Playground

The artists in this year’s festival:
Vasco Araújo / buren / Evelien Cammaert & Joris Perdieus / Clédat & Petitpierre / fieldworks /  Eleni Kamma / Emily Mast / Diederik Peeters & special guests Michael Portnoy and Benjamin Seror / Laure Prouvost / Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa / Grace Schwindt / Oriol Vilanova

Since 2007, Playground has been a meeting point for the performing and visual arts. Artists freely combine elements from installation, text, film, sculpture, architecture and choreography in their practice, bringing objects and bodies together in challenging live performances.

For this edition, STUK - House for Dance, Image & Sound and M - Museum Leuven are once more presenting several premieres, co-productions and collaborations. Re-M-Ommegang is a new performance by Eleni Kamma. During the performance an enigmatic medieval sculpture from the collection is being activated during a walk. Issues of memory, authenticity and identity take centre stage in Kamma’s artistic practice. In other collection galleries Grace Schwindt places a selection of sculptures and performers. The selected works include Pierced Mermaid and The Acrobat, which are part of Schwindt’s performance Opera and Steel, resulting out of research about the sea as a political site and the representation of a female figure like the mermaid. On the opening night, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa will present a new performance Cacaxte n°1, using sculpture and references to different cultural traditions. His performances use sculpture to transfigure everyday images and objects into symbolic scenes that engage with fantasy and allegory. Evelien Cammaert & Joris Perdieus present Grammatica an installation, laboratory for the relationship between artwork, artist and audience using coloured cloths on an empty canvas. In Oriol Vilanova’s Borrowed Words collectors Wilfried & Yannicke Cooreman, Alain Servais and Frédéric de Goldschmidt declare their love for their collection. The art lover talks about his artworks object by object, with plenty of humour and references to famous pop songs, as well as surrealist poetry and fiction.

In addition to his show at M, Vasco Araújo will present a selection of film works in loop, which focus on the role of the body, the voice and physical gestures. During the festival the installation TV Mantelpiece of Laure Prouvost will be on view.

The link between science and magic, between technology and the occult, has been Diederik Peeters’s field of interest for some time. For his experiment he invites Michael Portnoy and Benjamin Seror into a 19th century optical illusion that was once used to conjure ghosts. Emily Mast presents The Seed Eaters (spelen) a deconstructed theatre piece that consists of 12 short scenes and is played by local residents. buren brings two performances to Playground: in Blue skies forever they explore, in a dream-like, associative game, alternative ways of depicting women and in Have you rearranged the flowers? they play upon the imagination of the viewer. A pop song sets the tone for this performance about consumption, ownership, gender, memory and the desire to get to grips with imagery. Six performers of fieldworks take you on a mysterious journey behind the scenes, with the theatre stage as its final destination. Clédat & Petitpiere explore with Ermitologie different states of the human body and its sculptural image through a unique tour combining works from Gustave Flaubert, Alberto Giacometti, Paleolithic art, Max Ernst and the Italian renaissance. They will also present Les Baigneurs at the museum.

Playground is curated by Eva Wittocx and Steven Vandervelden.

For information and tickets, visit www.playgroundfestival.be.