Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond Exhibition Opening
At the exhibition opening, Christina Kubisch will give the first guided tour of her Electrical Walks Amsterdam. The walk is one-hour long, and has place for maximum 10 people. Electrical
Walks is a work in progress. It is a public walk wearing
special sensitive wireless headphones by which the
acoustic qualities of electromagnetic fields become
amplified and audible. Kubisch’s Electrical Walks
Amsterdam enables a new experience of the city, one
that uncovers Amsterdam’s hidden electromagnetic
phenomena. Armed with special headphones and a map
of magnetic landmarks, the visitors are offered an auditory adventure that shifts the perceptions of everyday
reality by giving substance to invisible wavelengths and
charges. Electrical Walks Amsterdam is walk No. 74 in
the series.
This piece has been commissioned by Sonic
Acts as part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by
the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.
We are happy to invite you to join us at the roundtable with some of the artists participating at this exhibition – Alexis Destoop, Lukas Marxt and Ulrike Ottinger. The panel will be moderated by Polina Medvedeva.
Alexis Destoop explores the mechanisms of image and narrative, the experience of time, and the processes of identification and memory. More recently, landscape has become his primary interest, particularly its artificiality. Lukas Marxt’s conceptual films can be related to both landscape and performance art, using the strategy and aesthetics of documentation films. He favours isolated locations and topographies, such as drilling rigs, fields of volcanic rock and arctic coastal bands. Ulrike Ottinger studied with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Althusser before launching a film career in Berlin in the early 1970s. After several feature films, Ottinger shifted away from the theatrical extravagances to a carefully observed documentary chronicling her travels through Asia. In 2011, she received the Hannah Höch Prize from the city of Berlin for an outstanding artistic life’s work.
Two voices in the dark. Dimensions of a territory emerge from oral fragments around the receding exclusion zone, following the nuclear accident of 2011 in Fukushima, Japan. Both factual and speculative, these fragments progressively give way to others: field recordings collected in the region, airborne, electromagnetic, accompanied by resonant metals. Another dimension of a territory which we hear but do not see. Divided in two movements, To our future ancestors is at once an acoustic and literary attempt at sensing a film to come, a narrative experiment for a cinema which we image without images – a film in the dark.
