home

ea@effiandamir.net

EFFI & AMIR

TEXTS

in hebrew

The Way of Negation (95:00 min)

Like all the participants in the program, we were not born in Brussels . Even now, living in Brussels , we are not Brusselians. Like a quarter of the Brussels population, we are not Belgian. Even the Belgian participants in the program sometimes feel that Brussels is a foreign land.

When we are asked (and everyone asks, even the Brusselians themselves) why we moved to Brussels , we don't have a good answer. We always begin by way of negation. And the way of negation gradually turns out to be a multi-lane highway. We are not alone there. It has heavy traffic. Unlike other European capitals, Brussels has no grand, shiny adjectives to flaunt. In a country whose nationality is as flimsy as Belgium 's, the capital is defined by what it is not. While the entire country is divided into the major Walloon and Flemish communities, with different languages, different cultures, and separate service and government institutions, Brussels , which forms yet another independent unit, boasts of its non-identity and non-belonging to either community.

"When Brussels conjures up a particular image, it immediately evokes the opposite image as well… the paradox is perhaps the only image that can adequately describe it." ( Sven Sterken, “ Brussels , City in Plural: Some Thoughts Concerning the Image of the Belgian Capital,” in exh. cat. Argos Festival 2004 , Brussels ).
The way of negation embeds liberation and a potential for change, for it always leads to "another" place. There is certainly something liberating about a place which is so fluid, a place whose identity is so dim: a place where no one feels solid possession – there, of all places, everyone has room.
The fluidity, the lack of dominant collective narrative, the negations lurking at every corner – all these leave empty spaces, air pockets, deserted yards, no-man's lands which enable, even necessitate, the retelling of a personal story, a commentarial story, one that would furnish its narrator with access into a reality which is his, but nonetheless foreign to him.

The five component works in the program all deal with the quest for a place – concrete, mental, social or personal – by means of re-telling; this re-narration always challenges, if not totally negating, the old story.

Sarah Vanagt's and Karen Vanderborght's works confront existing histories that constitute a collective narrative. Both artists depart from a concrete point, drawing away by a flight of the imagination.

In Vanagt's Little Figures , the voices of three immigrant children conduct an imaginary conversation between three monumental statues of key figures in Belgian history. They invent the content of the conversation which draws away from the factual historical content, blending imagination, fragments of personal stories and excerpts from Belgian history, as they understand it, thus introducing, as Vanagt phrases it, "a secret porthole onto the reality in which they live."

Vanderborght's The Happy Three Family recounts a story from the New Testament (the visit of the Magi), placing it, in the tradition of Flemish painting, in a contemporary Flanders landscape. In Vanderborght's version, the Wise Men are, in fact, Wise Women, and the asphalt path leading up to the home of the outcast Mary is strewn with pits and prejudice.

The alternative place offered by Anouk de Clercq and Kurt d'Haeseleer is more internal. In Portal , de Clercq constructs a digital landscape bubble, a delicate, harmonious system, from scratch. It is a utopian space offering refuge from the chaos outside, yet at the risk of the bubble bursting in one's face. D'Haeseleer, on the other hand, departs from mundane sights. Via continually rewritten documentary materials, he rescues and refines a rich inner world's sparkling diamonds from a sooty reality and indifferent pixels.

Pour vivre, j'ai laissé ('In Order to Live, I've Left Behind') is the most concrete work in the program, and was not created by artists. In this intimate video, which is a collective piece, political asylum-seekers staying at Le Petit Chateau, a refugee center in the heart of Brussels , attempt, by means of a hand-held camera, to reposition themselves within the frame. These forced exiles, absent from their homeland, whose new place is likewise intangible, are rendered present through the act of re-telling.

for more about the works see www.cca.org.il