People

A few of the visitors on the last day of the exhibition:
A man who came back three times (one of the neighbours who got an infusoria flyer through his door). His only comment was that the exhibition was strange, that I obviously liked strange things, but he kept coming back for more. A woman who said she had enjoyed the exhibition, to which I replied with my belief that if one person takes something away with them then the whole thing is worthwhile. A man from India who happened to be walking past about half an hour before the very end: he kept repeating that if he had walked the other way home, he would never have known. Many people walking by who look through the windows, sometimes for quite a while, but don't come in.

There are two particular things about infusoria that matter to me. One is providing a gathering place and an opportunity for communication between the participants. The other is offering visitors that butterfly-winged experience of seeing something beautiful when you are not really expecting it. I didn't think I'd be able to tell whether people "get anything" out of the exhibition or not: politeness and shyness can both get in the way. But with strangers I have found that I often can tell. Some clearly walk away unmoved, even irritated; others take the trouble to tell me they were glad they'd bothered to step off the footpath and come inside.

Opening (Sunday afternoon)

The opening was fun, if slightly chaotic. Claire and I arrived a couple of hours early to find that two of the perspex sheets had fallen down (again) and had to invent a whole new sticky-tape-inside-clips system.

Ghent is home and most of the people we know came to this opening rather than to the Brussels edition. With a poetry crowd, natural sunlight, performances and refreshments it had a whole different feel. (Mostly panic. But good panic. My new Dutch nickname is streskonijn, ‘stress bunny.’)

Some of my poetry friends were there: Luc Fierens, Dirk Vekemans and Tine Moniek as well as lots of the Logos people, but the best part was that I had never met about half the people who turned up. Some were friends of friends, but others had found the exhibition through the Literaire Lente publicity or picked up one of our flyers. Claire and I did a bit of late-night flyering in the surrounding streets on Saturday night and at least one of the neighbours came to see what we were up to. I recognised him as a customer from years back when I worked in the bookshop next to the cathedral but I didn’t know he lived nearby. The City of Ghent is amazingly supportive as well: not only in the sense that they subsidize us to put on events that are not exactly mainstream or high-profile, but also in the sense that people from the council regularly turn up to see what we’re up to. Thank you Ghent!


Lucille Calmel and Dirk Vekemans

I tried to take some pictures with lots of people on so you'd see the opening was well attended - maybe I should have stayed still for long enough to press the shutter down? And apparently I only managed to snap people I know (Yvan and Kristof from Logos, Maja, Patrick).



I left my camera over on the other side of the room during the performances – a long-standing tradition that dates all the way back to the Krikri 2002 festival. But Svend was filming so hopefully I can upload part of the film sometime. It’s a pity because Lucille in particular had an incredible physical energy during her reading: crouched on the floor with her Mac, making live recordings by scratching her fingers across the back of it and spitting on the case to make squeaky noises with her fingers, it is the best of her performances I’ve ever seen, online or off. The performance was based on Mina Loy’s Lunar Baedecker (the poem that also inspired Michelle’s work and provided the title for the exhibition). She read phrases at random from the original and the French translation, recording them live and replaying them in overlapping loops. I’ve never seen her give such a quiet performance, but at the same time it was full of restrained power, fireballs held down in the balls of her feet.

You can find Maja’s own work on her myspace, but yesterday she read pieces by other people, starting with her stunning party piece, Ernst Jandl’s bestiarium. It’s on Maja and Jelle’s Ubu page as well.

On a springtime and pond life theme, she continued with Kusano Shimpei’s 4 or 5 Tadpoles and Birthday Party from the Rothenbang, as Claire would no doubt call it, Paul Snoek’s Only for Poets...

... and finished up with a very, very cool reading of Steve McCaffery’s Positions of Sheep I and II (from Seven Pages Missing vol. 2).

I think this is the first time I’ve heard her give a performance with none of her own work, but it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed hearing poems from Poems the Millennium that I had either not read or paid no particular attention to before. Go Maja! Rumour has it she'll be improvising with angela on Thursday night as well...

Setting up in Ghent

We worked all through the day...

Maja

Claire

me

...and into the night...

Jelle

Maja and me

Some people had rented the upstairs room for a birthday party, and they were curious about what we were doing. So when we were finished we did a special pre-opening for them. It was great, there were about 40 people and they got really into it.



I'll take some better photos in the next couple of days so you can all see how we've hung your work - I haven't had time yet. It is completely different to Brussels: because the space was so different and we had access to different resources, it doesn't look anything like it did last month. But it's going to be fun :-D

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.

Last day in Brussels

2 German-speaking mail artists. They knew Jelle and Krikri because they’d been to Jerome Rothenburg’s lecture in Brussels in 2006.
2 French-speaking ’pataphysicists, wearing those knitted hats with flappy bits over the ears
2 little brothers, Mehdi aged 6 and Nael aged 2
2 joke eyeballs, being chased around the floor by Mehdi and Nael
4 more kids, a bit perplexed by Sharon’s Braille piece: “woah, you should hide that from blind people, they’re going to smash it.”
1 poetry editor who was all over your work like a rash, girls, and wanted links to all your websites
2 families with kids, looking for the workshops
1 friend of Bob Cobbing, who works for a publisher of scientific books and came to Brussels for the book fair. He got bored and ended up hanging out at infusoria all afternoon talking about poets we both know.
2 cookies left ...

It feels like months ago, although it has only been two weeks. And this time next week we'll be doing it all over again in Ghent.

Hnh

… and nothing can ruin Jelle’s day like getting his car broken into and the radio stolen while he and Maja were performing. He thought he was safe with an unglamorous car and a cheap radio, but apparently car thieves need smaller cars to practise on (they only bother stealing the Mercedeses and BMWs; with Suzukis or Sudokus or whatever Jelle has, they take the radio and leave the car). Plus the – predictable – indifference of the police, who just shrugged and said that’s what you get for parking in Molenbeek.

And people shrugging and saying “if it’s the kind of place where you only see men in the street, you don’t leave your radio in the car.” It’s not true about only men, by the way, although almost all the women are veiled. I’ve been walking around all weekend in a dress and heels, and I haven’t had any hassle at all. It would be different in the city centre, which is like Paris in all the wrong ways.

But then two old Moroccan men came out of their houses to apologise for the break-in and ask Jelle not to judge their area or Moroccans in general. They went round the neighbours asking if anyone had seen who had smashed the window. I’ve met more nice people this week than in the three whole years I worked in the city centre. I went back to the baker’s this morning with the 2 euros I owed him and a poetry book from the book fair.

Another post about cookies

Our subsidies partly depend on how many people come to Krikri events. As a poetry organisation, and a polypoetry organisation at that, audience numbers are not always our strong point. But the exhibition had almost 200 visitors spread out over the week.
Since almost everyone who came to the book fair also stopped by at infusoria, it was tough on the publishers participating in the book fair. They had been hoping to sell a lot of books but as you can guess from the visitor numbers, they didn't. Spreading the book fair over three venues didn’t help. For a small exhibition, though, the numbers were ideal: enough for it to feel worthwhile without the space getting noisy and crowded. The right numbers to be able to spend time talking to people or letting them look round without distraction. But some people are so nice I reckon we deserve a double subsidy for them:

- that art student on Thursday who went running from one work to another, squealing “ooh, what’s this, tell me about this one! Why is it a poem? Oh, wait, I see.”
- a woman on Friday night who took the trouble to offer a lot of intelligent and perceptive comments.
- a woman who came in two minutes after I opened on Saturday afternoon saying “I’ve heard so many good things about this…” and left saying it was “extremement beau” (self-congratulation time, everyone).
- the baker on the corner. He hasn’t been to the exhibition but he gave me Moroccan cookies on credit on Saturday morning because he couldn’t change a ten-euro note.


... so next time you're wandering round Molenbeek all cookieless, the bakery on the Parvis St-Jean-Baptiste will make everything happy ever after.

I feel like I’m in the anti-Brussels. I’ve hated the city with a passion for three years: taking the train here from Ghent, it strikes me almost every time how miserable everyone looks and how generally unfriendly they are. And when I take the Eurostar, I get out in London and think ‘wow, look at all the smiley people’ (no seriously, in London). Brussels is filthy, corrupt and lacking in urban planning: it is theoretically one of the richest cities in Europe, but something like 17% of people live below the poverty line. Closer to the other end of the social spectrum, friends who work for the European institutions tell me there is a huge amount of mental illness, alcohol abuse etc. up there in the shiny buildings.

The Maison des Cultures rocks, though. The people who work here weren’t immediately positive about the exhibition, but once we had set up and they saw we weren’t going to flake out on them, they were lovely. It seems to be a fantastic place for community arts as well: I’ve seen an Indian dance class, photography lessons, huge installations made by children, a rehearsal for an opera they are making from scratch, posters for a pop-up book workshop and Mozart’s Requiem, sculptures being carved outside from trees that fell down in a storm…
… and the baker gave me cookies. Nothing can make my day like free cookies.

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.

Thursday 5th March

An art student, who wants to write a report on infusoria for school. She wants photos to use in their project, but the deadline is tomorrow, my photos are still on the camera / laptop, she hasn’t got a printer at home… we think she might be able to print some of my photos in the office. I hope so. She was up for the full guided tour, I had fun.

An older gentleman told me that in a computer age it is rare to still ‘find objects.’

It’s easier today. I’ve stopped being nervous of people or (even mildly) disappointed when they walk out after a few seconds.

A crowd of people came in after the performances this evening, and I was immediately struck by how differently they reacted to the work. Until about six in the evening, the visitors are people who primarily come to see the book fair or the children’s workshops. The evening visitors are people who come to hear the poetry, and I was surprised to notice within a few seconds that they were looking at the pieces in an entirely different way. I’m not sure I can describe the physical gestures (approaching, stepping back, considering, reading the information sheets, occasionally laughing out loud) as opposed to how the daytime people approached the exhibition (wandering, gazing, sometimes touching things, picking them up: something more like window-shopping). But it was immediately clear that the evening people had experience of looking at exhibitions … and that many of the daytime people didn’t. I had forgotten that it is a skill to be learned.

I remember ‘sneaking in’ to an exhibition of paintings with my sister when we were teenagers. We just saw a sign, admission free, and my sister dared me to go in so we did. I thought art galleries were like shops: you would only go in there if you had the money to buy a painting and we obviously didn’t, so I was just waiting to get thrown out. I think I spent more time with an eye on the ‘security guard’ (guard? just an attendant, surely) than looking at the paintings.

There are a couple of obvious things I could improve, such as having more French-language information about the work, and putting the information beside the work instead of on a sheet on the desk. Doing that would mess things up a bit visually, but it would help people out. And housing an exhibition in a place where all kinds of people pass in and out is one way to lower a threshold. I’m enjoying working in a community centre, and I like that all the various events this week are free of charge. But it’s not enough. If people are interested enough to put their head round the door, they have a right not to be excluded by invisible barriers. Holding lots of exhibitions in community centres is one way to make things easier for people, simply because it makes the concept more familiar. Guided tours are probably good too, and I’d get better at showing people round if I had more experience. I could learn what they are seeing, what they are missing, what they might be interested in seeing if I could point them in that direction. With the kids it’s easier, I’m better at imagining what might interest them and what they might figure out for themselves with a couple of hints.

It’s very, very cool that all the staff of the Maison des Cultures have dropped in, though. Office staff, bar staff, workshop leaders and co-ordinators, technicians and maintenance guys, the lot. I’ve worked with Krikri at plenty of places where the organisers and everyday staff seem completely indifferent to whatever is going on at their own event.

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.