Isabella Pitisci

Isabella Pitisci is a Belgian photographer settled in London. She studied Romance philology and Art History in Bruxelles

Aglaia Konrad reist viel

Aglaia Konrad was born in Salzburg in 1960 and now lives and works in Brussels. Over the years she brought together an enormous archive of images shot in such diverse cities as Sao Paulo, Beijing, Chicago, Dakar, Tokyo, Cairo or Shanghai. Her pictures are always very strong, dry, very beautiful. Her book “Elasticity” provides a “strong dose of the thrill and horror of the late 20th-century metropolis” (…) her work documents “the global centers of late capitalism in all their frightening glory.” (R. Smith in NY Times 2004). A catalogue of an exhibition of her in Antwerp is available here.

(c) Aglaia Konrad

Chantal Akerman

From here: “Geboren am 6. Juni 1950 in Brüssel. Besuch eines Lyceums in Brüssel. Mit 15 Jahren sieht sie den Film “Pierrot le Fou” von Jean-Luc Godard und wird angeregt, selbst Filme zu drehen. Für vier Monate besucht sie die Film-Hochschule in Brüssel (INSAS). Nach eigenen Aussagen hat sie dort keine Anregungen erhalten. 1971 längerer New-York Aufenthalt und Beschäftigung mit den Filmen von Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow und Jonas Mekas. Seit 1968 dreht sie Filme.” Below a picture of her taken from her filmed autobiography.

Dear Umberta,

I told you a bit some weeks ago about a film inspired by “La Prisonnière” of Marcel Proust. It is La Captive (die Gefangene, 1999) by Chantal Akerman, jewish and homosexual like Proust. Very very beautiful film about jealousy inter alia. Any film of Chantal Akerman is interesting, but I particularly liked “Demain on déménage” (morgen ziehen wir um) — she’s a bit obsessed with migration — and “Jeanne Dielman” (1975) an incredible experimental film about an efficient homemaker and also a discreet one-client-per-day fille de joie marvelously performed by one of most beautiful voices of French cinema, Delphine Seyrig. One can see her peeling the potatoes here. She also published a not very well known small autobiographical novel, “Une famille à Bruxelles”, Edition L’Arche, 1998, of course not translated in german. The picture below is taken from La Captive.

Professor Bad Trip by Fausto Romitelli

I went to this concert I was talking about of Ictus ensemble last Friday (Professor Bad Trip of Fausto Romitelli) and I can only recommend to anybody reading these lines to listen to this piece. It is simply one of the most beautiful pieces of contemporary music. It is very strong, never boring or pretentious as contemporary music can sometimes be, filled with a “dry sadness”, a sadness which is never pathetic, and often nasty (esp. the cello solo, very beautifully played by François Deppe). Jean-Luc Plouvier (one of the pianists of Ictus) told me that it is certainly the best album of them (and only 12 euros on the site of the excellent Cypres Records). They worked on it for months and together with Romitelli. It is the last album by Ictus that Romitelli could hear before his death (and from what I was told, he was extremely happy with the result). During the concert, I thought that if progressive contemporary music exists, then Professor Bad Trip pertains to this genre. It is a bit like the first Pink Floyd album of classical music. The presence of the electric guitar (sometimes played with distortions) certainly explains it partly. And in fact, this impression was justified, since Plouvier explained me after the concert that Romitelli called this piece after a famous hippie comics from the seventies in Italy (see the drawing above) by
Gianluca Lerici, whose best known comics is an adaptation of William Burroughs’ ‘Naked Lunch’ (‘Il Pasto Nudo’). Professor Bad Trip was also inspired by the poetry of the Belgian writer and painter Henri Michaux and esp. his works on mescaline and other psychedelic substances. And it’s true that the drawing of Michaux above resembles a bit Professor Bad Trip. The drawing below is by him.

Ictus Ensemble in Stuttgart today

The Ictus Ensemble is an Ensemble playing contemporary music born in Bruxelles. They play today in Stuttgart the piece “Professor Bad Trip” from the Italian composer Fausto Romitelli. Some extracts of this ’spectralist’ piece can be listened here (to the right somewhere).

Ictus Ensemble plays with Rosas, the company of Teresa de Keersmaeker based in Bruxelles. Among the members of Ictus are the pianist Jean-Luc Fafchamps (below) and the violonist Georg van Dam.

Manon filmed van Dam playing a sonate of Bartok in “presto perfect sound” (2006). According to Bartok, this piece should be played in 6 minutes, but Manon told me that it is so hard to play that it is almost impossible to make it so short (but apparently, van Dam managed to)

Bruxelles –The Devlieger kitchen

Lionel Devlieger (to the left) is part of Rotor , an association from Brussels creating objects, furniture and even buildings with re-useable waste or “left-overs” from companies. Look for instance this kitchen:

It was made out of laser-cut plywood, an industrial leftover from a company specialized in die-cutting cardboard for the packaging of luxury-goods. Cool mmh?

Devlieger also made a nice table for the exhibition of Manon to the Frankfurter Kunstverein (see previous post) out of the marble cladding for the
Library of Human Science of the main Brussels University (Université Libre de Bruxelles), which begun to fall apart less than 15 years after its construction (Belgian architecture has to maintain its reputation):

Lionel accidentally also wrote a –fascinating — dissertation at the Ghent university called “on the Birth of Artefacts. Benedetto Varchi and the Naturalizing Approach to the Arts in Ducal Florence”. Currently, the only way to read it is to ask him to send you an e-copy.

Die Zeit, die bleibt — Manon de Boer in Frankfurt

Manon de Boer is a Dutch artist living in Brussels. The Frankfurter Kunsterverein currently shows a big solo exhibition of her. I wrote a small text about her work almost ten years ago. B

Below a still from Resonating Surfaces (2005)