New office, studios, exhibition, film and performance space

17 rue de la Senne / Zennestraat 17, 1000 Brussels

Opening 24 of April 2009 at 6pm
25 and 26 of April from 2 to 6pm

During Art Brussels

After each weekend in May, from 2 to 6PM, until 30th May.

Exhibition : 

‘Architecture of Survival’, an exhibition with Thomas Bernardet, Francisco Camacho, Ellen Cantor, Jean-Philippe Convert, Espace Off, Thibaut Espiau, David Evrard & Mathias Schweizer, Laure Gatelier & Benjamin Lalou, Ella Klaschka, Malte Lochstedt & Meike Schmidt, Nathalie Mertens, Grégoire Motte, Eleonore Saintagnan, Michalis Pichler, Yan Renand, Derek Sullivan, Zin Taylor, Andrea Winkler.

Click on the name of the artists to see their work from the exhibition.

Screenings, workshops, lectures and performances every week-end of May, watch this space for program.

24/ 05 :  ADDITION!

will add works to the Komplot exhibition ‘Architecture Of Survival’ at Zennestraat 17, 1000 Brussels

New artists in the show are Filip Gilissen, Pieterjan Ginckels, Saskia Holmkvist, Lasse Lau, Laura Parnes, Filip Van Dingenen

The inauguration of ADDITION! on Sunday 24/5:

2 – 6 pm: clothes swap + music
participate too: bring old clothes and exchange them

2 – 6 pm: screening program

4.30 pm: artist talk with Saskia Holmkvist

16/05/09 Workshop : WRITING INTO SPACE: PAGE/ GALLERY/ PERFORMANCE/ THOUGHT

with David Berridge (UK)

This micro-laboratory explored the role of the writer in space - both of  the page, the gallery, the performance, the city and ideas. It explored diverse and interweaving histories of fluxus scores, experimental music notations, experimental essays, conceptual art, concrete poetry and multi-genre fiction to explore a writing practice shifting between wall, page, virtual and physical space. It offered a practical methodology for writers, artists,curators, and anyone with an interest in new working processes involving language. Collapsing the creative and critical, the act and the response, participants created texts in response to other art works and the surrounding environment that themselves function as exhibitions, publications and performance scripts.

Power-point/ show and tell which led into an exercise followed by a discussion.

David Berridge :  http://moremilkyvette.blogspot.com/

10/05/09 : A lazy Sunday afternoon with Komplot

FILMS
16h00

Thomas Bernardet and Florent Mulot – 'Walker #3, Le Colisée, architecte Kisho Kurokawa, Nîmes, 2001' (15 min, France)

The Walker project is an ongoing series of video essays on different architectural or architectured sites. In each film, the two artists stroll through a building or landscape, taking turns filming with a single video camera. The Walker films are not fiction, nor are they documentary. TB and FM define them as performances meant to be filmed, cinematographical improvisations on a theme, like free jazz recorded in a studio, with multiple takes. Walker # 3 seems to have more to do with perception. It’s shot in a vacant lot of a housing development, somewhere in southern France. A fire has just devastated the site. Blackened tree-trunks ooze white gobs of sap. The ground is scorched and covered with ashes. Music by Labradford.

http://walkerfilms.blogspot.com/

Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles (52 min, UK, 1972)
selected by Thibaut Espiau

Long before Los Angeles's contribution to modern culture became widely recognized, British architectural historian Reyner Banham proclaimed it one of the world's great cities.

The documentary 'Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles' takes the viewer on a tongue-in-cheek tour of the city's cultural landscape. An entertaining and thoughtful examination of a metropolis in motion, the film documents a city situated at the divide between the modern era's clean lines and faith in progress—as captured in the work of architectural photographer Julius Shulman—and what has been described as Banham's "Pop Art" view, with its sparkle-front houses, Tiki huts, and jarring juxtapositions.

Reyner Banham (1922-1988) was a prolific architectural critic and writer best known for his 1960 theoretical treatise "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age", and his 1971 book "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies".

http://esotouric.com/reyner


CONCERTS

GAUTHIER LEROY & ERIC TATEPO KEMBO
17h00

Duo formed out of an encounter between a visual artist fixated on music and hooked on the harmonica and a guitarist ready to meet all challenges especially in the field of the improvisation.... A performance full of sound and visual surprises...

Gauthier Leroy  : http://www.aliceday.be/Gauthier-Leroy,252.html
Eric Tatepo Kembo : http://www.myspace.com/eatea

SCREAMING SLIPS
18h00

Rock'n'roll, noise, punk, a backdrop of destructured rockabilly, re-scotched, torn from the back of the throat. A minimal singing formation, guitar, drums. It's happening... The members include visual Yan Renand (b. 1979, F, lives in Brussels) who has shown his work with Komplot in the past.

Yan Renand : http://www.atp-lacie.com/liens.html

Concert 02/05 (16h00) :

Freudi (ITA)
Duncan Pinhas (FR)

Concert 25/04 (16h00) :

Skaters Solo European Tour
Monopoly Star Child Searchers (Spencer Clark, Skaters solo, USA)
Nuke Survivor (James Ferraro, Skaters solo, USA)
Dolphins Into The Future (BE)
P.A.R.A. (USA)

As cities struggle to cope with the contemporary economic climate, their downtown spaces are being transformed and it is commercial realities which dictate the changes. The non-occidental downtown functions more like a fairground for tourists than a living space for residents, whilst in downtown Kingston the streets are littered with garbage, sewage, dead animals, broken pavements.

Urban centres or postmodern ghettos? Urban migrants importing uptown style downtown?  The regulatory role of Brussels as the bureaucratic capital of Europe is often portrayed as having an adverse impact on it’s cultural life. Questionable building practices, hidden agendas design speculation, democratic roadblocks : ya que estamos en el baile, bailemos!

Etymologically, Komplot means conspiracy, and as an organization have been concerned with nomadic creative practices, trends of specialization, survival architectures and the infiltration of private, public and institutional space. The nomadism of Komplot as a platform of variable composition allows it to explore new terrain in relation to objects/spaces/artists and the public.

Between 2007/2008, Komplot operated from a ramshackle former car repair garage in uptown Louise, described by one resident as a ‘cancer sore’ on it’s gentrified surroundings. By compressing and expanding their activities to Zennestraat, Komplot aim neither to live in the shadow of utopian urban nostalgia nor become cultural speculators but create a vivid space of organic resonance.

Komplot’s studios and office will be located in Zennestraat 17 until October.

Also in the building: Constant, SECONDroom, q-o2, Fortlaan 17, Les Bains, JosWorld, Croxhapox

With the support of the Vlaamse Gemeenschap Commissie &
Communauté française Wallonie-Bruxelles.

Skaters solo european tour, 25/04 in Room 1, Komplot, Rue de la Senne 17, Dolphins Into The Future playing live, works of Andrea Winkler (foreground), Grégoire Motte (wall behind speakers) & Francisco Camacho visible.