On air Thursday 21.11.19 from 16h till 22h
For the occasion of the Terra Nova exposition by Raphaël Vandeputte, SS4S lands in the basement of the cultural center Nova. During the Sound-Score everyone is welcome to visit this outstanding architectural surrounding that once served as a library and currently functions as a socio-cultural meeting place.
A hidden treasure in the direct surrounding of a futuristic/historical site. WAV will air this event.
Where:
CO NOVA
Schijfstraat 105 2020 Kiel
District Antwerpen
Participating:
Michiel Helbig – dj/live
Bodo – live
Stekker aka Johan Faes – dj
Stéphane Schraenen – dj
Raphaël Vandeputte – dj
About:
TERRA NOVA // Raphaël Vandeputte
Terra Nova, New Earth, same old, same old.
We appropriate continents and expropriate entire countries. Discover and discard. Pushing civilization while plundering the treasure trove. We strip-mine what’s yours. Pass on the historic debt of colonialism and keep the profit.
We tap sources without paying credit. We copy and call it original. This Nova building itself is a not so distant echo of Alvar Aalto’s library in Viipuri. Sampled or stolen?
No comment.
A lot of comment.
Raphaël Vandeputte follows his intuition, and we follow him. From down to upstairs, from old to new.
A tectonic show of shifting layers. Where to begin, where to end, he doesn’t know yet. Scenography in transition. Clotted coincidence.
Twenty years later his ‘Three Kings’ unload their political charge. ‘Staat/Etat – the state of the flag of the state’ is a video of a Belgian tricolor in repair. Local hands reform a nation. They make their home, sovereign with needle and thread.
‘Dead Air’ by Becky Beasly and ‘Hunger Pangs’ by Margaret Welch resonate with a paper bag, wrapped up radio silence and video emptiness, a hunger that bites – we consume each other.
Objects and prints, ideas taking form. Always temporary. But detectable, tangible. Raphaël Vandeputte is a collector of residues. Of insights and outlooks. He removes. Attached and detached.
Maybe he builds a black base on the ground floor, colouring the upper floor with his boxes. Maybe a tower runs from 0 to 1 and back between two worlds full of synchronicity and doubly void. A vacant rack. A stack without a top.
Together with ‘Letterlegger’ Iwan Verhulst he digs a ‘Bottomless Pit’ out of polymer, organic and chemic, a substance connecting good and bad. Like a saxophone made out of copper from a colonial mine. Or the joy of a polluting vinyl record, pleasure with a price. Or rubber from Kinshasa, in 1920 the epicenter of HIV.
Today a hetero couple on a stamp still warns the people there about aids. Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play?
Luckily there is a reversal to every coin’s reverse. (Quoting Johan Anthierens).
Art is healing, uplifting, utopian. Art is naive, disgusting, destructive. Raphaël Vandeputte trusts his instincts, as well as yours.
Johan Faes