durations

curation

Durations is a series of performances curated by David Weber-Krebs in and around a glass house on top of the city.

For this format, a series of practitioners are invited to think and develop an intervention with a durational dimension.

First edition: 20 June 2021
Second edition: 29 August 2021
Third edition: 15 May 2022
Fourth edition: 24 September 2023
Fifth edition: 8 September 2024

invited artists
bryana fritz and henry andersen
nick steur
phréatiques: julien bruneau, anouk llaurens, sonia si ahmed, michaël grébil
the ambassadors of cribbage
leonie persyn / a series of suggestions
curated by
david weber-krebs
graphic design
amina saâdi
supported by
the flemish authorities

durations 1. slow reading club

For the first chapter of Durations, David has invited Slow Reading Club (SRC).

They present Road Movie, a still-in-progress pulp/pulp novel constituted from existing road literature. Its materials are handled via manual transcription, stenography, and repetition; typing past the point of bodily exhaustion until the writing buckles, allowing new meanings to pool into the slack spaces of mishearing, mistyping and autocorrect. (Truman Capote allegedly said of Kerouac’s On the Road: “That’s not writing, that’s typing”. But were these two activities ever really divisible?) Road Movie tries to swap the impossibility of travel for the image of motion. At the same time, the activity of writing a novel offers a cover for a set of durational reading and recordings, squeezing out the novel’s publicness chapter by chapter.

Slow Reading Club (SRC) is a semi-fictional reading group initiated by Bryana Fritz and Henry Andersen in late 2016. The group deals in constructed situations for collective reading. SRC looks at, probes, and interrupts ‘readership’ as a way to stimulate the contact zones between reader and text, text and text, reader and reader. SRC does not aim at deconstruction or even comprehension of the texts in hands, but at the production of a kind of excess: to temporarily suspend criticality for intimacy and to negotiate agencies with the text.

    Bryana Fritz, Henry Andersen and guests during Durations 1. Slow Reading Club. Ph: David Weber-Krebs.
    Ph: Alex Reynolds
    Ph: Alex Reynolds
    Ph: Alex Reynolds
    Road Movie, leaflet

durations 2. nick steur

 

For the second chapter of Durations, David invites Nick Steur who will develop a site-specific work titled Watch Tower.

Working primarily with stone, Steur creates installations and performances that are often site-specific and durational in nature. His analogue practices are in high contrast with today’s fast pace. Although Steur often draws inspiration from the visual arts, he finds the live aspect of performance important: “Live rituals allow duration and togetherness, in which we become aware of the present and our own presence in it.” Rather than grand gestures or symbolism, his actions appear mainly functional; moving a boulder or catching a drop of water… However, through skill and intense focus he is able to connect our inner dialogue with the material, physical world again. This holistic approach succeeds in creating subtle changes in time and space, and perhaps in people.

Entrance fee: a stone. The audience was invited to bring a stone as big (or bigger) as their own fist. Without it, they could have not experienced the work, unless someone else brought a stone for them.

Nick Steur (Nijmegen, 1982) is a Dutch artist working from Brussels. Since graduating in 2011 from the Institute for Performative Arts in Maastricht, his works have been shown in museums such as MuHKA and Middelheim, Bozar and Kanal Centre Pompidou in Brussels and international arts festivals like Spring Utrecht, Lift London, Adelaide and Edinburgh festival. Steur won several prizes and is currently supported by SoAP Maastricht, In Situ European Network, Workspace Brussels, C-Takt and the Performing Arts Fund in the Netherlands.

    audience inside the watch tower. ph. Nick Steur
    stones: entrance-fees. Ph: Nick Steur
    audience listenting to instructions before entering the watch tower. ph: Nick Steur
    view from the rooftop through the telescopes
    Nick Steur's invitation for the audience.

Welcome to Watch Tower. Get very close from a distance…

Choose your stone and come to the lighthouse, the tower room… venture higher and higher to uncover the smallest details. Discover how two people, two perceptions and two stones can fit together… over and over.

durations 3: phréatiques

The third edition – initially meant to take place in December 2021 and postponed due to pandemic – will host phréatiques, a long-standing research project initiated by Julien Bruneau.

For Durations, his collaborators and himself propose a durational event around Meta-Instrument Score, a performance originally created in 2012 as a 30min dance piece inspired by the XVth century art of the Flemish Primitives.

Turning abstract drawings and religious paintings into movement, the Meta-instrument Score explores the reading of a partition as a choreographic gesture, as important as the actual actions performed in space. A work on presence and attention, it offers to contemplate the rise of movement, its ending, and all the vibrant resonance it births in its wake.
The afternoon invites you to experience successively different versions of the piece interspersed with other ventures into interiority, medieval art and the reading of a partition.

    © David Weber-Krebs
    © David Weber-Krebs
    © David Weber-Krebs

phréatiques on 15th of May.

Glimpses of phréatiques from the try-out in December 2021

durations 4. the ambassadors of cribbage

The fourth edition hosts the Ambassadors of Cribbage. For over 15 years, artists Ron Bernstein and Rod Summers have met each other on Thursdays at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht to play a card game called Cribbage. Conversation is a significant element to the game and in the case of Rod & Ron this banter between the game interactions might be termed Poetic Dada. Once in a while they take their performance to the public, to play at art institutions. This time you are invited to spend the afternoon in their presence in a domestic environment. Follow the score and their thoughts, watch the changing lights of the sky above Brussels or simply stay for the duration of the game.

Rod Summers (GB/NL) learned to play Cribbage during his career as a para-medic in the Royal Air Force, he spent countless hours playing it with his ambulance driver whilst waiting for an air crash or road traffic accident to occur. As such tragic events are fortunately rare, he had a lot of time to thoroughly learn the game.  Ron Bernstein (USA/NL) learned to play cribbage from his artist friend Mathew Weaver in New York, who in turn was taught the game by his mother Lenora who grew up in the state of Iowa. 

Cribbage was created by English poet Sir John Suckling in the early 17th Century. It is the ideal game for two players.

This edition is curated and hosted by Rita Hoofwijk and David Weber-Krebs.

the ambassadors of cribbage.

durations 5. a series of suggestions

For the fifth edition of Durations Leonie Persyn and David Weber-Krebs launch their book A Series of Suggestions #3: The Invisible Geographies of Resonance.

They happily invite you to come and celebrate the collaborations at the heart of this project with further interventions by Laura Broux, Rita Hoofwijk, Kinga Jaczewska and three guests who will develop each a new suggestion especially for this event: Felix Schellekens (Rita’s guest), Katharina Smets (Kinga’s guest) and Edurne Rubio (David’s guest).

In each of its editions, A Series of Suggestions explored how suggestions can function as a possible research output. Suggestions are never clear-cut answers or solutions for a problem; they can function simultaneously as a recap of what has already been done and a forecast of undiscovered paths. They affirm and question at the same time. Suggestions highlight the strength of current or overcome fragilities and uncertainties while fostering future dialogues and explorations. But most of all they are moments of encounter between two practices.

During this afternoon, we will invite you to discover each of the three editions of A Series of Suggestions together with us. After a collective unfolding, the three artists at the center of each edition will read a fragment to you. Their reading will be answered by a new suggestion based on the guest’s reading of A Series of Suggestions.

You can buy the books here.

back to top of context

agenda

paul deschanellaan 225

curation

paul deschanellaan 225

curation

paul deschanellaan 225

curation

paul deschanellaan 225

curation

paul deschanellaan 225

curation
go to agenda