piloot.co (with Kelly Schacht)
-----> (note on Tondelier slam, 16-09-2020)
Last Saturday, A hardly work (Tondelier slam)
Context:
Tondelier slam was a happening in the frame of our Rabot /tondelier PILOOT project, a group of (around 5) artists under the name PILOOT commissioned to bring and research public art in a new neighbourhood that is rising in the Rabot wijk. The Rabot wijk is a former labourer neighborhood where today many newcomers lives. There’s a high amount of poverty. Tondelier will be a middle class venue with (what they call) budget houses from 250.000 euro on to really expensive lofts that goes over a million.
We have already a history of 6 years of actions and interventions in a sequence of different intensity and speed.
Often/untill now mostly actions were taken by us as individual artists but Tondelier slam I organised with Kelly Schacht (another artist involved) and it is part of a longer trajectory we run together in the rising neighbourhood. A trajectory that is strongly connected to the people who are living in or using public space in todays Rabot. For example we follow and work with a group of youngsters playing football guided by some older guys with a ‘difficult’ past (to be continued).
Tondelier Slam:
We organised a slam poetry/spoken word/hip hop ‘battle’ on the construction site of Tondelier in between the piles of polluted tar and surrounded by fences. The stage was a big circle in a red vinyl (a point) that also did serve as a mind map and thus contained texts and signs made by the performers during a meeting we had the week before the happening. No audience was allowed on the site but the event was streamed live by radio rood, a local organisation that started up streaming events on facebook during the corona period.
Local artist:
Local artists working with vocality in different ways where contacted and asked to bring a text/piece connected to the broad context of the place. Gentrification, whats the meaning of home, migration, the huge difficulties/obstacles for young people of color and/or with a poor background, drugs problematics, capitalism and the un-equality that comes out were themes that were common. Some wrote a text others used old texts whether or not mixed by new elements…
Networks:
We started our research in Ghent, looking after very different surroundings to find a big variety of performers from different backgrounds (working in different artistic or social frames). The basic idea was to reach and bring together these local artists but their contacts lead organically to Brussels, Antwerp and even Amsterdam. Also the performers art form (even in its difference) shapes a network that can be considered as a locality.
Voices:
Different voices were gathered on this empty terrain in transformation. The voices spoke in many different ways from positions that stays mostly unheard. In their performativity pain, angriness but also hope was staged. Performers addressed the current situation in Rabot critically and threw a perspective on a future neighbourhood surrounded by a rough landscape in transition. As important is the use and quality of the materiality of the voices, its colours, tones, volumes. These formal elements produced sensitivities and beauty related to humans and their bodies that nourished imagination and believe in humanity.
Community:
The act was conceived as one performance with many personal additions-one following the other. Performers, organisers and technical crew were standing around the circle. The group formed very much a community for the duration of the act.
Scenography:
The happening started with an act of Filip Van Dingenen another artist of PILOOT on the ruff of a house that looks up the construction site. In a dust jacket he sprayed water forming the words: ‘freeing the Lieve’. The Lieve is an old medieval kanal (from Ghent to Brugge) that used to cross the Tondelier site and that perhaps is still running somewhere under the plot. A drone filmed the performance and moved then over the entire Tondelier construction site. A red dot with people around announced that something was going on. From there the cameras on the ground caught the first performer starting the act. The line up run from basically spoken poetry to rhythmic/dutch American hip hop.
Positions/artist/audience:
Filip who was on the ruff, popped up very much as an artist performer during the happening, my rol in this was very different, I was perceived as an organiser.
The labor I did for that project was basically bringing these performers together, organise the event, looking after people for the production, giving trust, making sandwiches.
I enjoyed the event and I was as much as everybody a spectator at the moment the performance took place.
The concept or conceptual elements or decisions that were made on forehand were very minimal. The work is a hardly work. Its very close to organising a festival notwithstanding the decisions made here have very different motivations than ‘usual’ concerts. In the specific assumptions lays the conceptual script which is very context related. Important is/was the organically following up of the work during the organisation. Working in the now and in specificity, mould experiences and set out the way that has to be followed. The process is in this sense a learning process and things design themselves.
As became clear the work is a collaboration with many people, but on the level of concept and decisions made its a cooperation between Kelly and me, which means that I still know very well which labor tasks I carried out, but I can’t track down anymore (and its irrelevant) who -content wise- is responsible for which aspect of the work (this is a victory over myself).
