rita hoofwijk
Durations
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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.
The fourth edition hosted the Ambassadors of Cribbage, at the invitation of Rita Hoofwijk and David Weber-Krebs.
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. Once in a while they take their performance to the public, to play at art institutions. This time an audience was invited to spend the Sunday afternoon in their presence in a domestic environment; to follow the score and their thoughts, to watch the changing lights of the sky above Brussels or simply stay for the duration of the game.
Cribbage was created by English poet Sir John Suckling in the early 17th Century, and is the ideal game for two players.
In collaboration
David Weber-Krebs, Ron Bernstein, Rod Summers, Outline
On miracles
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Text
“This paper is an accompaniment to the exhibition ‘The Holy Seriousness of Play’ by Paulien Oltheten at Centre Photographique Marseille. I imagine that you will be reading it at home, possibly days after your visit or perhaps sitting on a terrace somewhere in Marseille, in the sun. (I picture Marseille as always being sunny.)”
In collaboration
Paulien Oltheten, Centre Photographique Marseille
Showing Without Going
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Atlas
In 2021 artist Ant Hampton initiated Showing Without Going together with Caroline Barneaud of Théatre de Vidy-Lausanne, with an initial aim to collect examples of how live performance work can travel and be experienced / performed without artists being physically present.
Later, in June 2021, a small working group was formed with artists, producers and curators from around the world. Over a period of collective writing, the group created the ‘Atlas’, bringing together their overview of current practice with a great array of related theoretical concerns. The idea is for it to grow, remaining open for some time to contributions from people engaging with it.
Visit the Atlas – Showing Without Going – here.
Personal motivation
“As an artist who creates site-specific or context-specific works, the going (to allow for the ‘being’ on site) has been crucial for my work. During the past year, as relocating myself and my work became impossible, I’ve worked around the question: How do we connect with places and with people at a distance or by means of our distance? It made me think of the impossibility of travel beyond the pandemic for many and possibly for all of us, may it be for different reasons; political, economic, ecological. In order to create the Atlas, we gathered as a working group in the same (online) space, uploading our thoughts, texts into the same file, while thinking them in different places in the world, in different circumstances, different time zones. After a click on the button ‘leave meeting’ the distance between us returned inexorably. I was alone again, felt far away from our common space in which birds from Nairobi, wind from Lausanne, the lockdown in Bangalore and the heat of an apartment in New York’s summer were simultaneously present, even though I had not left my seat. Working on Showing Without Going, made me rethink what ‘going’ means. To not go raises the question: how to stay? How can the going nor the staying be taken for granted? If to go, who goes where. If to stay, who stays why. The context as part of the work. Could this way of showing and creating inspire forms of art and connection across distance? It might demand a new kind of care and attention from us – I would consider that to be a good thing.”
Credits
initiated by Ant Hampton
and Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne – Caroline Barneaud
Working group:
Munotida Chinyanga (UK), Ant Hampton (UK / Germany), Rita Hoofwijk (Netherlands/Belgium), Ophelia Huang (China), Gundega Laiviņa (Latvia), Kate McIntosh (New Zealand/Belgium), Ogutu Mũraya (Kenya), Shiva Pathak (India).
Atlas designer: Tammara Leites (UY / CH)
Production manager: Tristan Pannatier (CH)
Production: Théâtre de Vidy-Lausanne
Coproduction: Zürich Theater Spektakel
With the support of Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council
And with thanks to all the initial contributors to the « Showing Without Going » research-database.
A Way of Seeing
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Text
John Berger’s Ways of Seeing demonstrates how what we see is shaped by where and when we encounter something. Each text in A Way of Seeing reflects on the specific context of an individual visitor’s theatre experience. These gazes, shaped by different circumstances, come together as a collection of ways of seeing, forming an image of theatre-going in the period following the lockdown. The project was originally developed at the request of het TheaterFestival.
Het Voorstel
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Installation
Het Voorstel is an installation in the form of a storage unit that holds nine (empty) boxes. The installation sparks conversations between lecturer and student. Every conversation is linked to a box that opens in two equal halves. The participants meet at an agreed time at the installation, where they begin or continue the conversation by opening their box. At the end of their hour-long conversation, they store their box again. The box can be seen as a shared archive of the conversation and may function as a mailbox between meetings.
Context
“Het Voorstel was commissioned by the Research Centre for Arts, Autonomy and the Public Sphere. The installation was created to invent an alternative way of sharing knowledge between lecturer and student. For Het Voorstel it turned out to be important that both would relate equally to the intervention. We were curious about what would be discussed, what could be shared if these meetings had no goal or agenda. Both the structure of the installation and the boxes offered space.”
Reactions
An element I particularly enjoyed (and found moving) was the analogue meeting place, where the box and its contents made the conversations concrete. It’s like a little treasure chest. I thought back to when I was a kid and ate ice cream—you had to scoop out the last bits to get to the surprise at the bottom. The boxes had the same kind of effect.
Nora Ramakers – student participant
I particularly liked the mystery surrounding this project. Not knowing what you were going to talk about, where the conversation was going to take place, and what the outcome would be.
(…)
I liked that all communication went through that one wooden box in that one corridor, that one place where the two meet and later, after the conversation, say goodbye again at the same place.
Anthony van Gog – student participant
In collaboration
Ruth Benschop (Research Centre for Arts, Autonomy and the Public Sphere), Ron Bernstein (Jan van Eyck), Erik van de Wijdeven, Institute for Performative Arts Maastricht, Milan Meeuse
Presented
2017 1 Nov – 22 Dec Institute for Performative Arts Maastricht, Maastricht (NL)
2020 2 Mar – 17 May Institute for Performative Arts Maastricht, Maastricht (NL)
Engaging the City
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Installation
A construction worker lies on the floor of a construction site in the evening, where work is done during the day. A record player is placed next to him. For the length of one song a spectator watches this paused motion, standing on a bridge above the site.
Engaging the City
“For a month, I took part in ‘Engaging the City’, a residency programme organised by Metropolis/KIT in Copenhagen. One of the results was an installation in a construction site. I discovered this area by chance. Work went on every day and each evening the project came a little closer to completion. For a long time, I didn’t understand what I was looking at. Because of the depth, it was hard to get an accurate idea of the size of the site and I also wasn’t sure what it was going to become. I began to come there more often, mostly in the evening when work had stopped for the day, the construction workers had gone home, and the site was floodlit. At the front there was an empty, rectangular space lit by arc lights. Like an altar, or a stage.
To close the residency, I created a small work leading to, and in, this location. ‘Morten’, one of the construction workers who slept in a caravan next to the site, agreed to lie down, rest and wait in the construction site.”
In residence with
Naja Lee Jensen, Hannah Loewenthal, Cristina Maldonado, Lukas Matthaei
Day of Architecture
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Walk
A performative walk through a disused high school building for twelve visitors per hour. One person at a time enters the building on the verge of demolition. Twelve metronomes are placed at points throughout the premises, giving visitors an indication of their varying walking tempo. When the walkers reach a metronome, they stop it to look around in silence. When they simultaneously resume their route and set the metronomes running again, the building fills with the sound of time, ticking away.
Context
Created for the Day of Architecture, commissioned by Breg Horemans, SCHUNCK.
conversations of a city
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Installation
The installation was commissioned by Van Eyck Mirror, the project bureau of the Jan van Eyck Academie. It was conceived as a mobile instrument to facilitate conversations in public spaces on topics such as resident participation in cultural policy. The result is a temporary, movable city bench in which the seating is mechanically connected to the roof of the structure, regulating the amount of light entering the installation. Users collectively determine both the length of their seating arrangement and the duration of their conversation.
In collaboration
Milan Meeuse, Van Eyck Mirror, Jan van Eyck academie and Ron Bernstein (Heimo Lab)