Sharon Harris, Moniek Darge, Ayşegül Tözeren

Sharon Harris


Sharon and Moniek


Moniek Darge


Ayşegül Tözeren

angela's angles

So you can see things how someone else sees them...

(with thanks to angela for letting me plunder her facebook album)

Sharon Harris, Blues

Jessica Smith, Veil (as modelled by the lovely Xavier Roelens)

Maja Jantar

a.rawlings


Moniek Darge

Jenny Sampirisi

Helen White

Alixandra Bamford

Angela Szcepaniak and Jennifer Scappettone

Review by Moniek Darge

Moniek has written a review of infusoria for the next issue of the Logos Blad (the Logos Foundation’s monthly magazine): the text should appear there shortly in Dutch. In the meantime, here’s an English translation. (I added the links myself, for anyone who might want to know where Molenbeek is or what the Koekelberg looks like...)

Infusoria

Organiser Helen White and I are on the train to Brussels, to put the finishing touches to a small exhibition of visual poetry made by women just before it opens. Without wishing to dwell on my own expectations, I imagine mainly videos and internet pieces. As for myself, I have been invited to contribute two music boxes, which Helen has already installed for me.
The activity is part of a “Foire du Livre OFF 2009” and is being held at the Maison des Cultures in Molenbeek.

The metro takes us as far as the avenue that leads to the Koekelberg Basilica. We walk down several side streets with mainly North African residents, pass a typical grocer’s shop with vegetables displayed in front of it and end up in a building that looks like a school. The corridors are decorated with colourful silhouettes of children, drawings and photos and the place exudes a vibe of multicultural community work similar to initiatives in our part of Ghent.

The exhibition has found a home in a small room that has been given a highly original atmosphere with huge cardboard boxes placed in the middle of the room on their narrow sides like a sculpture. Some of the contributions to the exhibition are fixed to the sides of the boxes and there are plinths around the room with three-dimensional works. There is no sign of the internet or video works I had expected.

An employee of the Maison des Cultures is hard at work attaching the spotlights and bending them to the correct angle, and a second man is pacing nervously back and forth with his hands full of materials and tools. He warns us to hurry up and is clearly not convinced that we will be able to open on time, because at three o’clock he is going to open the doors, whether we are ready or not. I’m at a loss as to why he is so worried, because everything seems to be just about ready. I can’t resist having a quick look round to get an impression of the whole exhibition. A couple of striking works grab my attention right away. A group of old-fashioned teacups with teabags covered in text; underneath a bell jar, all kinds of little dolls, toys and dice with letters on them that have rolled out of a bottle lying on its side and a six-sided wooden box in which blocks with letters on them are displayed on a cheerful pink cushion. The playfulness of the exhibition is right up my street.

Helen is already busy attaching name cards and I offer to help. This is how I find out that the teacups are by the Canadian Alixandra Bamford and that the bottle under the bell jar and the box with blocks inside are by the same person, Michelle Detorie from California, who grew up in South Carolina. I’m curious about what Helen’s own contribution is, and it turns out to be little plexiglas cubes, one of which contains transparent films with text on, and another contains balls of sticky tape with letters on them. In places openings have been made to look through, bordered with a star of red or gold thread. Small pebbles are lying between the boxes with text on them. As a whole, they emanate both endless patience and great playfulness.

On one of the side walls, a door is concealed behind a translucent curtain into which messages in Morse code have been worked in stitching and beadwork. It was made by Jessica Smith from Buffalo and bears the self-evident title “Veil”. Unfortunately I can’t read the texts, but they remind me of my father who used to spend whole evenings signalling when we were small children, and often let us listen in to the mysterious Morse code messages from distant lands. Might that be where I get my wanderlust from?

My two music boxes are displayed in all their glory under their plexiglas domes. I have chosen to exhibit two particularly visual boxes with lots of different colours and quirky shapes. One of them displays curled Thai finger extensions in yellow copper, with blue glass marbles and two moving eyeballs that roll back and forth between them. The other box contains brightly coloured fishing floats and two blue tropical fish.

It is almost three o’clock, and I make eager use of the last few minutes to take a quick look round at the other activities. Besides the alternative French-language book fair, there is another photo exhibition by local residents that gives us a view of colourful festivals and overflowing living rooms. An African man stops me with a steely glance and a brochure in his hand: he turns out to be from some christian sect or other which wants me to listen to the voice of jesus calling my name and warmly invites me to come and sing his praises.

I beat a hasty retreat back to our room and at three o’clock the doors swing wide open and our first visitor come in. When he stops at the music boxes, I lift off the dome and start the first story. When I hold the fish to his ears so he can hear the ultra-quiet sound they make, he protests, telling me he used to be a long-haul sailor and that the sea is not silent at all, but that constant pandemonium rages over the waves.

The time flies by and as I make my way back to the metro, the lively images of this small exhibition full of good things are dancing in front of my eyes. I am genuinely delighted that there are people like Helen White who put their heart and soul into promoting visual poetry, which would otherwise remain unknown.

Moniek Darge

Thanks Moniek! *blushing pink*

You can find more of Moniek’s strange and wonderful music boxes here.

Moniek Darge

Music Boxes

Moniek with the Ocean Box

Ocean Box

Mona Lisa Box (because its eyes follow you everywhere...)

"These alternative music boxes tell a poetic audio-visual story, with tiny sounds, subtle light reflections and a little liberating kitsch or humour as ingredients. Music boxes have fascinated me since childhood. Once I visited a small family museum at the back of the Beaubourg in Paris, to discover the most fabulous collection I've ever seen or heard. From that day on music making has become even more exciting: I visit flea markets, looking for the most appealing, still silent, box and listening to the sounds in my head. What kind of sound will I decide to let escape from what kind of box? Once a box has been chosen I start working on the visuals. Little by little my ears become pregnant with the most appropriate sounds. Soundscaping and building alternative music boxes are adventurous journeys into the audio-visual world. The vast universe of audio art is there to be explored."

~~~~~~~

Moniek Darge (Bruges, 1952) is active as a composer, violinist, performer and audio artist. She has built light and sound sculptures, installations and musical instruments. She has been performing around the world since 1970, first with the Logos Ensemble, then with Logos Duo, and more recently with the M&M robot ensemble and the Logos women. The latter are a small group founded by Moniek, who specialise in intermedia improvisations and perform their own compositions for various instruments, voices and music boxes.
In 1997 Moniek received the title of Cultural Ambassador of Flanders for the Logos Duo. Belgian radio has broadcast programs about her music experiences in Kenya, Rwanda, Japan, China, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand. She has also created her own radio programmes about women artists over the world.
She studied music theory and violin at the Music Conservatory of Bruges, painting at the Ghent Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and Art History, Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Ghent. She is assistant professor at the University College Ghent, where she teaches 20th Century Art History and Non-Western Art Studies in the Fine Arts Department and an introductory course to Ethnomusicology in the Music Department.

~~~~~~~

One of the very first visitors to the exhibition asked where the language element of the music boxes was. Given Moniek's background, I had considered the boxes as combinations of music and visual art, and hadn't really thought about the language element of these particular boxes (although there are others with where language is a more obvious factor). The visitor's suggestion was that the feathers in the Mona Lisa box referred to writing. When I thought about it later - having listened to Moniek talking about the boxes with all sorts of people and giving half a dozen demonstrations, and then doing the same myself, it occurred to me that the boxes are visual works that incorporate oral language. The stories are part of the boxes.

It doesn't make sense to type out the stories here. Perhaps I'll get a film of Moniek demonstrating the boxes when the exhibition comes to Ghent.

Wednesday 4th March

I had the enormous good luck that Moniek Darge wanted to come to Brussels with me for the beginning of the exhibition. There is no particular opening event in Brussels, because it didn’t really fit in with what Le Off were doing (there will be an opening event in Ghent). So it was a quiet beginning, but having Moniek’s boundless enthusiasm there made all the difference. She helped me with the last finishing touches and stayed to welcome the first few visitors. She talks to everyone, listens to everyone, and – implicitly, by example – gave me a crash course in how to make people interested in an exhibition. Instinctively I’d just pretend not to be there, give people space to look or not look at the work as they choose. (I don’t usually talk to attendants in museums or galleries when I’m the one visiting, beyond a hello or a smile or whatever basic courtesy seems to require. I prefer to be left on my own to look around so it hadn’t really occurred to me that other people might not want the same).

Each of Moniek’s music boxes has its own story, which she tells to everyone who comes through the door. The stories have given me a ‘way in,’ a way to approach the visitors. People have been in and out all day but I’m too shy, I’d rather hide behind my computer in the corner typing this than talk about the exhibits. I have to force myself to be open, which does not come easy. (What a phrase, forcing oneself open. It’s more or less accurate.)

Stuck in the room, inside the exhibition, I find inevitably that I am an exhibit myself. People look curiously at me, and often they want to talk. They want to tell me about an artist they saw in Korea who did such-and-such, about the need for art during an economic crisis, what a tiring day they’ve had. I don’t think I’ve had any direct questions about individual works yet, although I have had a couple about the exhibition as a whole, and a few discussions of the work where people seemed to want me to volunteer information. There’s a whole printout with each poet’s statement and biography, but nobody wants that. I’ve exhibited work before and had people come up to me and say “this is shit, this means nothing,” or “I like this one” – I haven’t had any of that today. People have asked factual questions, such as where the artists come from, but tended not to express opinions.

Three kids (Salma and Latifah, aged about 10 perhaps, and Zakarias who was maybe six or seven) asked great questions. How did you find all these things? Did the poets just give them to you? Why do you only use difficult things? (I asked Zakarias what he meant, but he wasn’t bothered by the ‘difficulty’ of the works – he just thought it would have been easier just to use sticky tape to attach the works instead of fussy little pins and photo corners.) Zakarias wanted to spell his name with the Lunar Baedeker. We couldn’t find all the letters but it was more fun anyway to make them out of the other objects (a crayon and a bent flower stem makes a K, the I looks cool with a bead on top). Latifah didn’t think the Ocean Music Box made the sound of the sea, but Salma made the sound of crashing waves for her. And the girls understood Sharon’s Braille poem without me having to explain. Once I’d asked them if they knew what the little dots inside the frame were, they were totally there: they got the point of the glass, the hammer, and what it meant to write the name of a colour in Braille.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaafuck! A SWAT team just crashed my expo. It was cool, they were lovely. The French Community Minister of Culture is coming over at seven and Mr Big Anorak and Mr Walkie-Talkie just came to check I wasn’t hiding any riot grrls in my teacups. Mais non messieurs, ici on est toutes gentilles.

A man just told me that what people look for in a time of crisis is the ephemeral. I’d have thought the opposite, but it’s an interesting idea.

There’s a language barrier. My French is rustier than I thought. In Brussels, which is bilingual in theory and mainly French-speaking in practice, I’m supposed to provide all the information in both French and Dutch, although Le Off haven’t bothered with Dutch. I thought I could get away with English, which is less politically loaded than opting for only one of the official languages. It would be fine in Flanders. Here people are like ‘ooooh, no, I can’t speak English.’ I realise I’m spending so long understanding the words of what people are saying in French that I have no attention to spare for a response. For example I didn’t ask the ‘ephemeral’ guy why he thought that. I’m not sure if I could phrase it as a genuinely curious question, rather than implicit disagreement/censure.

When I’m here, sitting among poems made by my favourite peers and surrounded by echoes of their hopes and well-wishes, I’m happy. When I get home, all kinds of doubts creep in. What if the exhibition is shit? What if things that inspire me leave everyone else cold? Has anyone who came in here today gone away with something worthwhile? Does it … um … matter?

There is something in this room. Maybe only the tiniest thing. Part of it is Maja’s inspired placing of boxes and photographs. But there’s more than that, although I don’t know if people have the patience to find it. I am discovering it as I go along, ever since I started getting parcels through the door at the beginning of February, and I suspect there still lots more to find. There is a photograph of the phrase “shall not damage it’s silver” caught in a cobweb on barbed wire. There is an interaction between Michelle’s tiny objects and a glass dome. Three recipes for cooking human hearts, suitable for a candlelit dinner. Alixandra’s teabags, which attract everyone’s attention. Silke’s funny vagina poem. The veiled door in the corner.

First pictures

I know you all need to see what we’ve done with your work but I’m going to post the photos gradually, taking my time to get a good photo of each piece. In the meantime a couple of general pics…



I went to Brussels with my Krikri colleague Maja Jantar on Monday to set everything up. Maja is an absolute genius when it comes to adapting a space, and I am so grateful to her for the hard work and huge quantities of inspiration she has put in this week. I’m not sure if the photos entirely reflect the way the two huge cardboard boxes open up the space and change it from a cramped rectangle into a garden of echoing lines. They also provide extra surfaces for exhibiting work, and something eye-catching to entice people into the room. The boxes are courtesy of Thomas, who scoured Antwerp’s music shops for big instrument boxes and went to unbelievable lengths to get them to us in time, and also gave us the idea of using them this way (he did something similar at the Krikri 2006 festival).

The positioning of Derya’s series make the height of the room more manageable and echo angela rawlings’ work across the room, as well as Suzan’s series down the side of the larger box; Angela Szczeapaniak’s red mounting boards resonate with the red floor tiles and the red background to angela’s series; the shape of the boxes work with the covered blackboard, which we couldn’t take down from the wall. Moniek’s big plastic domes covering her work, and the glass dome we used to keep Michelle’s tiny objects safe, take some of the solidity and squareness out of the surroundings, as do Jessica’s veils with the lamp behind them. One visitor described the space as ‘Zen,’ which it certainly wasn’t when we arrived there on Monday morning.