Performance programme
10 January – 28 February 2015
In collaboration with Kunstverein Amsterdam Ellen de Bruijne Projects will present different performances every week, by the following artists:
Kerstin Cmelka | Jeremiah Day | Uta Eisenreich & Eva Meyer-Keller | Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet | I’m with her records | Sarah van Lamsweerde | Erkka Nissinen | Janneke van Raaphorst | Geo Wyeth
Curator for the performance programme: Dorothé Orczyk
20 – 24 January 2015: Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet
20 – 24 January 2015 | Ellen de Bruijne Projects
Screening Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet, The Waterway, 2014, 23 min
Thursday 22 January 2015 at 8 pm | Kunstverein Amsterdam
BYU #23: Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet
Saturday 24 January 2015 at 5pm | Ellen de Bruijne Projects
Performance Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet, Spring Water and Sea Monsters
With special thanks to Marcelle Alix, Paris
20 – 24 January 2015 | Ellen de Bruijne Projects
Screening Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet, Un passage d’eau / The Waterway, 2014, 23 min
As often in French artists Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet’s projects, the origin of the film Un passage d’eau is based on scientific grounds. Employing a methodology that reflects their doctoral education in the humanities and literature, Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet’s scenarios establish consistency between speculation around mythologies, proposed solutions to impasses of science, and surveys around a field to study, making their films rather stages of exploration than a plausible answer.
Indeed, science is discussed in their work as a knowledge which forever renews the realities as well as fantasies. Their films are so, somehow, research laboratories, made of different layers and stages of proof of computation more or less likely, also echoing to the history of cinema. Playing with genres, from science fiction to epic, from TV reconstitution to anthropological documentary. Using experimental filming methods, as seen in Werner Herzog’s movies, or forms and frames, reminding particular Eric Rohmer’s visual language, the filmmakers offer a quite contemporary vision on the history of myths.
Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet’s first entirely written scenario, Un passage d’eau unfolds his story at the crossroads of history and knowledge. By staging their cinematic and philosophical potential, the film offers a contemporary and poetic vue on a history of aquatic fantasy. It is built around three narratives, in different places and times, in which actions are alternately held. This triptych aims to uncover and document the imagination of the water as objects and bodies’ conservation source.
Some marine creatures, such as lobster, may be immortal. In the future, Man would he be able to mutate instead of getting old?
Assumptions: off a beach resort, amateur archaeologists dive on old shipwrecks sites and try to preserve their underwater discoveries of the ravages of time. In a coastal town, a spa institute offers guests to use sea resources to rejuvenate. In the meanwhile in a former bathhouse, a mysterious group of retirees formed a club whose main purpose is to access to eternal life.
Between archaeological documentary and fantastic tale, between myth and incongruous encounters, from the depths of the sea to the thalassotherapy pools, Un passage d’eau is a fiction blending documentary and fully staged sequences, actual participants and actors. A fantastic end brings together scientific discoveries and fantasized speculations. The film is playing on ellipses and dichotomies guided by these characters. They provide meaning to the story thanks to their characterizations, their encounters, and their recurrences in different narrative frames. In the manner of symbolic figures from ancient mythology (such as nymphs, cyclops or sirens…), they justify the tracks taken from the theoretical and iconographic collection of the authors as well as the assumed fantasy they establish within the synopsis of the film.
Thursday 22 January 2015 at 8 pm | Kunstverein Amsterdam
BYU #23: Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet
Join us this Thursday at Bob’s Your Uncle for a screening* and Bärenjäger.
Doors open at 7 p.m.
Screening starts at 8 p.m.
A Recess and a Reconstruction
Written and directed by Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet, 2011, 22 min.
With: Rachel Spicer as Hippolyta, Benjamin Seror as Manfred, and Francis Grew.
Somewhat at a loose end, two museum guides in a basement storeroom are marveling at the great resourcefulness of archeological museography. Elsewhere, on an excavation site, an archeologist standing by trenches and mechanical diggers is describing artefacts. Much further along, a young woman imprisoned in the underground recess of a castle lets her terror fantasies run wild. A Recess and a Reconstruction is a Gothic story where the line between what is past and what lies in the future is in the process of disintegrating.
Saturday 24 January 2015 at 5pm | Ellen de Bruijne Projects
Performance Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet, Spring Water and Sea Monsters
Jeremiah Day20 – 24 January 2015 | Ellen de Bruijne Projects
Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet22 January 2015 at 8 pm | Kunstverein Amsterdam
BYU 23: Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet
24 January 2015 at 5pm | Ellen de Bruijne Projects
Performance Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet – Spring Water and Sea Monsters
27 – 31 January 2015 | Ellen de Bruijne Projects
Sarah van Lamsweerde
Janneke Raaphorst
5 February 2015 | Kunstverein Amsterdam
Kerstin Cmelka
10 – 14 February 2015 | Ellen de Bruijne Projects
Uta Eisenreich & Eva Meyer-Keller
14 February 2015 5pm | Ellen de Bruijne Projects
Performance Uta Eisenreich & Eva Meyer-Keller – Things on a table
17 – 21 February 2015 | Ellen de Bruijne Projects
Geo Wyeth
24 – 28 February 2015 | Ellen de Bruijne Projects
Erkka Nissinen
The performance programme is curated by Dorothé Orczyk.
Saturday 10 January | Talk by Jeremiah Day at 5 pm
It’s a feeling of bringing something to life, because it’s a bit like that. If something hasn’t been described than it doesn’t officially exist. So that if we start describing it, we bring it to life.” – Krzysztof Kieślowski
Part epitaph, part ode, part investigation, this installation draws together years of research and studio performance into a contemporary memorial form, chronicling the example of US Senator Frank Church.Church is a widely forgotten figure but whose name has resurfaced to public attention in the wake of the revelations of Edward Snowden. In the 1970’s Church led a series of investigations into the political practices of the United States, including the harassment of Martin Luther King Jr, assassination plots of foreign political leaders, and the development of mass surveillance.The title of this work is taken from the name of a wilderness park in Idaho, named in honour of United States Senator Frank Church, who had ironically used those exact words to warn of crossing over a “bridge of no return,” and this word play becomes the point of departure and hinge for Day’s evocation of Church, his investigation and his subsequent failed Presidential run.The Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness was originally commissioned by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.