Royalty, dead bees and pugs

I have been asked to produce a set for a beautiful play written and directed by Selma Alaoui in Brussels. The piece deals with melancholia and stages the life of a tormented soul: Angus and his relationship to love, utopia, a glamorous past in a castle, an alcoholic mother, a vampire-like old lover, an unfortunate life trainer and a job that he ‘would prefer not to’ do. Set design involves visual research and a great excuse for scouting. In this case, I took myself to a video exhibition in Flanders, a 3 hour walk in the forest, a dusty museum in Paris and a seriously damaged castle in Normandy.

I knew the castle from childhood, I only remembered a couple rooms, a terrible story about a giant rat monster living in the cellar, a tea party and walking through the nearby woods full of angst at the thought of being charged by vicious wild boars.

Anyway, as I soon realized a couple years later, the reason I had only seen a couple rooms was linked to the fact that the family physically occupied less than a quarter of the castle for heating purposes. When I started working on Selma’s show, I thought I needed to visit some sort of semi-abandoned castle. Since I was in France at the time, I thought about going back there.

I called my childhood friend’s grandmother, a certain ‘Vonvon’, who accepted to take me on a tour. My mother and sister came along, one to entertain Vonvon while I took pictures and the other to pose in the frame to represent scale. Vonvon welcomed us with a singular mix of warmth and impatience. My mother had deemed it relevant to specify Vonvon’s long lasted semi-madness while stuck in the car, half way to the castle. Vonvon, a tall and quite beautiful woman for an 80 year old, was wearing a bright red skirt, a fisherman’s jumper, 1950s golden rimmed glasses, some long necklaces and a couple thin gold bracelets. Her hair and posture were quite perfect and her tall figure was framed by two neckless and rather excited pugs.
Without further introductions she took us on a tour of the site. After telling us the history of the wood paneling in the dining room, we soon enough got into what I was to find the most interesting part of the building and what Vonvon was to systematically complain, grumble and gossip about. As we moved through the downstairs rooms, all sorts of humidity stains and improbable water damages started shaping the walls, remnant tapestries, old furniture and decorative wall paintings. Every time Vonvon opened a new door with one of the numerous keys hanging on a chain as thick as a jailer’s, she huffed and puffed and proclaimed some ‘Ah!lalalala’ and ‘Oh!’ at the decrepitude of the rooms.

A grandiose staircase pointed at a miraculous past and a private sitting room on the first floor still emanated some sort of precious elegance if one were to ignore the black plastic tarpaulin covering the card table and the delicate velvet quilting of its chairs.

Then we snaked up some sinuous stairs to the second and the third floors. We traveled from one room to another in a breath, I took as many shots as I could: mildew gnawing at an antique wall paper, an oxidized mirror, turn of the century dolls crushed under broken bookshelves, dead flowers in a stained vase, my sister sitting on a mouldy canopy bed, dust covered logs organized in a bedroom fireplace. Thousands of dead bees piled up on the wooden floors, Vonvon explained to us that there were a couple of hives upstairs that no one was particularly interested in dealing with. Once in a while a dead rodent in a corner would be snobbishly ignored by the pugs.

Suddenly, Vonvon had a little shriek, my sister mother and I turned to ice. Every room and corner seemed to point to a new corpse of sorts whether it be furniture or animal, we waited for Vonvon’s development: "Henry’s mother’s coat! What a waste! WHAT a waste!". We came closer to see what the woman was pointing at, she continued : "Do you realize that at his mother’s death, Henry brought her favourite coat up to the last floor of the castle and simply left it here. An Astrakhan coat! Look at it, it is absolutely ruined!", my mother asked : "Why on earth did he do such a thing?

-Oh! Laziness, what can I say…" The coat looked more like a dried up cadaver of a black sheep, the floor was covered with shavings of black wool and shriveled up leather. The fabric had gone back to its primal origins.

We continued our tour fairly rapidly and ended up back downstairs now officially bound to share a drink with Vonvon and her friend Henry, the actual owner of the oddhouse. Vonvon grabbed a tray in the kitchen and brought us to Henry’s den, an overheated study full of hunting books. Henry, a small dinosaur of about 90 years old, offered us a prickly cheek and humbly received our gratitude for opening up his house this way. Then he sat right back where we found him, clearly expecting to be entertained. Following her abrupt fashion, Vonvon served us to some unevenly dosed grenadine, opened a pack of biscuits with controlled irritation and passed them around without notice. Started a rather constrained conversation that became more and more relaxed as Vonvon slowly monopolized the attention and soon enough proceeded to declaim a long monologue with a small break for a second serving of cookies. It appeared that she is quite taken with the history behind royalty. My sister and I couldn’t help exchanging amused looks when Vonvon started talking about the English royal family and said to my mother: "Patricia, do you know what the secret of the Windsor family is?" without letting her respond: "Impotence! That’s right! Impotence! Without artificial insemination, there would’ve been no Charles, nor Andrew, and I’m pret-ty sure Diana needed some of science’s help for William… As for Harry, one has to admit that he has nothing of a Windsor". I was quite surprised by Vonvon’s crude language but her later suspicion was even more savoury: "And Camilla! I hate Camilla, I just, I don’t know, I just don’t trust that woman. But clearly, most evidently, Charles loves her because she is the only one who knows what he likes, and HOW he likes it!"

The sexual allusions sort of dissipated after a while when she got on the subject of princess Diana whom she had been a great fan of: "And then I saw that picture of Lady Di and Mother Theresa, and you could tell, I mean I could feel it, that there was something between these two women. What I think, is that Mother Theresa asked God to protect and carry Lady Di and in that particular picture, you can see that Lady Di recognizes that, reads it in Theresa’s eyes. And I mean it’s no wonder that Mother Theresa died a month later than Diana." Then Vonvon started nervously playing with her necklaces: "But you see, I feel these things too, I’m a little bit like a medium myself. I’ve often been told that I had special powers I could’ve developed, but I didn’t. I don’t know why."

My mother and I stared at each other clearly sensing that things were getting a little out of hand. Henry had grown so bored with the conversation that he had fallen asleep in his seat and my sister was plainly starring at the wall. But as we were suggesting a retreat, Henry woke up, reached into his bookshelf and started taking out a number of antique books he was determined to show us. We obediently came back to his desk and started looking at these, actually, splendid works of art, when one is fond of very old books. Yes, the engravers in them were delicate. Of course, the highly decorated leather bindings were admirable. And one has to admit that things are just not made this way anymore. The tragic of the situation is that this sort of faint enthusiasm only contributed to encourage Henry to show us more and more dusty old books. Until he took out The Songs of Bilitis, a collection of erotic poems from the late 1800s which Vonvon immediately tried to censure.

Amused by Vonvon’s reaction, I insisted on seeing the book. Vonvon said: "Well, yes, I suppose you and your sister are in age after all". The more pages she turned the more the engravers became pornographic. What had started as some depictions of nude women slowly become some nude women kissing and later on nude women having sex with each other and close to the end, many many nude women kissing and having sex with each other at which point Vonvon closed the book and said : "Ok, then, well we get the point don’t we!" My mother, sister and I laughed which relaxed Vonvon and got the pugs all dribbly and excited yet again.

After a tedious polite conversation between Vonvon and my mother at the front door of the castle, during which the pugs kept drooling and rubbing themselves on my trousers, the three of us eventually got in the car and left Mussegros with great shots and odd impressions.

Louboutindarella (a true story)

Once Upon a Time there was a beautiful girl named Zoja. She had the most gorgeous dark brown hair and a unique accent. One day, an evil fairy casted a spell on her and gave her the ‘In Flux’ misfortune. From that day on, Zoja forgot where and who she was supposed to be, brought up in South Africa in a Serbian family with an education in France, travelling from New Dehli to Mumbai to Bangkok to Dubai for work, Zoj-Zoj-Zoj dearest Zoj needed an anchor.

One day, as she was walking down the serpentine streets of Paris, a light came out of a store, a strange golden light. It seemed as if the air had turned into fairy dust and a sweet sweet music could be heard emanating from inside. Zoja tip toed to the door and the voice kept singing and it seemed like the voice was singing her name. Could it be possible? ‘Zooooooooja, zooooooja, follow me to this coooooooorna’ She entered the store hypnotised by the voice calling her over and over again.

What she saw was of a beauty, of a charm, of a folly that none could put in words. But I will try my best to define the traits that brought Zoja to her ‘enchanteresse’. There, in the middle of the store, shining like a gem on its own throne was the most beautiful slipper one could dream off, a subtle black line carrying the kind of timelessness that only a virtuose could ever draft and a delicate sole tinted in the most elegant red. Zoja’s eyes were like two young flies caught in the light of this new vibrating colour. And the world turned entirely red for a second, and Zoja fell to the floor. Suddenly, in the middle of this strange sea of red, Zoja saw an outline of crimson growing above her. ‘Zooooooja, Zooooooooja’, the rest of the store slowly reappeared in flashes of pink, fuchsia and scarlet and the outline looked more and more like a fairy, but was it a man? Was it a fairy? Was it a Persian fairy man?

When she eventually came back to consciousness and blues and greens and yellows had re-entered her palette, Zoja discovered a short fairy dressed like a Persian man, she/he said: ‘I am your good fairy, and I wish you the gift of settlement, you will no longer feel lost in this world, but this, to the condition that you always wear these two slippers, my friend, try them on promptly and dare tell me that you are still in Flux!’ Zoja got up, a little dizzy and put on the godly objects. She slipped her delicate feet in their off white fluffy beds, the moment her toes met the smooth leather, her entire vision changed, everything seemed suddenly so clear, evenly contrasted, smooth and so perfectly in harmony. Zoja thanked the ambiguous fairy with a kiss that oddly prickled.

The following day Zoja had a huge smile on her face, everything was that simple eh? ‘Arrgh Man!’ She thought ‘How could you have been so tortured my dearest Zoj? What beauty holds the world in all its simplicity!’ And the following day she rang her beloved boyfriend and said : ‘It is all so simple and easy now and I would like to tell you about the world I see and maybe this has been the world you have always seen as well, and if we both see the same world, the same world as it is, we should stay together always, because the world sees us same”.

That evening, Zoja was walking through the streets, her face lit by a new inner joy, she followed her heart and skipped on Canal St Martin, ran up and down the stairs of Sacre Coeur, danced on Pont des Arts, and finished with an improvised solo around the pyramid of the Louvre, she walked home exhausted and while getting to bed realized that she had scraped her left foot. A single drip of blood had come out and crystallised, the crimson outline of a drip. She figured it would heal through the night, took off her shoes and dreamed of her life to come.

The next day, Zoja woke up and realised, as she was trying to put on her slippers that her feet had swollen during the night and that it would be far too painful to walk around with them all day. Lunch was an hour away and she thought : ‘Well, it isn’t that bad, I will walk around in my flip flops and keep the slippers in my bag. When it is time to meet my beloved, I will swap the shoes, and I will get to see the world as it ought to be.” Back in the streets of Paris, Zoja didn’t feel like skipping and dancing that much, the clouds felt low and she thought about her family in South Africa, it started to rain a little and she could smell the scent of rain on her clothes, her hair got caught with the strap of her bag and she started laughing at herself while untangling the vicious knot. She was a street away from the brasserie she had planned to meet her beloved for lunch, so she stopped, took out her magical slippers, placed them in front of her, took off the flip flops and squeezed a little painfully into the Persian man/fairy’s gift. She met her beloved and they talked and talked and it was all so perfect, and they had never been so much in love. Zoja didn’t dare tell him about the Persian fairy man, but her feet were swelling and burning and although she was having wonders of a time she said she had to go, which seemed alright since her beloved was now very busy with his phone.

She rushed into the street, took out the flip flops out of the bag, placed them in front of her. She got her left foot out of her left slipper, placed the slipper in her bag then her left foot into the left flip flop. She got her right foot out of her right slipper then her right foot into the right flip flop. And although the wind started to blow a little, she felt much much better and walked back to her hotel, her mind spinning at all the questions and thoughts she was having.

The next day she woke up and looked for her slippers, surely they would fit perfectly today. But when she opened the bag, there was only one left, the right one must’ve been forgotten by the restaurant. The fairy fairy Persian man’s voice resonated in her head ‘ Zoooooja, Zojaaaaaaaa!’ She went back to the scene of the crime and asked the people at the restaurant, then the store to its right, the store to its left, the store upfront, behind and around and none of them had found the slipper. She asked a homeless man across the street, she offered him money, but he had no idea and so he kept the money and Zoja got on her phone. She called the garbagemen, the firemen, the policemen. No men had seen her magical slipper.

Zoja sat on the Pont des Arts and cried and cried until even her gorgeous black hair was entirely soaked and after feeling a little too sorry for herself, she pulled herself together and went back to the serpentine street she had found the store on. She finally found it but no light was emanating from it and no Persian fairy man was in view. Only a couple witch looking women trying on arches far to steep for their fragile ankles. Zoja, recognized similar looking slippers, and out of despair, presented her credit card to the shop girl, closed her eyes and signed. She left with her shoe pouch and got back to her hotel, not quite sure about the powers of this particular pair. She slipped her feet into them but nothing happened, the hotel room felt as lonely as before, and the gloomy whistling of the air conditioning was still the only sound to be heard. She decided to go for a walk, but nothing seemed as beautiful as before, men and women passed by and she kept wondering about their lives, are they happy? Are they good? Are they faithful? Are they ambitious or hopeless? And she thought about her mom and her dad and her brother and her job and her age and her dreams. The slippers weren’t doing any trick this time, so she safely put them back in their pouch and thought she might as well be more comfortable in her flip-flops.

‘Zoja, poor Zoja, your life galloped back to your eyes, and your vision may not be the most certain but God, is it diverse!’ she thought. She called her friend Kiki for a drink and met her at Cafe Nemours. She told her her story and Kiki was speechless for a while then ordered some champagne: ‘To celebrate the terrible beauties and profound mysteries of reality!’ They smiled at each other and Zoja found complicity and a single tear fell from her right eye: ‘What is it? Asked Kiki

-For a second I thought I had recognized in your eyes that for a second we both saw the same world, the world as it is, and that second has brought me immense comfort. To friendship!’

And they both smiled and talked and laughed some more and even realized that an 80s rock star was sitting next to them, a certain Michael Bolton with an anorexic new girlfriend and a bored looking bodyguard. They laughed some more and it was soon time to leave: ‘Let me at least see the slippers’ said Kiki to Zoja. Zoja took the pouch out of her bag and showed Kiki the shoes. Kiki bursted out laughing, and Zoja did too and they took le Pont des Arts to get back to the left bank and sang, giggled and confessed their most twisted thoughts and dreams.

When Zoja got back to her hotel and looked through her bag to find her phone, she realized the pouch was no longer there. ‘Dear, dear Zoja! Again! You must’ve forgotten it at the café!’ She called the café and asked them ‘I forgot a red pouch, a red pouch with black slippers at your café, has anyone found it?’ and the answer was:‘Non, Madame, nous sommes desoles’. The next day she stopped by and asked again, asked everyone in the staff and the answer was the same over and over again. And she thought about her mom and her dad and her brother and her job and her age and her dreams and she got on a plane to South Africa.

A little before landing, an air hostess offered her a refreshment: ‘An orange juice, please’. As she reached for the glass, her eyes met the air hostess’s, a Persian looking man hostess with a huge smile on her face winked at her and disappeared.

A Giant Sauceman

The other day, Manuel and Anne invited me to join them to a barbecue in the middle of the Ardennes: the only remote area in Belgium, a haven for boars, pine trees, actual snow in the winter, lakes, old houses and sordid stories to be told around campfires. I had had a ten hour shift day and grabbed a redbull to drive the 1h40 from Brussels to mystery land. I eventually got to the place, a beautiful old family house squashed in between a lake and a dark forest. We were a small group composed of performance and installation artists, musicians and a large chap who had started his own manufacture of sauces, all sorts of sauces, but mainly the kind of sauces one needs for a Belgian barbecue that is: mayonnaise, cocktail, tartare, andalouse and poivre. It sometimes seems like barbecues in Belgium, which solely occur when the weather permits it, which means generally a week or two a year, are really all about the sauce. Whatever meat, potatoe, salad goes with it is an accessory to the –always mayo-based- wonders of sauces.

The theory was clearly demonstrated when one of the guests, growing a little impatient and hungry, grabbed a slice of bread and started spreading mayo all over it. Anne cringed and had a little cry of distress which she soon enough managed to contain. Anne is French and consequently despises sliced bread (first motto: baguette) and clearly misunderstands the Belgian obsession with mayo (second motto: butter preferably mixed with big chunks of natural salt). Of course when one does it, everyone follows, it’s like a pack of cigarettes thrown in a 35 year old party, no one brought any, everyone’s trying to quit, but if someone lights up, ten people follow the flow.

We eventually met the chap who is behind the organic production of mayo, a giant man who had just resurrected after a weed induced three-hour nap. Manuel had cautioned me : "Be prepared, he looks like a fritkot* owner", he appeared to be rather nice and told me all about his sauces, a conversation which my inherently perverted mind tried hard not to misinterpret.

After a first serving of food, Anne, Manu and I migrated to the campfire with a bottle of vodka. Manu started playing an endless blues, which brought Anne and I to some sort of trance which made us say and sing the most inappropriate narration, involving artists adopting and experimenting new performance techniques with African orphans. I don’t think it was such a big deal but Anne is convinced that we shocked everyone, which I have decided to deny because the conversation, as diplomatically incorrect as it was, made me laugh immensely, and I was in bed at midnight with a huge smile on my face. And that: that is a good thing.

Anyway, I was glad that Manah, our host, had showed me earlier that evening where I was to sleep. Indeed the house was a huge maze, where rooms opened up to another bedroom, to a corridor, and a room, another bedroom and a bathroom. Locks, double doors for heat, sinks hidden in closets, old squeaky floors.

The next day we walked around her family property and ended up at this pond. The weather was muggy and we were all sweating and hoping for a thunderstorm to loosen up the air. A cold pond was exactly what was needed by this temperature and we slowly made our way into the dark water, swam under willow trees, stood up in the thick and tickling silt by the reeds. It was delicious. There was something melancholic about the whole scene that was certainly exacerbated by Mr Sauce getting on a rowing boat and slowly navigating around the lake while singing opera, projecting his deep voice on the surface of water, the notes echoing through the branches of the willow trees. Everything was still for a while, some of us were gently enjoying the water, others were sitting on the jetty dipping a toe in the sepia colored liquid. Manu and Anne were curled up in the grass nearby and all we heard for a while was the voice of the giant man rowing on his small blue boat.

*a fries stall.

Madame Moustache

The other night, I went to see some friends play at a venue in Brussels called Madame Moustache. The venue itself came as a surprise, a gem in the middle of the fish district in Brussels, that is: a little door lost in the middle of lobster restaurants, fish retailers, fish market stands, fried fish, fresh fish, fish fish.
Entering Madame Moustache is a little bit like going to Disneyland, the corridor is Moresque, a first room on the left is Mexican-ish, the bar is dressed like it’s Bastille day, another little room has a 50s milkshake sort of feeling, which might explain why it never seems to be particularly populated. The main room has a giant cardboard looking caravan painted in the most intense colours on the left and further back, the stage which has a little burlesque twist with its red velvet drape of a proscenium.
Strangely enough, that evening, it seemed like all of Brussels had ended up at Madame Moustache for all sorts of cryptic, drunk or random reasons. We hung out with the band drinking beer and chatting while another one was performing on stage. The music was excellent which put us all in great spirits. I constantly bumped into people I knew or had already met and I suddenly felt like I was living in a small village. I suppose that may also mean I’m officially ‘back in the old country’. My friends band eventually got on stage, so we all crowded upfront holding tight on our beers while snaking through the crowd. We were a couple girls on the front row, one of which, Anne, the guitarist’s girlfriend and of course, the founder of Indigeste (see prior blog entries) had had to bring her mother to the concert. Her mother was visiting from Paris and kept taking pictures of the band with some digital zoom monster of sorts. Anne kept yelling at her : "Who cares about taking pictures! You have to listen to the music mom! Just listen to it!" Anne was drunk, her mother too so I shifted towards Vero and Steph who had a slightly more relaxed vibe going on. We sang along the lyrics and I kept feeding Nico, the singer, with well-deserved beer throughout the concert.
By the time the last song had ended, the place was so crowded we could hardly move. After trying to have a good time in the space, we ended up having to migrate to the backroom. To access it, we had to walk up a number of flights of stairs in pitch darkness, then we ended up in some huge room lit by electric chandeliers, the bulbs of which tinted the space with a dusty dirty yellow light. The room’s architecture pointed at a Medieval Flemish style home, the first encounter with reality since the entrance of Madame Moustache. A couple of people were lounging already, constellations of bottles of gin and beer spread out on office like tables. A chap was cutting a line of blow in a corner for a friend.
I suddenly measured the amount of alcohol consumed in the evening and realized I needed to sleep, or at least sit down for a moment. I made myself comfortable on a pile of pillows while chatting with Vero about her last shag. Eventually Anne reappeared after having dumped her mother in a taxi and started the typical French monolog about weight, that is: an anorexic looking girl with a tiny waist trying to convince you that she needs to loose "6 kilos, I need to loose 6 kilos. See, I use to have a very pronounced jaw line and I feel like somehow, I’ve lost it, I don’t know, I look at pictures, and something’s missing, or really something’s extra". So I candidly suggested she stop drinking for a while. She smiled and me, then bursted out laughing and finally said : "No, I have a better idea, and this is what I always do, I keep drinking but I stop eating… of course the problem is that end up drunk all the time which becomes depressing, so then, I usually shift to vodka which makes me even more irritable, and it’s a terrible cycle but when I keep it going for a couple weeks, it usually does the trick". Hysterical, ridiculous Anne, gotta love her and her beautiful full-lived punkness.
Although the night was far from being over for them, I decided to be good and took off. I thought I’d stay at my studio space that night, a 10 min car drive from Moustache. As I was getting ready to open the door of my studio, a friend called me from across the street : "Hey ! Fred ! How’s it going ? Wanna come over to my place for a last drink ?". Very tempting proposal, I followed him to his place and as I sat on his patio, the Belgian expression ‘Bruxelles village’ resonated in my head.

Flirtatious Intermezzo

I had been told about a conference at the contemporary art museum in Brussels that spiked my interest and decided to pro-actively remember the date and time of the event and actually go. The lecture was held by a New York curator and examined the relationship between the renaissance approach of ‘intermezzo’ in the theatre and contemporary art. The conference was remarkable; I had a little Calarts nostalgia while listening to this precise yet chaotic geyser of information, the educational yet challenging language. The New York accent added to the general sense of: 'I might just get on a plane to JFK, go straight to Brooklyn and order myself a dirty martini, real dirty please’.
Anyway, point is, the lecture was amazing and following my fantastical ways, as time and words went by, I started finding this curator more and more good looking, and charming and wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a little something with an art theorist of this calibre… At the end of the lecture, he opened up to the expected Q&A and I couldn’t help but ask meticulous questions and play the devil’s advocate to test the guy. Disconcerted at first, he eventually started playing the game a little which satisfied me entirely. At the end of the event, I walked up to him to ask him the name of an unknown yet incredibly cutting edge piece at the time by artist Picabia. He admitted having forgotten the name but wrote down his email address for me to contact him, it would come back to him eventually. He then proceeded to get up and introduce himself to me. The unfortunate circumstance of this first physical connection resided in the fact that the man was over a foot smaller than me.

Not so Desperate Living

The other weekend, I went to Paris to reunite with some childhood friends: Elinor and Alice. Elinor came all the way from Israel to tell us all about her newborn child. It also appears her husband bullied her to get a plane ticket to Europe when he found her sobbing one evening after having obsessively reorganized every single cupboard and drawer in her house. Smart man. Nonetheless, she needed air and always finds her inspiration in Paris.
We spent a short but wonderful 24 hrs, chatting like schoolgirls, which I suppose we are to a certain extent.That Sunday evening, Elinor’s sister, Tal, a sound designer who has recently ‘moved in’ with the company (Zingaro) she has been working with for the past six months, invited us to a ‘Spring Party’. Both Alice and I gathered along in an attempt to spend as much time as humanly possible with our Israeli cupcake.
Zingaro turned out to be one of the most improbable microcosm in the middle of a dodgy and plainly said ugly part of Paris: a little green haven surrounded by a large amount of dreadful social projects. Zingaro is a circus company that works solely with horses and secondarily a large team of riders, trainers, acrobats and grooms. All of these people live on the land in colourful trailers. When first told about Tal’s new living arrangements, I couldn’t help but think about John Waters ‘Desperate Living’ but I was very much impressed by the site. Clearly, a tour of a trailer stays somewhat of an anticlimactic experience especially when you are taller than 5ft, but there was a certain quaintness and happy eccentricity about it all that made it delightful. And this, even after a trip to the toilet where one is asked to pour a cup of sawdust over whatever one has produced.

Tal took us around the stables; I was stunned at how impeccable they were, we saw horses of all sizes and types. Larger stables for the Argentinean horses that need to stick together as a herd and share one huge open hangar all to themselves. We also visited the horses ‘gym’ and shower. We got to pet them and take pictures while friendly dogs and the neighbour’s children came along. Eventually we arrived at the ‘Spring Party’ lit by hundreds of coloured lampions. Everyone had brought some food and beers were cooling in trashcans filled with water and ice. Music was playing and kids had started invading the dance floor. A Jack Russell kept nagging a particularly patient Dalmatian. The air was sweet and hot, roses climbing up an old caravan and a huge cherry tree looming over us: Alice, Elinor and I kept silent for a while. Sharp looking acrobats passing by, kids screaming with joy, a solid looking chap cutting saucisson on a table nearby: one couldn’t help but feel in awe.

My enthusiasm sort of faded when I got stuck in conversation with some guy who didn’t seem to sense the same contradiction I did when he explained to me that he was an unemployed social worker and had been for the past 3 years, and didn’t seem to have any issues with it per se. The exchange became the most exasperating when he described to me why social workers in France weren’t doing their job correctly while simultaneously failing to actually explain his own, surely revolutionary, techniques. A little later Tal’s companion tried to convince me that rulers and flat angle brackets were useless tools for carpentry. I suddenly felt awfully tired and we eventually left but all in all, I was happily surprised by the experience.

Kinky Techy

Two weeks ago, I shot a series of short videos in my childhood house that I plan to show in an installation within the next year. Since I seem incapable of staging anything that isn’t somewhat perverse and usually involving women, men working on the set end up having to train their sense of self-control. Was I slightly embarrassed when the (male) technical crew came into my house to find us rehearsing a lap dance scene involving close to no clothes for Yvain and an incredibly trashy yet overwhelmingly sexy outfit for Martha? Possibly. Let us underline that she was wearing a pink wig and has a natural pair of generous breasts. One may also want to comment on the soundscape at the time, composed of three female extras chatting and giggling in Swiss German. I felt like we were missing a well-hung polish TV repairman or something.
After the first shoot, we let most of the team go and recorded some sound with Martha and I was to replace Yvain, a man who appears briefly in the video. Since he undresses, the sound designer told me I needed to put on Yvain’s clothes and take them off in the same order than in the shoot. This seemed OK, until I realized that I hadn’t waxed for a while, which I of course made public within a second and tried to justify by a: “Well, I’m single, you know?”. The cinematographer frowned and replied: “C’est pas une excuse”. So, suddenly extremely self-conscious, I went to put on a pair of leggings.
The next day I was performing in one of the shoots. It involved a lot of acrobatic movements, splits, positions held for a long time, and mostly a lot of pressure on my abs and lower back. After shooting for close to two hours, I was sweating heavily and starting to shake a little while battling to keep my movements nice and smooth. After a while, the cinematographer (Romain), noticed my pain and offered to help stabilize me while in shoulder stand. The focus of the video was leg movements and we were trying to create an inverted air walk somehow defying gravity. The trick was complicated and had me crush Romain’s fingers a couple of times, but we got there eventually, although at some point, his head ended up sort of smashed between my inner thighs. This may be a good time to point out my costume: I was wearing dangerous looking black stilettos and electric blue tights. After the shoot and before setting up for the next one, I said to Romain: “See! I waxed for you”, to which he replied: “Yes, thank you, I noticed”.

Venison or my industrial fridge?

About a week ago, I needed help moving an industrial fridge my father had bought me on ebay into my new studio space. I called my childhood friend Frederic, who happens to live right next to my superb ‘atelier’. Since he failed to answer his phone, I asked a couple of musician friends of mine to give me a hand. We were drinking beers at a screening and eventually got the job done a couple hours later. I suppose me being under the influence was what left Frederic’s insistent text messages unnoticed that evening. It can be hard to focus on a slight twinkle sound in the bottom of one’s handbag while discussing bad 70s French movies (starring the epic Louis de Funes) with a drunk casting agent. What I discovered the next day is that Frederic had invited me to join an impromptu dinner party involving venison from his hunting lease. Needless to say that reading such a text the next morning was highly frustrating, I texted him back immediately to express my deep sorrow. Yesterday, around 2am, I got a new text from Fred: “The venison’s brother is waiting for you in my fridge.”

Barbie Bargain

Some of my work consists in shopping for absurd objects at bottom line prices, that means walking around thrift stores and flea markets and shuffling through dusty boxes belonging to freshly dead people. The other day I was scouting for a large amount of barbies who are to be tortured over the course of a semi-read, semi-staged play written by an Argentinian transvestite playwright living in Paris in the 80s. I found some at ‘le jeu de balle’, a daily morning flea market in downtown Brussels. When inquiring about the price, a Maroccan dealer, told me: “4 euros” to which I argued: “Mais elle a meme pas d’habits!” (She doesn’t even have clothes!). After all, a naked Barbie is close to pointless, think about it, there really is nothing to play with. Sticking to his original price, the chap said: “Mais c’est l’ete non?” (Well it’s summer isn’t it?).

May the force be with you...

Waking up at 5am on a Sunday to go to work is quite painful. That is probably why Michel, our manager, suggested we take the time to share breakfast at 7:30 with Lio, the cook and Anne-Sophie, the new weekend student-slave. As we were sipping on hot coffee and nibbling on our respective croissants, pain au chocolat and/or brioche, Michel started telling the story of an ex co-worker (Tim) whom he had to fire for unusual reasons. Apparently, while leaving work one day, Tim handed a letter to Michel. The text said: ‘Retrouves-moi derriere la friterie de la place Dumont demain a 14h pour un combat avec la force du dragon’ ( Meet me behind the French fried stall - to be found on any local market place in Belgium - tomorrow at 2pm to combat the force of the dragon). What might’ve been a joke for most non-retarded people was Tim’s dead serious challenge to a duel with Michel, our unfortunate looking, adorable, anal-retentive manager. Lio added that in the letter, Tim had actually crossed out 1pm and replaced it by 2pm. Maybe he had a haircut appointment or something.

At the dinner table

The last dinner I hosted at my place was a blast and involved an eclectic group composed of a historian, a financial consultant, two international law students, two set designers, a circus performer and myself. We had a wonderful meal involving many Belgian treats from ‘carbonnades flamandes’ (beef marinated in dark lager) to ‘crème de mascarpone au speculoos’ (speculoos is a ginger biscuit usually served with tea or coffee in any given Belgian brasserie) and close to a bottle of wine each. After the meal, we all decided to retreat to the drawing room and make use of the fireplace. Since we had no logs left, I threw a coat on and went out to get us more wood. Quintijn (the circus dude) offered to help. So there we were, walking through a dark and muddy terrain with a rather dim flashlight. We eventually got to the creepy little shack at the bottom of the garden and started gathering a couple logs. When back in the house, I realized that while I had taken two, Quintijn was carrying about ten of them as naturally as one may carry a passive kitten. I suppose I wasn’t that surprised to see him a couple of days later performing in a show during which a full-grown man and a petite acrobat towered up on his shoulders.