1928. Henri Ford embarks on intensive rubber mining. To clear a million hectares of forest, in the Amazon, on the banks of Rio Tapajós, to plant rubber trees, and to build a factory city, a utopian city, with school, hospital, dancing… The project was a real failure, Ford never exploited rubber. 2018. Florence Jou discovers the history of Fordlandia during an exhibition and round tables organized by the collective Suspended Spaces at the Colonie in Paris. She writes a poetic survey based on testimonies, anecdotes, observed gestures, readings… She proposes Dominique Leroy… Read More

Anna Walker was selected to be included in Mixtape #IWD, a two day multi-channel sound installation of experimental electronic music and sound art. This “cinema for the ear” is hosted by the Department of Creative Arts, Media & Music at Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT) to celebrate International Women’s Day 2019. This event brings together a wide array of music and sound art which celebrates womanhood. The event, curated by composer Dr Hilary Mullaney, Lecturer in Music at DkIT, is a response to the wider issue of representation; imbalances exist in genres… Read More

An exhibition as a riddle, that is the least one can say about Ik Zie Ik Zie Ik Zie Watjijnietziet – I See I See I See Whatyoudon’tsee – the left-out spacing of the last part of the title intended. As curator Lieve Segers describes it the exhibition is …a game in which one has to guess an object that one of the players has in mind and that is visibly present for all players. The only characteristic the player gives is its colour. …the exhibition not only lets the viewer search… Read More

On Saturday 23 February Sara Bomans will take part in the first ‘Stadsavond’ (City Evening) organised by Studiostad in the former town hall of Hasselt, Belgium. For this evening Wim Verluyten invited his favourite artists and other creatives. For the opening of the evening Sara Bomans meets up with fellow artists Bart Deglin and Pieter Timmers. Having recently started to experiment with using colour in a new series of paintings she will be showing ‘There is a rainbow underneath…’. As usual she she uses her particular humourous manner of observing. The evening… Read More

This Thursday you can enjoy a new sonic installation by Mike Blow and Peter Batchelor at The Royal Festival Hall in London. Inspired by Peter Eötvös’s composition Multiversum that premieres that evening in the UK, the installation is part of the Music of Today series. Blow and Batchelor are as composers based at the Music Technology Institute at  De Montfort University, Leicester, which is a Music of Today series supporter. Find an impressive video of the work in progress, which will thus sound even better during its final installation, below. Tickets are free and… Read More

It’s been a while, but I am happy to have another review published in Leonardo Reviews. In Powers of Time: Versions of Bergson French philosopher David Lapoujade sets out to construct a portrait of an ‘another’ Bergson, one not solely defined by the three main aspects of his thinking on affect – emotion, sympathy, and attachment. You can find the full review here. Some of my reviews are sometimes re-published in Leonardo. My review of Arts of Living on Damaged Planet was this month published in Volume 52, Issue 1 which you can find here. And finally… Read More

During this Research Network event, part of the Duties of Self Care programme, organised by Iniva (Institute of International Visual Art), artist Anna Walker will present her research on ‘When artists get it ‘wrong’. The repercussions of crossing a line: vitriol, shame and trauma’’ with a screening of some of her sound and moving image work ‘Fragments’ and a more recent work, ‘Breathe Wind Into Me’. The film ‘Fragments’, produced as part of her PhD, explores Anna’s research on collective and intergenerational trauma, artistic responsibility and censorship. She examines tension where trauma meets memory through a series of investigations… Read More

The new year starts promising with a new installation by Anna Walker at Fabrica in Brighton, UK. Walker uses her Making Space opportunity at Fabrica to test out a new three-part audiovisual work, Breathe Wind Into Me, she is developing for future exhibition. The work has emerged from her recently concluded PhD research which investigated the meeting place of trauma and memory and the notion of intergenerational trauma: what gets passed on down through the generations. She will be presenting Chapter 1: The Breath, which uses film, sound and text at Fabrica. Throughout the week she will be on hand to experiment and… Read More

This year was a bit of a bumpy ride, but Bureau Doove has nevertheless landed on its feet. To celebrate this I am sending you an image of a Liseron, a flower commonly found around here, which I photographed earlier this summer. It is quite symbolic as Prince Charles Eduard Stuart of England or Bonnie (1720-88) visited Saint-Nazaire in 1745 to prepare the war for England and collected some seeds of the Liseron de mer or Sea Bindweed which is since then also called Prince Charlie’s Rose. He apparently sowed the seeds on the… Read More

SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman—what then? This is the question Nietzsche asks at the start of his Preface to Beyond Good and Evil (1886). In ‘Stripped’ 18 female artists give an answer with drawings in the ‘first Nietzschean-feminist exhibition in the world’ and Sara Bomans is one of them. In her usual self-critical, humourous way, she reflects on her body while she takes a shower sitting on a tabouret to keep her recently broken leg dry, and discovers it is actually not too bad. In the accompanying text she wonders why… Read More