Cinema, Podium and
Workspace in Kortrijk

#Almost Summer Festival

Almost Summer 2024

Preface Almost Summer Festival

A resting place amidst the hustle and bustle: that’s what Almost Summer 2024 wants to be. We invite you to slow down together. With performances, gigs, and engaging installations, we briefly stop time. As we know, modernity and postmodernity have championed speed and acceleration, in particular through the invention of technological means that are supposed […]

Paper Lane

1 performer, 1 white sheet, 1 tear. These are the basic ingredients for the meditative Paper Lane. For this wordless performance, Olga de Soto drew inspiration from Hartmut Rosa’s theory on the need to slow down and a gesture used by Sophie Whettnall on some of her works with paper. The result: the uninterrupted, very […]

ElseWhere Rhapsody

ElseWhere Rhapsody

The power of desire In four musical chapters, Jen Rosenblit stages absurd yet familiar situations: an auction and a dog race. Two events with a hellish pace that revolve entirely around an absent object. ElseWhere Rhapsody is a grand experiment that seeks to illuminate the poetic and political aspects of desire. Beneath the humorous waterfall […]

DUST

DUST

Does the value of an object survive the test of time? Tamar Levit and Yaën S. Levi sought and found inhabitants of Kortrijk with a collection of, or a special bond with, objects. In their conversations, memories were brought out from under the dust, and along with the objects, stories of belonging came up. Thus […]

DOPA

While enjoying the sounds and beats of OK Radio, Anne Lise Le Gac and Anat Bosak break in unexpectedly. In DOPA’s SYNUSIAs, hackers attempt to dismantle, tweak and hijack system-objects in their hands. This may involve a luminescent organism, a rule of good militant conduct, a bagpipe or an air conditioner. On each new terrain, […]

_Life is not useful

Life Is Not Useful (or It is what it is)

Life as a journey of wonder In the search for philosophical and choreographic insights around the marvellous, Freire came across Ailton Krenak, one of the most important political voices in contemporary Brazil. His publication Life Is Not Useful is the starting point of this dance reading (a dance performing a text or idea). Krenak argues […]

OK Radio

OK Radio is an on- and offline community radio in Kortrijk. Bringing together a wide, eclectic range of music backgrounds, they mirror the city’s musical landscape. For this evening, they invite several DJs. Sit back and relax or dance the night away, the choice is yours!

Measuring Narrative With Water

Measuring Narrative With Water

To what extent can we be held accountable for the histories we inherit? Between 1920 and 1922, Knud Heckscher, Sirah Foighel Brutmann’s great-grandfather, travelled from Copenhagen to Bangkok and back over water. During these two years, he meticulously recorded his daily life in a series of 107 letters and a collection of black-and-white pictures. They […]

apap Feminist Futures

What could a feminist future look like?

FEMINIST FUTURES is a project by the international network apap – advancing performing arts project, which currently consists of 11 European cultural organisations. In addition, 21 artists are associated with the project. FEMINIST FUTURES is co-funded by the Creative European Programme of the European Union and has an ambitious aim: to instigate powerful social change […]

The library of Sara Manente

Would you like to read more about slowing down, eco-feminism or time? Then we recommend these books. You can also check out these books at Sara Manente’s library in Budatoren. Alba Rico, Santiago Sobre lo inconsistente y lo incompleto Berlant, Laurent Cruel Optimism Bridle, James Ways of Being Dorlin, Elsa Self Defense: A Philosophy of […]

The lexicon of Almost Summer, a Feminist Futures Festival

apap – advancing performing arts project is an international network of 11 cultural organisations from all over Europe. The network exists since 2000. Funded by different EU cultural programmes, apap has managed to collaborate continuously on supporting a high number of artists as well as developing new formats according to changing artistic practices and needs […]

Sara Manente

A conversation with Sara Manente

Sara Manente brings a whole new interpretation to our feminist school with her White Garden at Budatoren. Mathilde Villeneuve asked her about her past work and the philosophy behind White Garden. Can you elaborate on the development of your research based on fermentation? For the past six years, the central focus of my artistic practice […]

White Garden: closing

Choreographer and researcher Sara Manente focuses on the intersection between living art and living cultures. This White Garden is inspired by fermentation techniques and the world of fungus. Especially mycelium, an underground network of fungal threads that connects all the trees and plants in a forest. For Manente, this is a symbol for the network of […]

White Garden: welcoming

Choreographer and researcher Sara Manente focuses on the intersection between living art and living cultures. This White Garden is inspired by fermentation techniques and the world of fungus. Especially mycelium, an underground network of fungal threads that connects all the trees and plants in a forest. For Manente, this is a symbol for the network […]

STILL/ALIVE

STILL / ALIVE

Who are the real immortal heroes? Four dancers move in stop-motion to a steady beat. Like immortal superheroes, they continue endlessly in a cycle of attacking, defending, wiping sweat, and reloading. They seem to build their imaginary super-bodies and super-narratives effortlessly. Yet gradually small cracks begin to show in their grand gestures. Are they also […]

A Dance for Valeska Gert

A Dance for Valeska Gert

Dancing in the margins The Brazilian trans artist Fernanda Silva presents her latest creation, a tribute to Valeska Gert: a German dancer, mime, cabaret artist, actress, and pioneering performance artist of the early 20th century. In this solo performance, Silva connects her personal life to Gert’s satirical and provocative works. In doing so, she builds […]

Mata

Matamatá

A dance to postpone the apocalypse What if Western philosophers Descartes or Spinoza had visited the Brazilian rainforest? Brazilian poet Paulo Leminski’s Catatau poem or romance-idea is based on this dream: a philosopher is confronted with a new environment that bankrupts his thoughts. He arrives at the Atlantic Forest where everything is astonishing, where there […]

Máquinas (Machines)

Máquinas (Machines)

Longing for less Since the rise of industrialisation and capitalism, a constant desire for everything we don’t have (yet). Llopis Segarra dissects humans and our society, and exposes our inherent desires. Máquinas is a dance performance that explores what a “desiring machine”, as French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari called it, could be. They […]

Nocturnes for a Society

Nocturnes for a Society

Sleeping together under a blanket of sounds Nocturnes for a Society creates an environment to spend a night in – an abode somewhere between performance, sleep, dream, and sonic play. With our voices, we weave a nocturnal carpet of sound and use it as a blanket to crawl under. Sound artist Myriam Van Imschoot and […]

_The forest

The forest_

The forest is a place where one never knows where one is and simultaneously never feels lost. This condition before the unknown allows us to write the future in ways we could not have imagined. Entering the forest is an invitation to the practice of the ‘unknown’. A term that shifts as soon as it […]

No hay acto creativo

There Is No Creative Act

There Is No Creative Act straddles the line between a lecture and a performance. Using archival material, combined with movements, text, and the use of certain objects, Norberto Llopis Segarra tries to frame his artistic practice. He starts from the opposition between Operation and Action, whereby an Operation is conceived as a procedure that allows […]

Ethereal Possessions

Ethereal Possessions

A green front door covered in a spider web leads to a small space, both interior and exterior, with the purpose of protection; many beguines were women hiding from their wealthy families, fleeing arranged marriages. Somewhere inside this house, there is a clock ticking; it drives you back to childhood. Some sort of anthropology of […]

Sara Manente White Garden

Feminist School: White Garden

This year’s Feminist School of the festival takes the form of a White Garden. Choreographer and researcher Sara Manente focuses on the intersection between living art and living cultures. In the various versions of her ROT Garden, these two worlds collide. Every ROT Garden is a multi-layered landscape installation consisting of sounds, smells, texts, textures, […]

Almost Summer 2024

Almost Summer, a Feminist Futures Festival

As we know, modernity and postmodernity have championed speed and acceleration, in particular through the invention of technological means that are supposed to make us ever more efficient, when in reality many of them are alienating us and multiplying ecological destruction. In opposition to the supposedly unalterable structural triangle that combines competition, growth and acceleration, […]

Farm Fatale

Farm fatale

Join us on a bus trip to the Latitudes Contemporaines Festival! Our colleagues from the contemporary performing arts festival would like to welcome you in Lille. At the boundary between the human and the puppet, the peasant and the scarecrow, the five masked characters of Farm Fatale appear and settle against a spotless white background. […]

Almost Summer

Intro Almost Summer festival

Dance – film – performance – installation – sound walk – party – summer garden Almost Summer celebrates the transition to a new season. Artistic proposals in various forms and media, emerging from singular sensibilities, intermingle and echo each other. We turn the spotlight on language: a mother tongue to be relearned (Muna Mussie) , […]

Castélie Yalombo

Water, l’atterrée des eaux vives

“This is how i started my oddyssee to embrace blackness.” Water, l’atterrée des eaux vives explores the underlying friction of our perception of the racialised female body. Crossing a continuum of figures linked to representations of black history and her own imaginings of the black bodies, the body of Water is a dangling, lost object, […]

Emptor

Jubilee: Emptor

Emptor – Assembly of practice: whose artwork? Together with BUDA, Jubilee organises a collective reflection on the relationship between artist and artwork, with the practice of Katya Ev and Clémentine Vaultier at its core. Jubilee’s Emptor project forms the context of this event. Asking ‘how can we practice property for a sustainable visual arts field?’, […]

MOLD

MOLD

An environment where dance, objects, audience, light, music, scents and costumes interact as living cultures. A garden dedicated to cultivating, abandoning, inoculating, braiding, duplicating, sprouting, warming up and decaying. A mold refers to two very different things: it is a type of fungus but is also a hollow container to cast a specific form or […]

The Crip SChool

The Crip School

In BUDA we are developing a Learning Together programme. It is a collective space for critical reflection, forging links both within and outside the artistic community. During the festival, Learning Together takes the shape of a ‘school’. A place where art is shared in a different way, where we put ways of doing, thinking and […]

Fabrizio Terranova personal archives

Speakers for the dead

Fabrizio Terranova proposes a first phase of his residency at BUDA, which will constitute the starting point of this experimental quest. A residency full of ghosts, dedicated to living spirits that need to be nourished. A residency to prepare a future film in honor of a beloved one who has disappeared. Lecture by Fabrizio Terranova […]

Inga Huld Hákonardóttir

Neind Thing

Neind Thing seeks to transform a state of chaos and misery into a state of renewed empowerment, through dance, games, contemplative conversations. Neind Is Not Everything; It’s Every Thing: What if the answer to everything was nothing? Neind is the Icelandic word for nothing. In Neind Thing (Nothing Thing) we ask nothing to solve the […]

Liza Baliasnaja

TRIEB

Combining movement, animation, and poetry, TRIEB explores the qualities of human mind through the metaphor of the knife. From the dawn of modernity in western philosophy, human cognition has been characterized as something sharp, capable of thinking distinctly about itself and the world. At the core of this rational worldview is the distinction between body […]

Calixto & guests

FEIJOADA

Feijoada is a transdisciplinary project that takes the emblematic Brazillian dish as a starting point to question the colonial heritage and how it is actualized and transformed into a celebration, that includes music, text, dance and food. Feijoada is a piece that appears as an artistic answer to a generational encounter. In 2019, Calixto Neto […]

Jija Sohn

Landing on Feathers

Landing on Feathers, is a poetic short film, portraying human relationships through transparent communication and care within most intimate and close surroundings. The film opens the question of care and the dichotomy between ability/disability – caretaker and care receiver and where self-care takes its position. Landing on Feathers is a documen-tation of human relationships, based […]

Paula Diogo: Terra Nullius

Terra Nullius

TERRA NULLIUS is a performative audio walk that tries to capture the experience of a distant place, inviting the audience to walk through the city in a group experience. For each new location a path is drawn in the city to create an overlap with a previously adapted audio track. This experience concludes with the […]

Muna Mussie: Curva Cieca

Curva Cieca

When I close my eyes and I try to define my image, what do I see? The subject is always located in the world and its body is the situation. I am the Subject for myself and the Object for others. […] When I close my eyes and I try to define my image, what […]

The 8th Letter

The 8th Letter

In The 8th Letter Effi & Amir invite a limited public of 18 people to gather around a table and to explore together voices that become borders, phonemes that are checkpoints and stories that cross them. The 8th letter, H, is the letter that started Effi & Amir’s research into the both ancient and contemporary […]

PREMIER PRÉSENT

PREMIER PRÉSENT

Inspired by René Magritte’s painting, The Life of Insects, PREMIER PRÉSENT gives an interpretation by setting in motion the picture. The piece suggests an imaginary past and future that would fill in what we firstly cannot see. The Life of Insects is a painting by René Magritte that does not represent what it says it […]

Subscribe to our newsletter

Follow us!

@kunstencentrumbuda