Jan. 24, wp Zimmer welcomes Alex Akuete and Nina Plantefève Castryck for a residency around an artistic research they started in the framework of Antwerp Bijou/Fameus with the working title ESSENCE.
They presented a Work In Progress during Love at First Sight at HETPALEIS (Sept ’21). In 2022, they will continue this research – under a new working title CIRCUIT – with residency weeks at wp Zimmer in January and May 2022, to land with the installation at arts festival STORM OP KOMST in November 2022.
CIRCUIT is an electrically charged musical installation where you yourself are the composer of the sound you hear. In this space, through touch, they want to bring people together musically for play and experimentation. CIRCUIT is a musical game full of sound and noise for children and their families. About being able to hear touches and thereby make sound. An interactive installation in which you play with positive and negative charges. While moving, discover how they connect, repel or attract each other. Explore how long or short you can make sounds and how many sounds there are to discover. Together, compose the music of this installation!
Installation, sound and design: Alex Akuete, Nina Plantefève-Castryck – In collaboration with: MESTIZO ARTS PLATFORM, wpZimmer, STORMOPKOMST – Courtesy of: HETPALEIS, Fameus
This residency is part of a new collaboration between wpZimmer, STORM OP KOMST and MESTIZO ARTS PLATFORM.
Nina Plantefève-Castryck Studied at the Royal Ballet School of Antwerp and worked as a professional dancer with several companies in Germany and the Netherlands. She participated in the international solo festival Stuttgart and Gdańsk festival 2019 and was invited as a guest dancer for Tanzart Ost gala 2019 in Giessen and tanzart Ost 2020 with Irene Kalbusch. During WIPCOOP 2021, she presented a dance solo as Work In Progress at Arenberg: Isn’t Being Human Enough.
Alex Akuete is a dancer, painter, fashion designer. He accomplished hip-hop and house dance at Let’s go Urban and participated in competitions and dance battles such as So you think you can dance. He also collaborated on The Common People, a project by Jan Martens and Lucas Dhont. In 2017, he founded the Xray Company artistic collective to give young people opportunities for self-expression. From this is born XRAY ART STUDIO, a platform to paint artistic stories on existing/recycled textiles. He showed these creations in Antwerp (Fameus, Fomu, Kavka) and abroad (Kunstverein Wagenhalle Stuttgart). In 2019, he will show his first performance as Work In Progress in Arenberg as part of MESTIZO ARTS PLATFORM (MAP). Working further in collaboration with MAP, he will perform CONNECT WITH YOUR DEMONS again at Rataplan, but now in conjunction with the solo Paradox, which he commissioned (Sept ’20) from KVS. He is also 1 of the players in Who’s Tupac (KVS/Jr.cE.sA.r).