Let's Not Get Used to This Place – Works 2008-2023

17 Mouvements collects traces of a project that Decoratelier - the workspace and arts platform of Jozef Wouters - did in the fall of 2022 around the ‘5 blocs’ area in Brussels (Rempart Des Moines/Papenvest).

When Nuit Blanche invited them to build a gym, Camille Thiry and other Decoratelier associates did not want to design another generic muscle cage. Together with the neighbourhoods inhabitants, they built 17 distinct movement spaces, each tailor-made to an individual’s size, needs, dreams and aches. The gym equipment has meanwhile been removed from public space, but this eponymous book (ed. by Jozef Wouters) combines notes and reflections (language: French) by Camille with beautiful photography by Enzo Smits, documenting the ingenious and unique negotiations that were a part of this collaboration.

ROT is the catalogue for a community of practices.
ROT is a medicine and a ritual. The prescription for a new therapy.
ROT is a manual without instructions. A map. A party.
ROT touches upon sci-fi doomed scenarios.
ROT works within the ruins of the future.
ROT engages in weird beautification processes.
ROT uses mushrooming as a research method.
ROT hosts essays, stories, poetry, interviews, visuals, recipes, horoscopes and more.
ROT is mouldy.
ROT is glossy and asks to be touched.

With contributions by Adrijana Gvozdenović, Agnese Krivade, Alix Eynaudi, Anne Juren, Asli Hatipoglu, Carolina Mendonça, Cécile Tonizzo, Coline Gautier, Daniele Gasparinetti, Deborah Robbiano, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Elke Van Campenhout, Ēriks Ašmanis, Eve Gabriel Chabanon, Gary Farrelly, Goda Palekaitė, Günbike Erdemir, Jaime Llopis, Jennifer Russo, Jeroen Peeters, Jonas Palekas, Kristin Wiking, Lucia Palladino, Luciano Maggiore, Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Michelle Anay Woods, Muna Mussie, Muslin Brothers, Natasha Papadopoulou, Nina Janela, Norberto Llopis, Paloma Bouhana, Peggy Pierrot, Sandra Muteteri Heremans, Santiago Ribelles Zorita, Sara Manente, Sébastien Tripod, Sina Seifee, Sofie Durnez, Wilson Le Personnic

Sara Manente is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher who promotes collaborative situations in heterogeneous formats. Drawing on the imagery and matter of living cultures and mycelium brought into relation with live arts, her recent projects reflect on the possibility of contamination between pedagogy, research, performance and publication.

Published by Varamo Press
First edition, August 2023
136 pages, 22 x 30 cm, perfect binding
ISBN 978-82-693189-2-0
Graphic design by Deborah Robbiano

Conversations about embodied strategies of knowledge production and knowledge transmission based on the choreographic and curatorial practices of about fifteen international choreographers, performers, dramaturges and curators.

In the context of the numerous ethical-political challenges of the global present, actors from the dance and choreography scene both in Berlin and internationally talk about forms of knowledge production beyond the prevailing conception found in Western modernity. They counter the mind-body separation and the notion of a universality of knowledge with multiplicities of knowledge production that emerge with and from the reality of differently situated bodies.

What potential do embodied practices offer for emancipatory movements? How can community be created through these practices, and what responsibilities does this entail? What role does the body play in the preservation and transmission of knowledge?

In this publication, edited by the choreographers and curators Martha Hincapié Charry, Sandhya Daemgen, Raphael Moussa Hillebrand and Matthias Mohr; Lukas Avendaño, Wagner Carvalho, Sandhya Daemgen, Ismail Fayed, Alex Hennig, Raphael Moussa Hillebrand, Martha Hincapié Charry, Isabel Lewis, Matthias Mohr, Prince Ofori, Mother "Leo" Saint Laurent, Léna Szirmay-Kalos, Thiago Granato and July Weber conduct conversations about embodied strategies of knowledge production and knowledge transmission based on their respective choreographic and curatorial practices.

Drawing on his experience in the field of contemporary dance, Jeroen Peeters discusses principles, methods and practices that contribute to an understanding of dramaturgy as an experimental, collaborative practice and a material form of thinking.

Written from practice, this book reflects a particular history of collaboration and conversation with dance-makers such as Martin Nachbar, Meg Stuart, Vera Mantero, Sabina Holzer, Lisa Nelson, Jennifer Lacey, Chrysa Parkinson, deufert + plischke, Eleanor Bauer, Philipp Gehmacher and many others.

Phantasmal archaeology, unfolding material, literal and physical reading, crafting method, articulating process, witnessing and performing not-knowing, naming and ritual destruction, conceptual landscapes, symbolic waste, internal fictions and foreign objects – they may all play a role in creation and in exploring the unfamiliar in pursuit of making sense.

And then it got legs is an invitation to think along or against, to discuss those ideas with others or explore them in the studio, and eventually to imagine and devise one’s own methods of research, observation, reflection and creation.

Afternoon Editions no. 1: an essay by Jeroen Peeters titled Reseeding the library, gleaning readership. In May 2017, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine settled during three weeks in the Ravenstein Gallery in Brussels as part of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Invited as a writer in residence, Jeroen Peeters visited the library of living books on a daily basis and recorded his observations by hand in a notebook, which formed the basis for Afternoon Edition #1. Reseeding the library, gleaning readership is an essay on the seed library, on the dispersion of literature through wind, water and animals, on biodiversity and commoning at the heart of readership. On the cover a drawing by Wouter Krokaert of a Philodendron Xanadu. Published May 2018.

A take away cup and a cloud is an essay written alongside the dance performance Seems to be by Denise Lim and Stina Ehn. It plays with a variety of containers–the list form being one. By mixing a personal with a historical gaze it traces the trajectory of mundane commodities and  the replacement of material with imaterial objects brought about to the everyday by technical progress. 

Koreografi / Choreography is a magazine initiated and edited by Solveig Styve Holte, Runa Borch Skolseg and Ann-Christin Berg Kongsness. The magazine consists of texts written by Nordic artists within the field of dance and choreography.

Lesson on Gravity is a slice of Anne Juren’s ongoing artistic research into ‘fantasmical anatomies’. ‘What happens when our sense of ground, orientation and support is lost? What are the risk and the promise of detaching ourselves from the pull of gravity?’ As this apocryphal Feldenkrais lesson embraces moments of intrusion and fragmentation, poetry and flights of fancy, it shows how language is alive, embodied and liquid. It also invites the reader to treat the book itself as a body, an unruly tongue sticking somewhere in its folds and creases

Anne Juren is a choreographer, dancer and Feldenkrais practitioner. In 2021 she finished her PhD at Stockholm University of the Arts with the project Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
First edition, March 2023
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer