the final analysis, than one giant construction, the building of which involves the countless thoughts, fantasies, dreams, and desires of everyone whos involved in giving shape to this reality. In this sense, directing a film (or any other discursive activity for that matter) acquires a certain exemplary quality: you could say that by its very definition, film is always already implicated in the conception of the world as a discursive construct.
marie logie

That is probably also a consequence of a very conscious choice to work with one actor, or at least zoom in on one person in particular: they quickly give the impression that they know how things are working, or at least they appear to know whats what. And that of course in turn leads us back to doubt the veracity of what you show us. Is it real, or are we just watching a certain fiction unfold? In
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In Johan there is one scene in particular that is quite symbolic: the one where you, the protagonist, react to the comment (made hors champ, we should add) that its for a documentary, for television. People allow their on-screen behavior to be influenced by the consideration whether something is made for documentary purposes or not.
anouk de ClerCq

And this then leads them to appropriate and inhabit certain behavioral codes.
sven augustijnen

Theres no avoiding such a transformation in the subject: as soon as the camera rolls, a certain magic is put to work. And that is certainly also a factor in Manons work, especially when it concerns 16mm
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or 35mm film: the sheer physicality of film rolling, the buzzing of the camera Were all aware of films power of enchantment.
manon de boer

Thats one reason why I choose not to interview people when or while Im filming them it completely changes the discourse. So that would be another reason to divorce sound and image.
marie logie

And of course your actors do not expect to be featured in a documentary.

manon de boer

Exactly, because they werent being filmed while they were talking. There is a strong sense of staging to the whole event.
dieter roelstraete

Thats why they have an almost majestic, official quality for me. And thats not something that we would readily say of Svens films, which are much more informal in tone: towards the end of Lcole des Pickpockets, for instance, we can hear the artist laugh out loud its hard to imagine a filmmaker participating more actively in his film while remaining off-screen. And that impression is strengthened even more by the relentless mobility of the camera: Sven Augustijnen is a participant, thats what this heightened mobility seems to suggest. Here too one could locate a defining distinction in Manons work but also in Hermans. While the experience of immersion, in contrast, is again a particularly strong dimension in Anouks work

Another telling split inside Auguste Orts that I would like to talk about, concerns the problematic relation between the personal and the public as political domains. Herman and Anouks films seem closely related in this regard: Hermans films in particular confront the world. What matters most is how the world works (or, more appropriately, fails to work), not how we feel. So I wonder how Herman relates to the intense intimacy of Manons films (and, to a lesser extent, also of Svens films). The articulation of a direct, personal relationship with a given individual is very often a central feature of Manons work. Of course, a work like resonating Surfaces starts with a panoramic, sweeping view of So Paulo, an image very much like the view of an unidentified, fictional metropolis in Hermans AM/PM (2004), but both films go their separate ways as soon as a human being enters the image. Fittingly enough, the assertion that the personal is the political is easily identified with the legacy of someone like Suely Rolnik, the subject of Manons resonating Surfaces Now, looking at Hermans films, Im inclined to think the opposite: the personal is the personal and the political is the political and thats the end of it.
Herman asselbergHs

***
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I completely agree with your point about intimacy being the defining feature of Manons work but at the same time there is also quite a bit of distance in her work: a distant, cool gaze. My work isnt really concerned with the relationship between the filmmaker and the people in front of his or her camera Im interested in my, our relationship with images. I want to evoke (or invoke) the images
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that haunt our collective memory. Because these images not only represent our reality, they also help to shape it. We never just watch images; we also use them, and inhabit them. And these images in turn also inhabit us; they haunt us as well. That, for me, constitutes contemporary intimacy: our intimate dealings with the media. Right now I am working on a film titled After empire, in which (much like Black Box) I try to penetrate well-known archival images taken from YouTube.13 Is it possible to invoke the events of September 11th, 2001 in an extreme zoom of an amateur image made by witnesses on that day, rather than revert to the overly familiar sound & image bytes? Can I clarify the importance of the worldwide peace protests of March 15th, 2003 by showing only darkened images of the many rallies? Abstraction versus spectacle, in other words or texture and rhythm versus figuration. Fairuz, whos editing the film, is slowly going crazy Now to respond to your question: I very much believe the personal and the political are entwined in my daily interactions with the natural environment of images, both as a user/viewer and filmmaker. And I mean this quite literally: I venture into this environment to work with these images they are both my subject and material.
sven augustijnen

have also filmed a number of protests I have collected hours worth of Congolese protests here in Brussels, for instance, and two rallies in particular were mighty impressive, if only in terms of sheer volume and atmosphere The way in which the Congolese express themselves, verbally as well as physically they are certainly, literally, manifestations for sure.
Herman asselbergHs

13.
For more information on Black Box, see page 98 & 115.

I think that in terms of content, our work is marked by a number of convergences and commonalities: we both like to know not just how things work, but how the world works as a whole, how politics and history are inextricably linked, how reality is constructed a discursive construct first and foremost...
sven augustijnen

14.
Spectres is the title of Augustijnens current film project, unfinished at the time of writing (March 2010).

In this sense, our work is almost diametrically opposed.

Herman asselbergHs

Formally speaking, yes but not in terms of content

sven augustijnen

Thats correct. For my most recent film project, I

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In Spectres I try to hound down the ghosts that haunt Belgiums colonial past, and Ive filmed a couple of people who have lived through or experienced this past, in some way or other.14 But I dont use any historical images from that period I only use language to evoke certain events or chapters from that history, the language of various witnesses and protagonists, their memories and confrontations with contemporaries... So for me as well, the images that are central to the story are absent, invisible. Take the execution of Patrice Lumumba for instance: no images or visual records were made of this particular event. There are a lot of images out there quite like it, or images that are closely related to this event, but I have chosen not to use them the execution of Lumumba is something that is only being spoken about. The
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crucial image, in other words (and this of course sounds paradoxical), is explicitly absent. So you could say that ours are two diametrically opposed practices indeed, yet both are committed to the problematization of the same idea of visualizing absence or presence.
dieter roelstraete

landscapes as open invitations for such musings and for that you need space.
dieter roelstraete

Spectres also references the specter of communism that haunted Europe exactly at the time when Belgium embarked upon its ill-fated colonial adventure as well as Jacques Derridas Spectres de Marx, in which Derrida launches the concept of an hauntology. Theres quite a few phantoms that haunt Auguste Orts it seems!
anouk de ClerCq

Its also interesting to witness how your work alludes to (or makes use of) the double meaning of animation as a technique, first and foremost, but also as a method for inflating an empty space with a certain animus or spirit.
anouk de ClerCq

Well, isnt that exactly what Auguste Orts is a phantom?

dieter roelstraete

Anouk, the peculiarly dark nature of your interest in architecture and spatial structures bespeaks a similarly morbid mindset: the inner or outer spaces that you prefer to explore in your films are not exactly sunny... They are literally animated by a dark (or darkening) spirit, so to speak, like ghost towns.
anouk de ClerCq

Its not because my work regularly features lots of dark, empty spaces that it should be read as dark in the literary sense of the word. Are people who like to gaze at stars at night ever called morbid? I dont think so quite the opposite. What do people do when they stare into the distance of a vast, desolate landscape or a starry sky? Precisely, they think, reflect, muse. Id like to think of my digital
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That interpretation reminds me of what Manon mentioned before about the people in her portrait films how their faces function like projection screens. The same could be said of the spaces that occupy so much space in my work: you can imagine walking around in them, but you can also project all kinds of ideas and thoughts onto them. That, however, requires their idealized emptiness you cant have other people walking around in them and obstructing your view, so to speak. I work with 3D animation because, by its very definition, it requires starting from scratch the blank slate of an empty space that invites building. So in that sense, Im perhaps more of an architect, a builder of environments, than a video maker. In Building (2003), for instance, I started from an existing structure, wondering how an architect would see his or her own building in his or her dreams. With Oh (2010) I wanted to reanimate the ambitious, utopian spirit of tienne-Louis Boulle. In both cases, Ive tried to give life to an architects dream (Im obviously aware of the tension between the virtual and the concretely real in this regard), and in both cases it has resulted in haunted houses structures that shelter or house spirits. Light
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is not wholly absent in either of them: my interest concerns the play of light and dark precisely, black and white, and the complex energies that are released in it. And that, in the final analysis, is also what takes place in a movie theater: the room is darkened so that a beam of light can travel across it, haunt it, unfold an entirely new world on a twodimensional white plane. This tension between the two- and the three-dimensional is also what guarantees the suggestion of depth.

manon de boer

***

Id like to briefly return to an earlier remark, when Sven was mentioning his reservations vis--vis the use of archival images and it also has do with animation I think. Like Sven, I never use existing, archival footage; in my work as well, language conjures or brings to life that which is being talked about this is very much the case when Suely Rolnik reminisces about Gilles Deleuze for instance. What interests me here is the construction of history in the present, which ultimately assures both its plasticity and mobility.
dieter roelstraete

So here we encounter the spirit and shared strategy of avoidance once again: a voice confronts us in an attempt to reconstruct past events, but the images do not quite follow they lag behind, or remain wholly absent.
manon de boer

Yes, they remain a mere surface effect impenetrable, opaque.

Herman asselbergHs

15.
Capsular is an oblique portrait of Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, its special status as a geopolitical security concern, symbolic of the deep chasm between two continents, between over exposed haves and unseen have-nots.

My question is a very similar one: what can we depict of the present? How can we conjure the present without relapsing into the habits of a traditionally journalistic approach? When I visited Ceuta in preparation of Capsular (2006), I met some refugees, had a few conversations with some of them, saw pretty much everything there is to see, but at no point did I feel an urge or need to film the whole thing that which we are so very familiar with anyway.15 Why show yet more of the same? Of course you could film all these familiar scenes, assess them afterwards, and then decide not show
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them but I couldnt bring myself to do even that.

dieter roelstraete

This reminds me of a thought I had when I last saw one of your films and paid close attention to the end credits: one person took care of the camera, another of the sound, yet another for the editing, etc. Your name first only showed up as the one who had authored the text, and this involuntarily led me to ask myself the question: how is a book different from a film for you? This may sound crude and naive, but it is a question I likewise would like to address to Manon and Sven, whose work is often also very textual. When I look at a project such as Svens Les Demoiselles de Bruxelles (2008), for instance, I am of course struck by the literary qualities first and foremost the images that accompanied the exhibition (which I didnt see, unfortunately) I can only imagine.16 And Herman, you have of course also been active as a writer, theorist, and critic for a long time A little while back you told me that the great thing about cinema is that we can take place in a movie theater and be served something very different from what we normally expect, something to listen to rather than look at, for instance. Certainly a rich and intriguing idea, but it inevitably begs the question
Herman asselbergHs

beam of light projected onto a screen, a dark space, people alone together or together alone, the volume of the sound... Even a minimally defined apparatus enables the sharpening of our hearing in fact, looking means sharpening our hearing.
anouk de ClerCq

And this in turn facilitates a very different form of attention than a conventionally visual one a quieter type of attention to be sure.
Herman asselbergHs

17.
On the occasion of their exhibition at LuX 28 in London, Asselberghs, Augustijnen, de Boer, and De Clercq were invited to screen their work at Tate Modern; following the screening on October 1, 2008, a round table was organized at the Tates Starr auditorium a public event, as opposed to the present round table conversation, which was conducted privately. See http://www.tate. org.uk/modern/ eventseducation/ film/15943.htm.

16.
Les Demoiselles de Bruxelles is made up of a series of photographs, a publication, and an installationlike environment. The book includes an essay by a noted psychiatrist on King Leopold IIs sexual biography, a fragment from the memoirs of Leopolds valet, and a programmatic text by the artist himself on the coincidences of history.

For me, its definitely about the echo, our memory, or one version of the cinematic experience, thats for sure. And that, in retrospect, is certainly what I remember from our round table at Tate Modern in London two years back: that all of us, in some way or other, are essentially concerned with a culture of attention and attentiveness.17 With films that take time, test patience, dont necessarily show much, or too much instead; films you have to listen to very attentively, or look at with great care Demanding work, in other words. And for me, this is all related to the idea of the alternative an alternative for the dominant forms of image production that often aim at distraction, the dispersal of attention, instead.
dieter roelstraete

Why I need images at all? Youre not the first to be asking me that question whether a soundtrack wouldnt suffice, in effect But my point is precisely that I need the entire apparatus of the cinema to convince the audience to listen more attentively and carefully. That may sound paradoxical, but I deeply believe in the potency of the film medium: a
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Which helps to explain the decisively antispectacular nature of your work in particular.
Herman asselbergHs

And in my case this is again connected with my reluctance or refusal to film or depict people. It is true that I continuously look for more and more ways to either avoid or subvert spectacle and spectacularization, and the evacuation of human
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presence or the use of dark, hardly legible images are part of that quest. And the same goes for my use of voice-overs and relatively large amounts of text. But to conclude that I could just as well write a book
dieter roelstraete

Lets say I was referring to the tradition of the film essay writing with the camera, if you wish. The essayistic spirit certainly also animates much of Svens work. Now, going back to the subject of spirits and ghosts, and to Derridas hauntology: Derrida certainly seems a relevant reference when discussing your quasi-programmatic suspicion of all language. In Anouks work, the ghost or specter also lives on in the notion of a wrong planet in the chimerical image of a sonorous starry sky. And in your correspondence with the person suffering from autism you name science fiction as your favorite film genre. Now I dont go to the movies very often myself in fact, hardly ever yet
Herman asselbergHs

Aha! Now is the time to tell us why Ive heard you say this so often in the past...
dieter roelstraete

You mean about my reluctance to go to the cinema, to see movies even? Its probably not a bad idea to explain to you what I mean it does have bearing on our conversation to be sure, and it certainly relates to the issue of attention, as it does with the changing culture of film. I used to go to the cinema quite often in the past, and really used to love it... But perhaps thats already where the problem starts, at least for me: in the very expression of going to the movies to have to go there, queue for a ticket,
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then queue for a good spot in the theater, which youre never sure of (not something thats likely to happen in a museum), join a mass of people who all want the same best seat, to have to sit there in the dark, amidst all these strangers only to completely deliver myself to the whims and wills of the producer or director? No, I cant seem to take that soft, gentle tyranny anymore, not in the same way it really has to be worth the trouble, and thats never the case anymore it seems. And why cant a film just last ten minutes, for instance? That, precisely, is what the art worlds adoption of film has made possible: a movie that lasts no longer than ten minutes. But the rigid system of mainstream film culture on the other hand everything is so standardized: small wonder that the genie has long left the bottle! And if you dont want to partake in the film experience but you still want to see the film, theres really only one thing: watch the movie at home, on DVD played on a laptop! Frankly, Id rather not. In this sense, I really feel film is a highly inaccessible medium and that is doubly the case when youre talking about canonical film genres such as westerns and science fiction: film genres that seem to be able to exist only within the narrow, sclerotic confines of a certain tradition, or only work by virtue of the machinery of tradition. Of course there are still a lot of movies out there that I watch for the same reasons, and in the same way, as when I read a book like Derridas Spectres de Marx: for purposes of study, research, enlightenment. These are the kind of film experiences which invite the copious taking of notes and that means you probably want to watch those films in a well-lit
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room, remote control at hand: not precisely what youd call a film experience
Herman asselbergHs

I find it remarkable that you single out the solitude of the film experience especially... Ive never found that to be much of a problem, frankly; I almost always go to the movies alone. Cinema ceased being a social ritual for me decades ago
sven augustijnen

And I think that what you describe as a form of soft, gentle tyranny, we perceive much more as a liberation.
anouk de ClerCq

Yes, and as an invitation.

dieter roelstraete

OK, lets take a film like The Dark Knight for instance classic mainstream movie fodder that is being referred to on a couple of occasions in your correspondence Yes, I admit I did go see that film God only knows why though, as it was truly a tormenting experience, one of which I hardly remember anything today (and Im not sure whether I should feel happy about that or conned instead)... I think I saw three films in all in 2009, and one of those was Peter Watkins La Commune also a form of torture if you ask me, but for very different reasons.
sven augustijnen

Come on, surely that must have been a fantastic film experience?
dieter roelstraete

Well, I wont deny it was what you would call an experience, but I felt it was one for reasons that were not intrinsically related to the film as such,
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although it is of course difficult to argue what is intrinsic or extrinsic to film: I saw the film in the superbly curated night program of the 2008 Berlin Biennial, in a fantastic movie theater in Berlin, complete with a workers choir from Neuklln singing The International during the many breaks, the actors themselves were present at the screening... A meticulously staged event, in other words, successfully stretching the very format of film to its utmost limits but Im sad to say that, in the end, the staging or setting impressed me more than the film itself. Now the very expression, the film itself, of course demonstrates that here, we have long left the classic film experience behind we are probably already in the realm of visual arts, even if were still in the Poelzig-designed theaters of Babylon Mitte... And, of course, I can fully appreciate the film experience when it helps to break down the monotonous routine of many a gargantuan art exhibition Steve McQueens films offer brilliant examples of films efficiency in that regard: think of the piece he made for the British pavilion at the last Venice Biennial for instance, or of Caribs Leap/Western Deep, first shown at Documenta 11 in 2002... You just spent a whole day loafing around the Giardini, and then, at a precisely set time (for which you have made reservations earlier in the day), you are required to lock yourself into utter darkness for an uninterrupted half-hour stretch: quite a laborious process, but it certainly worked, and a lot obviously depended on the creation of the exact conditions conducive to maximal attention. These conditions veered towards the overly
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dramatic to be sure, and as such they almost acted as caricatures of directorial will. But at the end of the day you go home with the memory of a remarkably strong cinematic experience not just in the plainly visceral terms of a spectators response to having been at the mercy of the artist for what is both an inordinately long and relatively short time (I should also add that I thought the film itself was good, and opinions vary wildly on that score). After a long day of almost exclusively fragmentary, superficial impressions five seconds spent in front of this video, ten seconds in front of another suddenly this deep, steady submersion in utter eventlessness The reconstruction of cinematic conditions within the museum or art exhibit can have a very liberating effect, in other words. But contrast is a crucial factor here, and that may just as well be extrinsic
anouk de ClerCq

manon de boer

What Dieter was describing is really how the tyrannical experience of classical film can produce a very different effect in a very different context, such as that of the museum. Which obviously says a lot about the different ways in which we look at certain things in a museum, we are easily distracted, often in a hurry even. In the end you realize that the whole day you have seen nothing but fragments, until youre forced to watch something for a much longer amount of time But thats still very different from going to the movies, I would say!
dieter roelstraete

And to think that our first idea for our exhibition in Antwerp had been to devise a tight, coercive structure which would have required the viewers subjection to a precisely directed spectatorial regime of a kind that would not let you see the second work without you having finished viewing the first work Of course, one important factor has to do with the linear or finite nature of some of the work: certain films have beginnings and ends, and ideally you want a seated audience to see the film from beginning to end. Just like a real movie, in short. But just as many works lack such a linear logic: these are the kinds of films that people can just drop into.
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Lets look at the same story from a different angle. You could say that the artistic critique of the dominant modes of image production and consumption started out, in the mid-nineties, with a critique of speed and acceleration, with artists opting for slowness and deceleration instead; all of a sudden all these images were being slowed down, frozen exorcised. That is exactly why someone like Douglas Gordon truly is an emblematic artist, and why 24 Hour Psycho really is an icon, a powerful symbol of its time. Already then it seemed important to slow down, and luckily enough art was one of the first to step on the brakes. Thats also why, in the end, I sympathize deeply with your plea for an evacuation of the imagosphere: there is just way too much. There are just way too many images, they move too fast, theyre superfluous or of inferior quality, etc. a familiar lament. It is only logical that within this cultural context, slowness and emptiness are automatically accorded the accolades
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of belonging to, or clearing the path for, a critical countermovement of other imagings. For me, the terminal problem of contemporary cinema, especially in its mainstream manifestations, is its speed: no shot is allowed to last longer than a split second it drives me insane.
Herman asselbergHs

But thats precisely because you dont go to the movies often enough! If you would go more often, slowly, surely and imperceptibly, youd get used to the increases in editing speed.
dieter roelstraete

we do decide to submit ourselves to a certain visual experience, then certainly we dont want an exact or hyperbolic replica of the torment of everyday life? Im talking about the world of Endemol, Britney Spears, and seventeen thousand iPhone applications here Dont you think movement and dynamism are too often made out to be virtuous per se? Think of how used weve gotten to using the word static as an insult, as a surefire way to express our lack of enthusiasm for something
anouk de ClerCq

Used to? You mean conditioned!

Herman asselbergHs

No, you just get used to it.

marie logie

Youre up-to-date.
dieter roelstraete

Up-to-date? Excuse me thats sounds more like being very far behind to me. That is to say, Im really not interested in such a picture of contemporaneity. Its very clear that this acceleration cant go on forever. I am really not interested in the world that is portrayed in the type of mainstream films that weve been talking about, and I honestly dont think that world is interesting. Id rather have the world evoked by the immobile camera of Ingmar Bergman.
Herman asselbergHs

So what you like is to see the duplication of the movement of a visitor strolling through a museum If you say you like static cameras, it means that you want at least one element to be immobile or immobilized a little bit like the traditional work of art in a traditional museum, say, the sculpture around which crowds of people coalesce, mill, and dissolve.
Herman asselbergHs

I like how this conversation with the artists has suddenly turned into group therapy for the curator

***

says someone as hyperkinetic as you!

dieter roelstraete

But thats precisely my point: my whole life is hectic enough as it is, I would be stupid to naively desire its duplication by going to the movies! If
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sven augustijnen

Overall, I must say that so far we have tended to gloss over the immense diversity of expressions and practices that can be gathered under the rubric of film. In Cher Pourquoi Pas?, the project I developed for A Prior Magazine # 14, the references range from Michelangelo Antonionis Professione: reporter to Veilles darmes, Marcel Ophuls fourhour documentary.18 Both films deal with the problems of war reportage, but they treat it very differently. Whenever Im asked about the film experience that made the greatest impression on me, I often refer back to the super 8mm shorts my uncle used to shoot of his family, which he then projected during Christmas family dinners some years after his son had died in an accident Or I think of a big-screen projection of Andy Warhols Chelsea Girls, which I saw from start to finish
dieter roelstraete

18.
See http:// www.aprior.org/ assets/files/ Augustijnen CherPourquoi Pas.pdf

One of the key questions of this whole conversation for me concerns the idea of reflection: how does art relate to the world, and how do we want it to relate to the world? Do we want art to merely reflect reality, or rather reflect upon reality? Film occupies an exemplary, privileged role in this regard, precisely because of its mimetic potential, its proximity to (or implication in) the reproduction of reality: is it desirable at all that film should seek to mime reality? Perhaps it would be better to ignore or turn our backs to the world as we know it, to further its dismantling. Or perhaps we should just turn back the clock Anyway, for me the problem of film is located in its deep involvement in the industrial apparatus that is called upon to
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secure the continuation of certain status quo; the complicity of film in this enterprise is much bigger than that of art, which really occupies a relatively marginal position in all of this. I obviously do not want to deny the facts of arts integration into the global economy: art may be a marginal phenomenon overall, but it is still very close to the symbolic top of the worlds pyramidal structure Whereas a phenomenon such as The Dark Knight is much closer to its base, and probably is much more influential and powerful because of it that is one of the defining ambiguities of film. This is also where I would situate the problem of the art worlds desire to mimic the dynamics of the film world, of arts longing to become more like mainstream cinema, which is expressed in a shift in the economy of scale first and foremost I only have to invoke the name of an artist like Matthew Barney, who started out as a really interesting performance artist, to make my point: his slow descent into the abyss of a certain Hollywoodian mediocrity has an almost tragic dimension to it. And this is really where the ambiguity of film manifests itself as a machine for seduction. Now, on the other hand, we also have to acknowledge that over the last two decades, the art world has gradually expanded to become a refuge of sorts for all kinds of things that, back in the day, belonged to the realm of cinema things that were shown in movie theaters.
marie logie

Or on television even
dieter roelstraete

Indeed, what only thirty years ago could be seen

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both on television or in regular movie theaters has been forced into the much more peripheral spaces of art.
sven augustijnen

Yes, if you look back at the films made by Jef Cornelis for Belgian national television (so with a very broad audience in mind) Thats some pretty improbable stuff!
dieter roelstraete

Another particularly sensitive point in the transition from a visual arts practice to a more conventionally narrative film practice again has to do with the problem of people: many artists are simply not trained to work with real people, and their lack of directorial training can produce some pretty atrociously wooden acting. Many art films are often marred by poor acting management and it is of course also true that the art world can be singularly tolerant towards that which anywhere else would be disqualified as sheer incompetence.
anouk de ClerCq

fiction is the fact that the viewer is asked to imagine a situation beyond the immediate given, a world in which everything is still possible. And of course there is also the appeal of space of the dialectical play of the minute and insignificantly small (that is to say, the human) and the immeasurable scale of macrocosmic events, which are limitless and unlimited: its hard to think of a better mirror image for the world or reality at large That said, however, I have to add that Im not that interested in the cinematographic conventions of science fiction as a film genre the idea of science fiction is the thing for me.
Herman asselbergHs

Whereas for me science fiction is an especially grateful way to (indirectly) speak about the present, or address present-day conditions. Because all these books that are set in the year 3011, for instance...
manon de boer

Yes, but isnt that precisely because the classical language of film simply eludes the grasp of most visual artists? Its really a language issue I think: the language of directing, writing, tuning It all comes down to a question of vocabulary which is very different from just installing a camera at a given spot and letting the film roll, even though that can obviously produce interesting formal results. Classical film is no different from any other language: you have to learn how to speak and write it. But Id like to come back to your earlier remark about my love for science fiction you got interrupted there. What attracts me to science
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are in reality only talking about today. Sometimes very anecdotally so, but still.
anouk de ClerCq

The crucial difference being that science fiction allows you to move beyond the anecdote of both the present and the everyday perhaps more than any other genre we know of you can really strip down things to their bare-bone essentials. If only by virtue of locating the events at hand in an unspecified future time, you can get rid of a lot of circumstantial ballast and deal with the essence.
dieter roelstraete

Because the challenge posed to every artistic practice that wants to address the here and now is of course this: how long does the present last?
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When does it dissolve back into the past, or in the future instead? How soon is now? Ive spent quite a bit of time researching the love affair with the archeological paradigm in art recently the artist as historian or historiographer and there too one is led to ask: why are so many people looking back so obsessively? Why do we enjoy digging up the past so much? Now one of the explanations for this behavior has to be sought in the deplorable state of the present at least that is what I believe. And the historiographic mode in art in some way or other relieves us from the duty to really (that is to say directly, not indirectly) engage the present. Whereas this is precisely what Hermans films want to do, or seek to do, and thats why I think they are very topical and relevant indeed. Although theyre not very sunny or particularly optimistic of course perhaps that is why you use the color black so often...
Herman asselbergHs

is repeatedly called out in Altogether The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think (thats a one-liner from Virginia Woolfs diaries, by the way) is meant to sound just as hopeful: the black hole of the future and the unknown, the unpredictable character of what has yet to come, do not necessarily have to lead to despair, they can also signal the promising prospect of the undecidable as well as the undecided, the undefined. Although I do tend to address certain dark issues, I always try to make room for the affirmation of a sense of possibility, as Robert Musil put it so elegantly (as opposed to a sense of reality)
dieter roelstraete

But surely the color black doesnt always have to be equated with dark thoughts? A black image or an image of blackness is not always one of despair or lack of future...
dieter roelstraete

Thats not what Im talking about I really mean melancholy, hypochondria; the experience of a complete lack of perspective.
Herman asselbergHs

19.
Made up entirely of nocturnal or twilit cityscapes made at the occasion of Asselberghs visit to Palestine, this visually sparse film features a lengthy monologue in which a woman reflects upon todays imagesaturated society.

Yes, but dont you think most of my films end on an uplifting note? In AM/PM we do see the morning break, and the camera completes its upward movement.19 Futur antrieur also concludes bathing in light, with the words of a child. The slogan that
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Lets take After empire for instance, with which you aspire to write an alternative political history of the twenty-first century one that doesnt start (like all the others, geared as they are towards standardization) with the events of September 11th, 2001, but with the biggest political protest in recent history the worldwide manifestations against the impending invasion of Iraq that took place on March 15th, 2003. Wouldnt you agree that in the end, it didnt help much? Such a phenomenal, overwhelming display of popular dissent, yet so little effect, an almost painful demonstration of the multitudes powerlessness hence my inclination to call your work melancholic. My theory, then, is that artists like Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Joachim Koester, Deimantas Narkevicius, the emblematic artists of the present moment the people of whom we will say, in twenty years time, that they helped to define the art of the first decade of the
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twenty-first century, as well as the way in which we think (back) of this art probably retreat to the relative safety of twentieth-century culture (in formal terms, that is) because so far the twenty-first century has just been too depressing for words. A decade from hell, thats how Time magazine recently looked back upon the difficult first years of the third millennium, and they werent entirely wrong. Hence the aforementioned artists programmatic fascination with all kinds of archaic and anachronistic technologies like analogue film, slide projectors, lithographs and its easy to see how such an aesthetic should produce a definite melancholy as the dominant tone of this particular strand in art. Hermans films, on the other hand, are very much rooted in that decades present; they are truly testimonial. Yet one could say that the worst has perhaps passed, and that a new sun may be rising over our world
manon de boer

has encouraged the forgetting of March 15th, that has been silent about, or rendered invisible, the mass-scale, organized protest day after day.
dieter roelstraete

OK, in that sense Im ready to admit that, in the long term, the worldwide wave of anti-war protest has been successful after all: Bushs America is definitely something of the past.
Herman asselbergHs

Now that Obama is president you mean?

Herman asselbergHs

First of all, I dont think we should necessarily think of the events of March 15th, 2003 as a failure. Admittedly, within a week of the protests the war had begun, and both the powerlessness you were talking about and the arrogance and blatant corruption of the political class have been a source of terrible frustration for most of us for almost a decade now. But this worldwide civic protest has had a greater resonance than we may now care to remember, and this resonance has certainly culminated in the symbolic potential of Obamas electoral victory. Its the mainstream media that
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The reason why March 15th failed to fully sink into our collective memory is obviously related to the media: a crystal-clear, compact image of a passenger plane burrowing into an iconic office tower is a lot more spectacular than a multitude of peaceful protests that are made up mainly of young families with children. Yet still, Im convinced that this 3/15, and not 9/11, marked the real beginning of the 21st century, and thats where the personal meets the political in Black Box. To set the record straight, I avail myself of an other type of image production, different from the well-worn formula of journalistic reportage, different from the documentary. And there you are doubtlessly right: Im interested in the now, and I want to engage with the present, but with the proper measure of distance you could very well call it an untimely meditation of sorts. Film lends itself to this distancing, I think. The medium is a bit of an anachronism; it belongs to the previous century, and even the one before that, doesnt it? One could state that perhaps Auguste Orts is a little old-fashioned to fully engage or immerse itself in the present through film? As if a modernism is not yet obsolete Of course, the four of us are in love
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with something that a lot of people think has had its day: film as a physical carrier of the image, the projection beam, the big screen, the architecture and time schedule of the movie theater Those are things of the past by now
dieter roelstraete

Youre calling Auguste Orts an anachronism, an archaism even?

sven augustijnen

Oh well, there are so many different media and disciplines that are now able to coexist so easily... This whole debate reminds me a little bit of the question whether painting can still be relevant in the twenty-first century is that really that important or interesting of a question? I dont think so.
dieter roelstraete

still in its infancy they were concerned with the experience of new possibilities, both in terms of technology and narrative Well, I dont think we command that kind of a position anymore. I dont mean to stir up the tired debate of avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes, but it is clear that film is a very familiar world for us if we compare ourselves to artists who are working at the intersections of science and technology that are still under development Maybe thats where todays creative vanguard is in the process of articulating itself?
dieter roelstraete

Isnt digital technology Anouks preferred medium?

anouk de ClerCq

But if painting has been able to stand its ground amidst the assault of millennial technological changes (and it has done so very successfully, I think), then why wouldnt film be able to do the same?
sven augustijnen

It certainly is, but my work has a very conscious oldschool feeling. That is to say, I use digital tools in a very analogue way. A work such as Oops wrong planet is a case in point: the visual language I use in that film is borrowed from fifties and sixties television.
Herman asselbergHs

Well, its a technological question first and foremost of course. The rise of digital media has brought about an increase in the quality of analogue film stock: it is much more sensitive, it has greater material qualities Because there will always be demand for high-quality film material.
Herman asselbergHs

Those arent really the techniques and technologies I was thinking about I was referring to people who work with algorithms and mathematics, with models derived from microbiology for instance, artists who deal with nonlinear systems, nanotechnology, telecommunications, generative processes
dieter roelstraete

But if we think back on the early decades of the twentieth century, when a generation of adventurously minded visual artists started to explore and exploit the potential of the film medium, then
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And thats where the avant-garde is at according to you?

Herman asselbergHs

First of all, the entire idea and very concept of the avant-garde has long been discredited, but
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youll have to admit that those are the people who are really helping to give shape to the future, or at least with that which has yet to come. They may be pushing towards new forms and different conceptions of art, way beyond the screen model that were coming from We are mostly working with historical forms.
manon de boer

But when I look at the art that is being made in the field of developing or emerging digital technologies, there is very little there that really strikes me as new whereas thats what this should be about, dont you think? Many of the images that are being produced with these very innovative means are often very conventional strikingly so, in fact.
dieter roelstraete

Anouk, when you use digital technology in an emphatically analogue way, I assume you do this in part to avoid the danger of obsolescence: many art works that use the state-of-the-art technology of their times usually age rather badly a telltale sign that it is not always a good idea for art to rush headlong into the vanguard of technological innovation.
anouk de ClerCq

varied range of individual expression, much less the development of a truly personal vision. Its far from easy or obvious to interrogate ones own uses of such software, and the very moment we avail ourselves of any computer technology were already trapped at least in some way, or to a certain extent. I carry my share of baggage with me just as much as anyone else the baggage of a filmmakers training with a strong narrative orientation for instance: its language has managed to sink its roots deep inside my mind, and I wont deny its influence or impact. And the same is true of my musical education, which is even older maybe thats one reason why it is so important for me to establish a dialogue with sound artists time and again: yet another way of avoiding the traps and pitfalls of ones own formation.
dieter roelstraete

20.
This is a reference to Manon de Boers film Attica (2008), loosely based on Frederic rzewskis eponymous composition from 1971. rzewskis piece pays homage to the victims of the notorious Attica prison riots of the same year, an important event in the history of Afro-American political radicalism.

Its important to keep in mind the question of software of course: if you decide to start working with a particular software package, it basically means you enter a world in which countless parameters have already been written out and defined for you, and it is of course very tempting to just work within the terrain delimited by those exact parameters resulting in a kind of universal lingo that doesnt allow for a terribly
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The issue of music in your work is also interesting because of its strongly historical character and that, for me, in part defines the anachronistic dimension, if we can call it that, in Manons work: the music of Frederic Rzewski, John Cage and Bla Bartk, or of Stockhausen in Anouks work... Contemporary music is how we usually call it, but it of course has a strong historical feel, and I like how this paradox plays out in your work. What do you find so appealing about this musical tradition in particular? A composition such as Rzewskis Attica, for instance, could almost be called a period piece, as remote from the present as a Renaissance dance20
manon de boer

The appeal that this music holds for me is situated in

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her historical character or historical value precisely: they are true icons of the avant-garde and that is definitely true of a piece such as Cages 433.21 But in the work of Frederic Rzewski, for instance, I am struck first and foremost by the manner in which an artist who is squarely located within the avant-garde tradition can still address explicitly political or politicized questions. Besides, the piece also acted as a source of inspiration for the specific structure of the film. I wanted to interrogate the avant-garde aspect of those historicized forms, and question their relevance for our contemporary experience.
anouk de ClerCq

21.
The reference here is to de Boers Two Times 433 from 2008, which features a recording of two performances of John Cages emblematic silent piece in front of a small audience the first performance recorded with, the second without a soundtrack.

dieter roelstraete

Let us conclude, or move towards a conclusion, with a long last look at Brussels and there are a couple of reasons to end on such a local note. Firstly, Brussels has often been the more or less explicit subject of Svens work, and not just its setting, however prominent; it is often also a decisive factor in Hermans work, and some of Manons portraits are really city portraits too. In a sense, you are local artists, just like Warhol was a local artist, an artist whose work was New York as much as a description of depiction of New York. Brussels is not just the works context; it very often also determines the works content.
sven augustijnen

A little while ago I listened to Edgar Varses Pome lectronique again, his ode to technology from 1958, which was made using all kinds of sounds sourced from everyday life. That immediately led me to think how an ode like Varses would sound today As for the music of John Cage: isnt that piece in particular an invitation, first and foremost, to really actively listen to your surroundings, to the music produced by our daily environment? Or take the example of Olivier Messiaen, who often took long walks in the forest and meticulously wrote down the songs of various birds, which he then transcribed for the piano Like Cage, Messiaen understood the art of listening attentively, of paying attention to the sound of everyday life, and used it as the basis for his compositions. And that brings us back to the issue of attention, which weve talked about earlier

Its funny and ironic that you should be asking me this question at this moment in time, when I feel I am taking a bit of a distance Anyway, the local character of the work is another aspect that is grounded in practical considerations first and foremost. When I was a student at the Jan van Eyck academy in Maastricht, I made a film that was set in Sarajevo. To be honest, that brought along such a raft of practical problems that all of a sudden, after finally being fed up with having to deal with these exact problems, I came to the realization that I could just as well make a film around the corner from where I live. Of course, Belgium and Brussels are infinitely interesting, inexhaustible topics: just imagine a modern nation-state in the heart of Europe, irreversibly disintegrating and ripping itself apart
dieter roelstraete

***
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For you as well, Herman, Brussels appears to be a

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very fertile, inspiring environment.

Herman asselbergHs

It certainly is, for a number of reasons but also because like Sven, I like to keep things local. The political rally that appears in Altogether for instance I just filmed it as it was passing by my front door. Or the regular protests in front of the Stock Exchange building are right here at the end of the street: you can see them when looking out of the window of this office Such events also take place precisely here because Brussels is both the center and capital of Europe; you cant really imagine a better place to work if you want to say something about of the state of affairs in the world today. Capsular was originally conceived as a simple movement: from Brussels to Ceuta and back again from the center to the margins and back. Im also not so much interested in Brussels as such, as I am in its symbolic potential the idea of Brussels. That also seems to be the case in your work, Sven or am I wrong?
sven augustijnen

your hypothetical interrogation of the various ways in which a young King Leopold II may have crossed paths with Karl Marx during his visit to the Crystal Palace in London in 1851, and what such an event may have meant for Belgiums subsequent geopolitical history Such a story is of course riddled with the idiosyncrasies of Belgian history and Brussels in particular quickly becomes the place where all its inherent absurdities come to the boil and breach a critical threshold: it is without a doubt an absurd place. And I guess that for you, Manon, Brussels is especially interesting because of its multilingual character it really is a bit like Babylon.
manon de boer

The difference again being that I work closely together with people with whom I have to build a relationship or some kind of rapport with Which is not an easy thing to do when youre not even speaking the same language! Even in a small, local community life can be pretty complex I really dont see the need of complicating things even further. Its difficult enough to relate to people as it is anyhow
dieter roelstraete

Of course, Brussels is also an interesting place for me because Im not Belgian myself: in the midst of all this hybridity and glossolalia and polysemy I dont necessarily have to identify with one particular group or other and thats perhaps not a luxury that most Belgians can afford. Yet the melting-pot sensation of the capital also means that I do not have to feel like an outsider, and this constant negotiation between insider and outsider doubtlessly makes for an interesting status.
Herman asselbergHs

Didnt we all move here from another country? At least, that is how I often experience or perceive things for me, Flanders has become this other country.
anouk de ClerCq

I read your publication Les Demoiselles de Bruxelles with great interest, and greatly enjoyed pondering
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I often feel that Flanders does not want to be a melting pot, whereas Brussels absolutely is one and that of course charges the city with an
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immense sense of possibility. Brussels isnt clearly limited or delineated, it is a crossing of just about everything: old and new, ugly and beautiful, all kinds of architectural styles mixed together, all kinds of different languages and cultures There is a constant friction of sorts and thats where it all happens. Wherever things meet is also where they are allowed to emerge, come into existence the many unexpected combinations, the minute conjunctions, the unnoticed fusions. The interstitial space where things both pass through and come to pass, and maybe gel together to produce something new; thats where Brussels takes shape for me. So Brussels is a little bit like a place between the lines, and I feel very much at home precisely there. Lets just say I really live inside my laptop; Brussels is the city I encircle.
dieter roelstraete

Id like to explore the notion of the outsider some more it seems to me that this dialectic of inside and outside partly functions as a structuring principle in much of your work; in some cases, it even appears as the works actual theme or motif. Sven, in your case this is certainly true of the twilight zone peopled by professional pickpockets and gays staking out cruising areas in a city park right in the center of Brussels. Or just think of the Congolese prostitutes: you consciously seek out the outsiders even among the outsiders and that double negation may well lead us back to a community of insiders... We are looking at the margin, not only as a sociological concept, but also as a spatial figure, as an element of spatialization and it is worth asking ourselves the question
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whether the margin of the margin brings us closer to the center or further away still. And this perhaps leads us back to our earlier intuitions regarding Brussels as a quintessentially marginal place, so dramatically placed right in the center of things: this city very often appears to be one giant marginal zone, and thats exactly why its so much easier to cross paths why you have been able to find each other, for instance, or why (as Manon noted earlier) it is much easier to reach and work across disciplinary boundaries. And is the margin, finally, not also the domain par excellence of the phantom of the chimerical and the spectral? It is the margin rather than the center that invites haunting and shelters secrets. Because that is very often at the heart of Svens films: the exchange or revelation of some kind of secret knowledge, the exploration of some subterranean history. And the subterranean present, in turn, is often at the forefront of Hermans interests the specter of an other historiography than that which is produced within the established power centers.

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Sensing Politics T.J. Demos

1.
Jacques Rancire, Politicized Art, in The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 63.

Manon de Boers 16mm film Resonating Surfaces (2005) portrays psychoanalyst and cultural critic Suely Rolnik as she recounts the time of her exile in Paris during Brazils military dictatorship. Relaying her closeness with Gilles Deleuze, Rolnik weaves a tale of solidarity, love, and survival, recalling the period when she gained confidence in her intellectual sovereignty and found her voice. But rather than a straightforward documentary account, the films organization of imagery displaces its nonetheless fascinating content from center stage: voice and image are desynchronized, liberating words from their origins (bringing to mind the strategy of de Boers earlier film, Sylvia KristelParis, 2003). A resulting resistance to meaning issues from the gaps of atmospheric sound and visual passages of un-narrated duration, opening the viewer onto a shared world of indetermination. This sense of disjunction also occurs in de Boers short film Dissonant (2010), its title announcing the incompatibility to come, in this case, the rupturing of the footage of dancer Cynthia Loemij as she responds to Eugne Ysaes 3 Sonatas for Violin Solo, from the musical soundtrack, and at times even from the imagery. Visually blank passages present listeners with the recordings of the dancers breathing and sounds of her footwork, as Loemij invents her dance from her memory of Ysaes pieces. These films, in my view, unleash an experience of liberationnot only the dancers, but also the viewersvia a selective organization of sensations that encourages a heightening of perception: As one dances without accompaniment, the viewer is left without an image, to sense anew. Although political art may not be an obvious descriptor for de Boers work, hers engages, for me, the terms fundamental paradox as articulated by Jacques Rancire: Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification. 1 That is to say, de Boers films announce what I see as the key concerns of the Auguste Orts collective. While comprised of the singular and at times divergent approaches of its members, the groups work shares, in my view, a simultaneous commitment to, on the one hand, the political potential of filmmaking (imagining experimental modes of life, contesting oppressive systems) and, on the other, the subtle craftwork of aesthetics (the perceptual attentiveness to the specific nature of form and medium). The resulting pieces generate the

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potential for the creative discovery of meaning beyond transparent documentary, instrumentalized political content, and activist sloganeering. Which means that here politics must be carefully qualified as a matter of the reorganization of affective forms, modes of visibility, and the creative formation of sociability that defies the dominant orders of appearance, and does so on multiple grounds. It is not so much a matter of perceptual shock, as in the avant-garde heroics of originality, that is evident in works made by Auguste Orts members, but a quiet, anti-spectacular sensibility that is mobilized by an uncommon mode of address (as well, as in de Boers work, by an anachronistic use of film, gaining traction against todays fastpaced digital culture). But these are moving images nonetheless, in ways alternative to readymade formulas and the sensationalism of the entertainment industry.2 Take Sven Augustijnens Le Guide du Parc (2001), which divulges the clandestine knowledge of the cruising that takes place in the ravines of the Parc de Bruxelles/Warandepark, granting visibility to the outlaw culture at the feet of the Royal Palace. Perhaps closest to documentary, the videos monologue, spoken by a single informant, appears to determine its format, placing the account at the service of reportage, as in an ethnographic study. Yet in replaying the codes of documentary (as much as those of the parks subculture), the works light touch hollows out such filmic conventions. Just as the pickpockets act leaves the victim ideally unsuspecting, but often aware that something is amissconsider in this light, Augustijnens Lcole des Pickpockets (2000)similarly here a lurking sensation suggests that the codes have been revealed without giving away much, without, that is, allowing full access to its community. Documentary form, in other words, encounters its own limits, showing that membership in the cultures it depicts is no simple matter of knowledge; rather, Le Guide du Parc intimates that an invested position within this affective economy (e.g. one circulating around the desire for the thrill of theft, or for illicit, anonymous sex in a hidden public space) cannot ultimately be granted by merely rendering its codes legible. In this sense, the piece communicates the impossibility of access, and thereby induces a dissatisfaction with the complacency of being informed, even while informing. In works such as these, its not so much a matter of placing

2.
For more on this term and its relation to contemporary video and film practices, see T.J. Demos, Moving Images of Globalization, Grey Room 37 (Autumn 2009): 6-29.

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3.
Rancire, Politicized Art, p. 63.

4.
Also see T.J. Demos, The Right to Opacity: The Otolith Groups Nervus Rerum, October 129 (Autumn 2009):113-128.

the political message and formal invention at cross purposes as Rancire notes, between the readability of the message that threatens to destroy the sensible form of art and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all political meaning 3 rather, the negotiation between the two engenders the mutual reinvention of each. And this negotiation leads potentially to an infinite array of options, demonstrated by the disparate practices groupedperhaps at times impossiblyunder the Auguste Orts moniker. Unlike Augustijnens deconstruction of documentarism, other members work veers toward the negation of the message that is, where the radical uncanniness of aesthetic form does threaten to destroy all political meaning. At this point, one can speak of the opacity of the image, as in Anouk De Clercqs Oops wrong planet (2009). The short animated video commences with the display of video static placed in a curved-edged frame. Its as if we arose half asleep late at night to find the TV left on but the programming concluded. Adding a further subversive shade to the groups engagement with the outmoded, De Clercqs piece recalls distant memories of television from decades ago, before it had completely colonized the night with continuous broadcastingas if to say, today we need more static. The lack of imagery, normally understood to interrupt attention, in this case brings with it a heightened regard for the flickering luminescence that is videos molecular matter. It also gives time to thought and invites perceptual activity. A liminal zone opens that is a portal to new ways of being not captured by and reactive to programmed content, but instead constituent of an unstructured existence before the image (rather than being glued to what is behind it). It may be odd to introduce the term opacity here, as it signifies the measure of impenetrability to visible light; yet I mean to invoke its semiological sense, as the video directs our attention toward the play of light that blocks the transparency of representation. 4 Yet while political meaning, considered as instrumental content, may have been disabled, De Clercqs video shows that aesthetic significance can still be political in a wider sense. For in this case we discover the potentiality of the moving imagenot as a capturing of reality, but as a framing of possibility via the refusal to represent. The resulting blanknesswhich should be held in suspense for a momentis radically unstable, even paradoxical, and

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volatile for this reason: In the most pessimistic sense, the absence of an image signals a recognition of the tragic unlikeliness of arts promise to bring about political change; at its most optimistic, it suggests a hopeful anticipation of the reinventing of a new world. Soon, of course, De Clercqs glistening field of electronic noise begins to coalesce into shapes that emerge from the randomized snow of the video image, revealing undulating hills and valleys, a foreign landscape devoid of built space. The soundtracks distant cacophony of voices, coupled with the dream-like imagery, suggest a radical elsewhere, as if the broadcasting system has by chance picked up an alien signal transporting us to another planet. While the video, we learn, was motivated by the artists interest in autism, for her, everyone has the propensity for this psychology of withdrawal.5 Oops wrong planet translates it paradoxically as a shared phenomenology, suggesting that each possesses within him or herself a radical alterity. This unknowable terrain can only be glimpsed, but it can also be explored via fictional constructs and made into the basis of community, one of proximity predicated upon distance. In the context of Auguste Orts, De Clercqs video travels the furthest from the political message, but shows how the reorganization of sensation and the construction of an affective landscape can nonetheless propose a different form of life tentative, curious, unfamiliar, undetermined, creativewhich is also developed by other members. Herman Asselberghs Black Box (2009) provides a model where the confrontation between political meaning and uncanny form occurs in extremis. The installation invites us into its dark environment. A blindingly low threshold of visibility at once cancels the worlds conventional visuality, generating an experience of estrangement (not unlike De Clercqs static), and demands acute attentiveness. Soon, on one wall, vague projected images can be made out: figures appearing in a protest, moving in and out of focus, accompanied by the whispering of words, similarly deprived of clear sense. Intelligibility comes in gradations, as flashes of the demonstrationan anti-war manifestation in 2003and the voice becomes increasingly distinct, reaching a crescendo in the pieces message: Historical moments only assume a meaning once they are over. It all depends on what happens next, once the storm has passed, after the party. In this way, Black Box correlates the underexposed power

5.
See the publication that accompanies De Clercqs film project, Oops wrong planet, ed. A. De Clercq (Ghent: MER, 2009), which includes the artists email exchange with an autistic man calling himself Landschip, as well as the archive of the artists sci-fi visual sources for this work, including Andrei Tarkovskijs film Stalker, 1979, Buckminster Fullers Dome Over Manhattan, 1950-60, and other pop-cultural sources. (www.merpaperkunsthalle.org)

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of oppositional social movements with a reinvented realm of affect, indicating the diverse perceptual waysvisceral, physical, conceptual, experientialby which politics might come into being. Refusing the visual pornography of mass media, Asselberghs installation beckons us to restructure the passive consumerism of perception as an engaged attentiveness, bringing about a different politics of aesthetics than what we are used to. The result is a contest of forms of visibility, which Asselberghs video Capsular (2006) also invokes in its exploration of the condition of Europes geopolitical enclosure within its increasingly militarized borders. Visiting the Spanish enclave of Ceuta located on the northern shore of Morocco, the artist recorded its barbed-wire fences and surveillance cameras that protect against illegal migration, making a video that sensitizes us to Europes hemmed-in existence. How can we shatter our complicity in the self-enclosure that is simultaneously geopolitical and visual, a matter of images and forms, modes of address and perceptual regimes? Auguste Orts carves out a creative zone where life can be reinvented as an arena of experimental becoming, liberating existence from its conventional structuringand it does so by giving space and visibility to political possibility.

Based in the Department of Art History, University College London, T.J. Demos writes about modern and contemporary art, and is the author of The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (MIT Press, 2007).

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List of Works in the Exhibition

Herman asselbergHs black box

video & audio loop, 16:9, b/w, be, 2009 Courtesy tHe artist

A cursory first glance may lead one to assume that Herman Asselberghs Black Box stands squarely in the hallowed tradition of anti-cinema: the viewer must brave the darkness of a narrow, tunnellike passageway to enter a space which contains a projection of images so dark that they can hardly be discerned at all. Only after our eyes have accustomed themselves to the darkness can we make out the ghost-like contours of a multitude on the move: these are blackened images of manifestations, political rallies, and protest marches. An apparent synthesis, in other words, of two earlier films by Asselberghs: the similarly jet-black Futur Antrieur (2007) and the more thematically kindred Altogether (2008). Black Box thus succeeds in wedding Asselberghs structural and structuralist preoccupations with a political critique of what was once called the society of the spectacle: his profound suspicion of the dominant image culture and the mainstream media that produce these images here results in a decidedly anti-visual statement. In marked contrast to most of the films produced under Auguste Orts aegis, Asselberghs Black Box is made up exclusively of found footage (does one ever find footage, or does footage find us these days?), culled from the bottomless image archive that is YouTube. And the images we almost (or rather, hardly) get to see function as the ghostly

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crown witnesses to an other history of the first decade of the twenty-first century rather than the one that has become the standardized, orthodox model in the meantime one that cannot imagine the so-called decade from hell to start with any other event than that of September 11, 2001. The first day of Asselberghs noughties, in contrast, is February 15, 2003: the day upon which millions of people around the world took to the streets to protest against the impending invasion of Iraq. Black Box thereby inevitably acquires the character of a chronicle of the cold, soundless war between two superpowers: the United States on the one hand, and popular, public opinion on the other hand and that the formers war-mongering rhetoric was so blindly adopted by the mainstream media forces us to look back upon the stream of images that issued forth from them with a very different set of eyes. What initially appears to be nothing more than a formless black hole, then, really signals an opportunity, a sense of possibility a chance to rewrite at least that shameful chapter of our recent political history. For as one textual fragment in the film assures us: Historical moments only assume a meaning once they are over. It all depends on what happens next, once the storm has passed, after the party.

Herman asselbergHs dear steve

video, 16:9, Color, dutCH, englisH subtitles, be, 2010, 50 Courtesy tHe artist

The subject of Herman Asselberghs Dear Steve is the most dependable of foot soldiers manning the machinery of our presentday culture industry the laptop. Most of us have one, and their relative invisibility within the field of cultural production how often do we actually get to see laptops in exhibitions or films, or as artworks even? contrasts starkly with the indispensability of the mobile personal computer in our present-day globalized cultural economy. For instance, it is difficult to even imagine the current exhibition (or publication) having come about the way it did without this singularly trail-blazing invention. Dear Steve, however, is obviously much more than a lyrical portrait of this pedestrian icon of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have called the New Spirit of Capitalism. What we are witnessing in this work is the ruthless, smooth dismantling, in one uninterrupted take, of a brand-new MacBook Pro, and the act of literally turning inside-out the digital work station, wich cannot help but reveal the irreducible materiality of the one tool that plays such a pivotal role in the triumphalist rhetoric of so-called immaterial labor. Toute chose est une societ, says the informal motto, borrowed from the French philosopher Gabriel Tarde, of Asselberghs exercise in literalized deconstruction, and Dear Steve clearly alludes to both the inside-outside and interior-exterior dialectic of our technocratic society a society marked by sensory overload and visual hyperbole, the ceaseless proliferation of which we of course owe to the digito-mobile revolution as embodied by our laptops and cell phones in the first place. At the same time, however, Dear Steve also appeals to our memories of another (slightly more archaic) genre, one well-known to Asselberghs, who has long been active as a critic, theorist and writer, namely that of apparatus theory a critical tradition devoted to the art of ideological unmasking.

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sven augustijnen johan

video, 4:3, Color, dutCH, englisH subtitles, be, 2001, 23 Courtesy jan mot and tHe artist

Franois
video, 4:3, Color, dutCH, englisH subtitles, be, 2003, 22 Courtesy jan mot and tHe artist

Many of Sven Augustijnens films portray people who like to talk or otherwise enjoy the manifold pleasures of language. In this way, his work reveals a deep affinity with the films of both Manon de Boer (whose portraits of Sylvia Kristel and Suely Rolnik involve expansive monologues) as well as Herman Asselberghs (in whose films speech often obscures actual imagery). Works such as Le Guide du Parc and Une Femme Entreprenante, for instance, zoom in on particularly talkative subjects, revealing the complex interweaving of discourse, knowledge, and power in the process. Powerlessness in the face of language rather than the actual power that comes with the easy command of language, however, is at the center of Augustijnens informal diptych Johan (2001) and Franois (2003), two portraits made when the artist was able to witness speech therapy sessions for patients suffering from aphasia, a language disorder caused by damage to those regions of the brain responsible for speech and language comprehension. Both films depict damaged men (of different ages, with very different characters and temperaments) trying to regain control of a language that was once theirs, but now appears to elude their every anxious grasp a spectacle that is

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quick to trigger a wide gamut of post-structuralist or deconstructive reflections, such as Jacques Derridas notorious quip that il ny pas de hors-texte, or Jacques Lacans equally oft-quoted assertion that the unconscious is structured like the language we are quite literally born into. Finally, Augustijnens double portrait of the strained relationship between language and its subject could also be viewed as an oblique reflection upon the ambiguous status of communication within the general domain of art: a picture of the limits of language as much as languages limitations in everyday life.

sven augustijnen sale Flamand!

prints on paper, b/w, 2010 Courtesy tHe artist

Of the work of the four artists who constitute Auguste Orts, it is undoubtedly that of Sven Augustijnen that most clearly approximates the dictates of an (admittedly experimental) historiographic practice, and in this the amateur-historian in Augustijnen often likes to zoom in on the densely layered, highly inflammable fabric of Belgiums or Brussels own history in particular. Finally, as is so often the case in the work of Augustijnens colleagues in Auguste Orts, questions of language likewise often turn up at the forefront of the artists concerns (there is plenty of talk in Augustijnens films, or there are many frantic attempts at talking) a subject that quickly acquires a polemical charge in the context of Brussels high-strung cultural-political landscape. In the series of insults that is the subject of Augustijnens multi-chapter text piece Sale Flamand!, a slur like Sale Flamand! (dirty Fleming) immediately stands out because of its crude mobilization of the politics of language. At the same time, the work also explores the aftershocks and unsavory side-effects of Belgiums colonial history (a theme that has preoccupied Augustijnen for a long time, and will finally take up center stage in the ambitious film project he is currently preparing): the insult Sale Flamand! may at first appear tinged by the recent history of racism and xenophobia centered around Brussels (that is to say, by the unfortunate presumption, deeply rooted in Brussels sizeable Arab migrant community, that all Flemings are racist), yet its roots reach much further back in time, leading back to the micropolitics of Belgiums colonial adventure to the fact, namely, that the Flemish element of the Belgian colonial regime was habitually forced to perform lowly tasks or those thankless jobs that made them the easy victims of the local populations disdain and outright hatred. This highly explosive cocktail of language and identity questions continues to inform the cultural tectonics of present-day Brussels, and makes for a prodigiously fertile breeding ground for those social and political epiphenomena that are likely to elicit artful, delightfully sardonic commentary the real theme, after all, of Augustijnens insultology.

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manon de boer resonating surfaces

16mm to video, Color, dolby, portuguese & FrenCH, englisH & dutCH subtitles, be, 2005, 39 Courtesy m HKa ColleCtion

The protagonist of Resonating Surfaces is Brazilian critical theorist Suely Rolnik, who played a crucial role in the introduction of a radically revised, highly politicized brand of psychoanalysis in the Brazilian intellectual scene of the eighties. Earlier on, Rolnik had been one of the numerous high-profile victims of the cultural repression that followed the military coup of 1964, and spent most of her formative years exiled in Paris during the feverish heyday of poststructuralist philosophy, meeting Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, among many others with the latter she continued to collaborate with after her return to So Paulo on many occasions. All these aspects, many of them enriched by the existential flavor of personal experience, are touched upon in de Boers filmic portrait of Rolnik, which clearly resembles her earlier Sylvia Kristel Paris (2003): here as well, the film doubles as a portrait of a strong woman, on the one hand, and of a city (an intellectual milieu, an attitude, a way of life), on the other. Resonating Surfaces opens with a sweeping panoramic view of the dense urban fabric of Rolniks hometown of So Paulo, the second biggest city on earth. Music, ambient sound, and voice-over intersect and overlap, but not once do the mute images of Rolnik and her story, told offcamera, converge exactly we only hear her voice when she is no longer in the picture (out of sight)
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and vice versa: this asymmetry of sound and image functions as a highly efficient metaphor for the fundamental instability of each attempt at writing (personal) history, of a plasticity of human memory that cannot be disciplined. The structural disjunction of a persons voice and his or her visual representation also help to define another element of ambiguity that is integral to de Boers sophisticated portraiture that of an undecidable tarrying between intimacy and distancing.

manon de boer dissonant

16mm installation/video, Color, 4:3, mono, be, 2010, loop/11 Courtesy jan mot and tHe artist

Dissonant belongs to an (evidently informal) grouping of film works in which both music, mostly of the modern or contemporary variety, and musical interpretation take up center stage: after Bela Bartoks work in Presto, Perfect Sound, John Cages oeuvre in Two Times 433, and the politicized practice of avant-garde radical Frederic Rzewski in Attica, it is the musical legacy of Belgian violin virtuoso Eugne Ysae that is at the heart of Dissonant, more specifically a fragment from his celebrated 3 Sonatas for Violin Solo. The piece in question can only be heard for a brief moment, however, at the beginning of de Boers film, after which we are treated to a solo by Dutch dancer Cynthia Loemij which may in turn lead us to consider Dissonant as one chapter in the artists ongoing (and equally informal) series of portrait films. Loemij is shown here improvising on the basis of Ysaes solo violin piece, trusting only her immediate memory of hearing the sonata the silence in which she executes the actual dance helps to emphasize the strength of that memory. The camera closely follows the dancers movements, and the unfolding structural principle is as simple as it is effective: every time a four minute film reel is used up, we look at a black square, an absent or emptied image, for about one minute (the time needed to install a new reel), while the soundtrack continues to run along, as attested by our hearing of the mercurial shuffling of Loemijs feet. In this work, in other words, de Boer deepens her programmatic fascination with the uncoupling of sound and image (a defining element of Presto, Perfect Sound), while there are also formal connections to be made with Herman Asselberghs and Anouk De Clercqs work in this exhibition, namely with regards to the black squares that break up Loemijs choreography into three pieces empty spaces onto which the viewer can project his or her own memories of both the recently seen and heard. Memory, in short, remains the basic premise of this work: the dissonance referred to in the title of the film not only invokes the friction between image and soundtrack, but also the many mnemonic incongruities of our own imagination.

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anouK de ClerCq oh
video, Hd, b/w, surround, 2010, 8 Courtesy tHe artist

The point of departure of this multimedia installation is the work of a (relatively) little-known visionary French architect named tienne-Louis Boulle (1728-1799), whose epochal experiments with geometric abstraction really only came to be appreciated in the latter half of the twentieth century his theoretical writings, which were only published in the fifties, certainly exerted a defining influence upon Aldo Rossis architectural thought. True to the spirit of the utopian architectural tradition Boulle is part of, he is probably best remembered today for one unrealized project in particular: the design for a gigantic mausoleum-like shrine dedicated to one of the founding fathers of modern science, Isaac Newton (1784). The title of De Clercqs work not only references the spherical shape of the letter O, but also the beginning of Boulles eulogy in honor of Newton and it is worth noting here that Boulle was a contemporary of Edmund Burke, who pioneered the philosophical exploration of the category of the Sublime: O Newton! Si par ltendue de tes lumires et la sublimit de ton gnie, tu as dtermin la figure de la terre, moi jai conu le projet de tenvelopper de ta dcouverte. Boulles proto-minimalist monument to Newton served as the inspiration for De Clercqs Oh, a digital environment in which sound, like in so many of her works, again plays a crucial

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role; indeed, her collaboration with sound artists such as Anton Aeki has helped to shape much of her practice in the past. Not only does the resulting atmospheric soundscape deepen the immersive quality of the work, it also charges it with a typically entrancing (oneiric, oceanic) dimension, further emphasizing the connection with earlier works such as Building (2003) and Echo (2008): Oh sees the continuation of De Clercqs singular potique de lespace a richly textured visual investigation of the allegorical tension between inside and outside, real and imaginary (virtual), two- and three-dimensional, analogue and digital, immensity and intimacy. Although the historical reference to an unrealized megalomaniacal architectural project adds a nostaligic, melancholy twist to Oh, De Clercq nevertheless stays true to her well-documented passion for images of futurity.

anouK de ClerCq oops wrong planet

video, 4:3, sound, b/w, be, 2009, 08 Courtesy tHe artist

Oops wrong planet could be the surprised exclamation, half panic, half exhilaration, of anyone who suddenly gains startling insight into the true nature of the autistic condition or the goodhumored life motto of the stereotypical artist (in the traditional, romanticized conception of artisthood, that is): a literally spatialized, quasi-comic acknowledgment of maladjustment, of having ended up, not just in the wrong place, but in the wrong world. This (admittedly fraught) comparison between autism and artisthood is not innocently or even arbitrarily chosen: Oops wrong planet is partly based on a real dialogue, in writing, between Anouk De Clercq and an autistic person (operating under the pseudonym of Landschip) the ensuing correspondence was reprinted in the accompanying publication. At a certain point in the course of this correspondence, De Clercq and Landschip discover a shared passion for science fiction, and the hypnotic imagery of Oops wrong planet does indeed invoke immediate associations with a string of pictorial sci-fi staples: a gently undulating, moonlit landscape, marked by the same desolation that is a recurring feature of much of De Clercqs previous films; the grainy pulse of cosmic white noise (the soundtrack was composed by British sound artist Scanner); the alternation of sharp and out-of-focus images that allude to approximation and approach as much as to distancing In the end, tellingly, this so-called wrong planet does not look terribly frightful, hostile or inhospitable, but rather peaceful instead positively inviting, in fact: a symbol, perhaps, of what Sigmund Freud called the oceanic feeling a precious sensibility akin to a fitful sleep of reason.

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Works in the Exhibition

Herman asselbergHs black box

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Herman asselbergHs dear steve

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sven augustijnen sale Flamand!

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sven augustijnen johan

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manon de boer dissonant

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manon de boer resonating surfaces

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anouK de ClerCq oh

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anouK de ClerCq oops wrong planet

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Reference images

Herman asselbergHs
Altogether
video, b/w & Color, 16:9, englisH spoKen, be, 2008, 18

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Herman asselbergHs
Futur Antrieur (a.k.a. Disciples of the Heinous Path Part 1: The Pain of Everyone)
video, Color, 16:9, stereo, dutCH spoKen, englisH subtitles, be, 2007, 1520

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sven augustijnen
Une Femme Entreprenante
video, Color, 4:3, stereo, FrenCH spoKen, englisH subtitles, be, 2004, 72

sven augustijnen
Lcole des Pickpockets
video, Color, 4:3, stereo, FrenCH spoKen, englisH subtitles, be, 2000, 52

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sven augustijnen
Le Guide du Parc
video, Color, 4:3, stereo, FrenCH spoKen, englisH & dutCH subtitles, be, 2001, 36

manon de boer
Sylvia Kristel Paris
super-8 Film transFerred to video, Color, 4:3, stereo, FrenCH spoKen, englisH subtitles, be, 2003, 39

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manon de boer
Two Times 433
35mm/video installation, Color, 4:3, dolby surround, be, 2008, 10 FraC lorraine, metz listen to your eyes

manon de boer
Presto, Perfect Sound
35mm/video installation, Color, 4:3, dolby surround, be, 2006, 6 FranKFurter Kunstverein tHe time tHat is leFt

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anouK de ClerCq
Building
video, b/w, 4:3, stereo, be, 2003, 12

anouK de ClerCq
Pixelspleen
soFtware, b/w, 16:9, stereo, loop, be, 2007 a Collaboration witH jerry galle

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anouK de ClerCq
Whoosh
video, b/w, 4:3, stereo, be, 2001, 12

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Works in the Exhibition: Credits

p. 114115 Herman Asselberghs (Black Box) Image: Fairuz Sound: Boris Debackere Voice: Claude Wampler Produced by Auguste Orts Co-produced by Contour Mechelen vzw With the support of the Flanders Audiovisual Fund p. 116117 Herman Asselberghs (Dear Steve) Image, editing: Fairuz Sound: Boris Debackere Text: Herman Asselberghs Produced by V2_ Co-produced by Auguste Orts p. 118119 Sven Augustijnen (Sale Flamand!) Prints on paper, b/w Courtesy the artist p. 120121 Sven Augustijnen (Johan) Concept, camera, editing: Sven Augustijnen Produced by Projections vzw Co-produced by Huis a d Werf, O.K Centrum fr Gegenwartskunst Sven Augustijnen (Franois) Concept, camera, editing: Sven Augustijnen Produced by Projections vzw Co-produced by ContourBinnale voor videokunst With the support of the Flanders Audiovisual Fund p. 122123 Manon De Boer (Dissonant) Concept: Manon de Boer Choreography & dance: Cynthia Loemij Music: 3 Sonatas for Violin Solo (sonate n2, prelude, obsession) from Eugne Ysae, performed by George van Dam Camera: Sbastien Koeppel Sound: Els Viaene, Manon de Boer, Laszlo Umbreit (Atelier Graphoui) Produced by Auguste Orts Co-produced by Vlaams-Nederlands Huis deBuren, Atelier Graphoui, Jan Mot With the support of the Flanders Audiovisual Fund p. 124125 Manon De Boer (Resonating Surfaces) Concept: Manon de Boer Camera: Sbastien Koeppel Editing: Manon de Boer Text & voice: Suely Rolnik Soundtrack: Manon de Boer & George van Dam Voice (singing): Badi Assad Violin: George van Dam Sound: Bastien Gilson, George van Dam & Christian Cartier (Le Fresnoy) Produced by Blitz vzw/ Manon de Boer Co-produced by Le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains, Jan Mot, Transmedia Hogeschool Sint-Lukas Brussel With the support of the Flanders Audiovisual Fund p. 126127 Anouk De Clercq (Oh) Animation: Tom Kluyskens Music: Anton Aeki Acoustics: Johan Vandermaelen Produced by Auguste Orts With the support of the Flanders Audiovisual Fund, CERA Partners in Art, M HKA, SCAM* Brouillon dun rve numrique p. 128129 Anouk De Clercq (Oops wrong planet) Animation: Tom Kluyskens Music: Scanner Initiated by Initia Produced by Auguste Orts With the support of the Flemish Community

Biographies

Herman Asselberghs (1962 in Mechelen) is a Belgian artist whose work focuses on the questioning of border areas between sound and image, world and media, poetry and politics. His installations and videos have been shown at Centre Pompidou, Paris; documenta X, Kassel; Deitch Projects, New York; CGAC, Santiago de Compostela; hartware, Dortmund; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Netwerk, Aalst; M HKA, Antwerp; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin; FID Marseille; EMAF Osnabrck; Medien- und Architectur Biennale Graz; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid. In 2007 he won the Transmediale Award in Berlin. Herman Asselberghs, who has published extensively on film and visual culture, teaches at the film department of Hogeschool Sint-Lukas Brussel. He lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Sven Augustijnen (1970 in Mechelen) studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, the Hoger Sint-Lucas Instituut in Brussels, and at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. His work concentrates mainly on the tradition of portraiture and the porous boundaries between fiction and reality, using a hybrid of genres and techniques to disorienting effect. His films have been included in exhibitions and festivals in Athens, Basel, Fribourg, San Sebastin, Siegen, Rotterdam, Tunis, Tel Aviv, Tokyo and Vilnius, among others. In 2007 he participated in the documenta 12 magazine project, in collaboration with A Prior Magazine. He lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Manon de Boer (1966 in Kodaicanal, India) completed her artistic education at the Akademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Rotterdam, and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Using personal narration and musical interpretation as both method and subject, De Boer explores the relationship between language, time, and truth claims to produce a series of portrait films in which the film medium itself is continuously interrogated. Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently at the 2007 Venice Biennial and the 2008 Berlin Biennial, and has also been included in numerous film festivals in Hong Kong, Marseille, Rotterdam and Vienna. Her work has been the subject of monographic exhibitions at Witte de With in Rotterdam and the Frankfurter Kunstverein, among others. De Boer currently teaches at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent. She lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Anouk De Clercq (1971 in Ghent) studied piano at the Academy of Music in Ghent and film at the Hoger Sint-Lukas Instituut in Brussels. Her films explore the audiovisual potential of computer language to create possible worlds, many of which have a strongly architectonic character. She has received several awards, including an award from the Future Imprint International Animation Competition, Taipei (2003), the International Backup Award New Media in Film, Weimar (2004) and the Illy Prize at Art Brussels (2005). Her works have been shown in Tate Modern, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Centre Pompidou, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, New York Film and Video Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Transmediale, Biennale de lImage en Mouvement, among others. Anouk De Clercq currently teaches at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent. She lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Marie Logie (1977 in Ghent) is the director of Auguste Orts. Following her Masters degree in History at the University of Ghent, she worked at the documentation department of Cinemathek Brussels, the media department of M HKA Antwerp and the audiovisual department of BAM, the Flemish institute for visual, audiovisual, and media art. She is a co-founder and former coordinator of the Ghent-based Courtisane festival for film, video, and media art. Marie Logie is currently a member of the Audiovisual Commission of the Flemish Community. She lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

Colophon

Editor: Dieter Roelstraete Copy-editor: Melinda Braathen Design: Sander Vermeulen (Fanclubproject) and Olivier Lamy Printing: Hayez, Brussels ISBN 978-1-934105-11-5 2010 M HKA & Sternberg Press The authors and artists All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Sternberg Press Caroline Schneider Karl-Marx-Allee 78, D-10243 Berlin 1182 Broadway #1602 New York, NY 10001 www.sternberg-press.com Auguste Orts is supported by the Flemish Community, Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie, Beursschouwburg Auguste Orts would like to thank Anita Daes, Ben Cook, Chantal De Smet, Charlotte, Christine Sticher, Dave Driesmans, Dominique Callewaert, Els Roelandt, Fairuz, Garage64, Geert Palmers, Herman Croux, Hogeschool Sint-Lukas Brussel, Isabelle Tollenaere, Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten, Lionel Devliegher, Marc Ruyters, Michal Bussaer, Mike Sperlinger, Paul Robbrecht, Pieter-Paul, Robin d'Hooge, Scanner, Stuart Comer

Auguste Orts: Correspondence was published on the occasion of the exhibition Auguste Orts: Correspondence, organized at M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, from May 20 until August 22, 2010. Scenography: Tenfinger Audio support: Johan Vandermaelen M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp Leuvenstraat 32 B-2000 Antwerpen www.muhka.be M HKA is an initiative of the Flemish Community and is supported by the Province of Antwerp, the City of Antwerp, the National Lottery of Belgium, Akzo Nobel Decorative Coatings Levis, Ethias, and Klara M HKA Director: Bart De Baere Administrative director: Eric Krols Team: Jrgen Addiers, Raoul Amelinckx, Katrien Batens, Maya Beyns, Carine Bocklandt, Lahbib Boumedmed, Els Brans, Cecilia Casariego, Marcel Casneuf, Tom Ceelen, Ann Ceulemans, Celina Claeys, Christine Clinckx, Rita Compre, Leen De Backer, Jan De Vree, Martine Delzenne, Han Deswert, Liliane Dewachter, Staf Dierickx, Sophie Gregoir, Ria Hermans, Sabine Herrygers, Nico Kppe, Renilde Krols, Joris Kestens, Christine Lambrechts, Hughe Lanoote, Sarah Lauwers, Ben Lecok, Viviane Liekens, Maja Lozic, Alexandra Pauwels, Joost Peeters, Ghislaine Peeters, Anne-Marie Poels, Aicha Rafik, Ruth Renders, Dieter Roelstraete, Staf Rombouts, Marnix Rummens, Rita Scheppers, Katleen Schueremans, Georges Uittenhout, Jos Van den Bergh, Chris Van Den Broeck, Ria Van Den Broeck, Frank Van Der Kinderen, Willy Van Gils, Lut Van Nooten, Roel Van Nunen, Gerda Van Paemele, Lutgarde Van Renterghem, Annemie Van Roey, Kris Van Treeck, Sofie Vermeiren, Nine Verschueren, Jan Vertommen, Grant Watson, Thomas Weynants, Magda Weyns, Kathleen Weyts, Hans Willemse, Abdel Ziani

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