durations

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.

First edition: 20 June 2021
Second edition: 29 August 2021
Third edition: 15 May 2022

invited artists: bryana fritz and henry andersen
: nick steur
: phréatiques: julien bruneau, anouk llaurens, sonia si ahmed, michaël grébil
curated by: david weber-krebs
production and communication: alice ciresola
graphic design: amina saâdi
the first edition was supported by: the flemish authorities

For the first chapter of Durations, David has invited Slow Reading Club (SRC).

They present Road Movie, a still-in-progress pulp/pulp novel constituted from existing road literature. Its materials are handled via manual transcription, stenography, and repetition; typing past the point of bodily exhaustion until the writing buckles, allowing new meanings to pool into the slack spaces of mishearing, mistyping and autocorrect. (Truman Capote allegedly said of Kerouac’s On the Road: “That’s not writing, that’s typing”. But were these two activities ever really divisible?) Road Movie tries to swap the impossibility of travel for the image of motion. At the same time, the activity of writing a novel offers a cover for a set of durational reading and recordings, squeezing out the novel’s publicness chapter by chapter.

Slow Reading Club (SRC) is a semi-fictional reading group initiated by Bryana Fritz and Henry Andersen in late 2016. The group deals in constructed situations for collective reading. SRC looks at, probes, and interrupts ‘readership’ as a way to stimulate the contact zones between reader and text, text and text, reader and reader. SRC does not aim at deconstruction or even comprehension of the texts in hands, but at the production of a kind of excess: to temporarily suspend criticality for intimacy and to negotiate agencies with the text.

Bryana Fritz, Henry Andersen and guests during *Durations 1. Slow Reading Club*. Ph: David Weber-Krebs.

For the second chapter of Durations, David invites Nick Steur who will develop a site-specific work titled Watch Tower.

Working primarily with stone, Steur creates installations and performances that are often site-specific and durational in nature. His analogue practices are in high contrast with today’s fast pace. Although Steur often draws inspiration from the visual arts, he finds the live aspect of performance important: “Live rituals allow duration and togetherness, in which we become aware of the present and our own presence in it.” Rather than grand gestures or symbolism, his actions appear mainly functional; moving a boulder or catching a drop of water… However, through skill and intense focus he is able to connect our inner dialogue with the material, physical world again. This holistic approach succeeds in creating subtle changes in time and space, and perhaps in people.

Entrance fee: a stone. The audience was invited to bring a stone as big (or bigger) as their own fist. Without it, they could have not experienced the work, unless someone else brought a stone for them.

Nick Steur (Nijmegen, 1982) is a Dutch artist working from Brussels. Since graduating in 2011 from the Institute for Performative Arts in Maastricht, his works have been shown in museums such as MuHKA and Middelheim, Bozar and Kanal Centre Pompidou in Brussels and international arts festivals like Spring Utrecht, Lift London, Adelaide and Edinburgh festival. Steur won several prizes and is currently supported by SoAP Maastricht, In Situ European Network, Workspace Brussels, C-Takt and the Performing Arts Fund in the Netherlands.

audience inside the watch tower. ph. Nick Steur

audience listenting to instructions before entering the watch tower. ph: Nick Steur

view from the rooftop through the telescopes

Nick Steur's invitation for the audience.

Welcome to Watch Tower. Get very close from a distance…

Choose your stone and come to the lighthouse, the tower room… venture higher and higher to uncover the smallest details. Discover how two people, two perceptions and two stones can fit together… over and over.

The third edition – initially meant to take place in December 2021 and postponed due to pandemic – will host phréatiques, a long-standing research project initiated by Julien Bruneau.

For Durations, his collaborators and himself propose a durational event around Meta-Instrument Score, a performance originally created in 2012 as a 30min dance piece inspired by the XVth century art of the Flemish Primitives.

Turning abstract drawings and religious paintings into movement, the Meta-instrument Score explores the reading of a partition as a choreographic gesture, as important as the actual actions performed in space. A work on presence and attention, it offers to contemplate the rise of movement, its ending, and all the vibrant resonance it births in its wake.
The afternoon invites you to experience successively different versions of the piece interspersed with other ventures into interiority, medieval art and the reading of a partition.