“Les États tombent, les rivières et les montagnes demeurent; le nouveau printemps recouvre d’herbe le château “
DU FU (712-770)
Le Bide et le Vide, two sentiments as uncomfortable as they are topical.
In November 2019, I participated in performance days at WIPCOOP – Work In Progress Cooperation – in Brussels, organized by MESTIZO ARTS PLATFORM (MAP). We met different women from different cities: Berlin, London, Brussels,… to build bridges and forge ties for exchanging projects.
During the presentations of the performances, I was struck by the project of the twin sisters – Nathalie and Doris Bokongo, who form the collective Les Mybalés – who live in Brussels and are of Congolese descent. I immediately associated them with two Catalan twin sisters and artists from Ghana. I was curious: what similarities, what commonalities and what differences these four women might have with each other. After a beginning that seemed to lead us to an interesting research project, the Catalan sisters abandoned the project in a silence that left us, at least me, very confused. And thanks to the welcoming and enriching attitude of Tine De Pourcq (MAP), we turned this feeling of emptiness, and I could also say failure, into an element of reflection to turn the feeling and experience into fruitful material.
We began an artistic investigation with Nathalie, Doris, Tine and me. Remotely by Zoom (November 2020 – February 2021), then in Antwerp (March 14-21) and we continue in Barcelona in May …
The failure as a starting point brings us to the idea of the clown, but the clown as an attitude toward events with bewilderment and wide-open gaze, lack of words for a half-open mouth, and that sadness that elicits an understanding smile full of pity.
The other feeling we had was the feeling of emptiness when you are abandoned, when something is ripped away from you; the emptiness after loss. The feeling that so many people had during that time of uncertainty during the pandemic and lockdown, when all of humanity was re-examining its values and ways, without finding many answers or explanations in their place.
It is from childhood, childhood itself, that we want to explore with a naïve eye the feeling of emptiness and emptiness. Not from a psychological standpoint, of course, but rather through an inner look at our childhood memories, such as the Journey of Bashô, or the path proposed by Jacques Lecoq to find the Clown himself.
Ester Nadal
