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How many views, perspectives, interpretations, visions, images, sounds, solutions,
fantasies, artworks and concepts can there be on subjects like ecology, sustainability,
livability, space, humanity, history, media, nature, AI, reality, society... and how can we
as a
multidisciplinary collective give shape to this...
TEMP WEBSITE / Previous content can be found here.
For BOFUS | The Bureau of Unclassified Sounds click here.
Only Art Can Save Us
Most of the times, a state of emergency is at the heart of any new political theory. Today, however, the problem is not the crises we face —often used by governments to legitimize themselves— but an urgency that political realism fails to recognize as emergencies: from totalitarian states with their widespread surveillance to climate change, global poisoning, the construction of concrete cities, the destruction of nature, and the systemic shocks of neo-liberalism. Martin Heidegger distinguished between works of art that save us from emergencies and works of art that are saviors in emergencies. The former are a means of cultural politics, those that maintain the status quo and conceal emergencies.
By interpreting works of art that aim to propel us into absent emergencies, Wastelands shows how the capacity of art to create new realities is fundamental to the politics of a progressive democracy in a state of emergency. With Wastelands we not only want to interweave sciences and arts with an involutionary momentum but also offer space for the sensory experience with attention to the larger whole of which we are a part. Inspiration, wonder, questioning, exhiliration...
Wastelands has been a socio-cultural collective recognized by the city of Ghent since 2019. It started in 2017 with Listen to Me, an international group exhibition at Zebrastraat Gent on the subject of tinnitus and silence. Projects such as Ethereal Threads (radio-art performance/concerts), SoundCloud / La Pluie Joyeuse (permanent installation in the Muziekbos), Bearing Voices, .... The musical interpretation is now done under the name The Bureau of Unclassified Sounds so that the collective can now offer space for a broad multi- and cross-disciplinary interpretation. The Bureau delivers PICs: Performance-Installation-Concerts. PICs are a hybrid art form characterising the live + installation events such as the piece Winter, Blumen with soprano, Arduino/C++, slide projector, Victor Vasarely appropriated B&W photogaphy and car horn samples, delivered for the 25th Aniversary of the Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (Münster, Germany).
Wastelands are undeveloped, abandoned or fallow lands or terrains. ...des terres désolées / abandonées... Cities where everything is neatly built up are suffocating. Abandoned terrains are necessary as undesignated space. They offer space for all kinds of activities, for plants, animals and people. People play, fantasies arise behind the fences, between the train tracks, in half-overgrown ruins, owls and bats... It is a temporary symbiotic state between nature and man, like a swamp, with unique life forms.
A wasteland as bio-eco-architecture with space for unexplored inspiration, in an artistic sense, where people think outside (literally) the boxes (studios and -isms). These are the sites that are eventually gentrified and lose their value (obviously not for the project brokers) when grass becomes concrete, and the worms escape the pressure of this civilization, making their way between the (micro-)plastics, PFAS, bones of pink chickens1 and radioactivity... Anthropocene and Capitalocene migrants. Wastelands Connective might even be a better term.
The Team Welcomes You, Welcome to this Team
If we take a closer look at the current composition of this art team, we soon discover the added value of its adjacent, overlapping, parallel, complementary and enveloping components:
Philippe Druez (BE) conducts an art-scientific process, supported by technology to arrive at multidisciplinary (sound) experimental works of art. The art-science activist inventions and experiments use neural networks and mechatronics, among other things, to involve the visitor as a participant through interaction.
Heide Bertram (DE) works in her daily and professional life with improvisation and experimentation in which voice, word, song and music lead to communication and social interaction that, just like observation and participation, is a daily and permanent theme and functions as a Gesamtkunstwerk.
Chthonix (EARTH), a collective of earthworms that has been part of the Wastelands Collective for several months now. This group of less talkative organisms of about 40 (also called) ringworms take up an important place in Heide's living room. They were fed there (with organic kitchen scraps), cared for and observed. They live in a specially made wooden cupboard — a kind of worm apartment building — and after a while they reside in your thoughts, compassion and actions.
The name of this fourth partner is derived from the Greek word χθόνιος (chthonios), which means "to reside under the surface of the earth". This can be interpreted broadly, from a mythical underworld to the world wide network in the (sub)terrestrial habitat of this Phylum Annelida. Much can be said about earthworms, but for us they are an essential element, even more, an essential and full-fledged partner, with a voice, that guides our thinking, increases our empathy for the unseen ecological and leads to a different kind of art/thought/work that would not be possible without Chthonix.
It is an encounter that opens up an ecology of interspecies intimacies and subtle propositions. An ecological relationality that takes seriously the practices of organisms, their inventions and experiments, to create interspecies lives and worlds. This is an ecology inspired by a feminist ethics of responsibility in which questions of interspecies difference always involve attention to affect, entanglement and rupture: an affective ecology in which creativity and curiosity characterize the experimental forms of life of all kinds of practitioners, not just humans.
Interested? Reach out: info@wastelands.be
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