Courtisane festival

What Lingers When It's Gone          
Lieve Kleeven
audiovisual performance, 25 min

“In a small house somewhere in Flanders, my mother and I sit together at the kitchen table. We eat Bubur, a simple but typical Indonesian dish. What starts as an ordinary moment turns into an intimate conversation full of memories. She tells stories about her childhood in Indonesia and about the generations that preceded her. These words form the core of my work. They form a bridge between the past and the present, between here and there. By listening to her stories, I realize how important it is to pass them on. Not only to make them tangible for others, but also to better understand my own Dutch-Indonesian roots.

What remains? What disappears?”

In What Lingers When It's Gone, Lieve Kleeven unites film and live performance. Her vocals blend with traditional Indonesian sounds and her mother’s compelling narratives. A reflection on what continues to resonate, if only we take the time to listen.

FOLDS 
Miko Revereza            
audiovisual performance, 26 min

Miko Revereza is a filmmaker born in Manila, The Philippines, and currently living in Oaxaca, Mexico. His upbringing as an undocumented immigrant and current exile from the United States informs his relationship towards moving images. FOLDS is a silent film poem composed of a series of superimpositions/double exposures. Like a folded map, distances are collapsed and face each other. Through the act of superimposing years of footage of portraits of people and places, the separation between borders here become dissolved.

“It’s complicated to call any place home. Mexico is a place that’s not my home as it is for other people who have lived here for generations. Every place I live, it’s hard to connect to as home, like the US and the Phillippines, but I also feel like there’s so much weight to the word “home,” and it doesn’t need to be such a priority.”

KMRU                      
sound performance, ca. 50 min

Joseph Kamaru, better known as KMRU, is a Nairobi-born sound artist and producer currently based in Berlin. For KMRU, sound serves as a sensorial medium through which he explores political, material, and conceptual dimensions. Drawing from a rich repository of listening experiences in Nairobi and beyond, he expands his sonic practice to bring a heightened awareness of his surroundings through creative compositions, installations, and performances. He has collaborated with Niamké Désiré aka Aho Ssan, Freya Edmondes aka Elvin Brandhi, and Kevin Martin aka The Bug, amongst others, and has released his work on prestigious labels such as Mego, Touch and Subtext. Alongside this, he honors his grandfather and namesake, Joseph Kamaru, the celebrated Kenyan activist and Benga musician, by reissuing his music and continuing his legacy of sonic storytelling.

“Different places have identifiable sonic identities relating to their specific locations and the auditory culture of the place. We are influenced by the environments we live in, but mostly not aware of them. This became apparent to me when I first traveled to Berlin and realized how different its sonic identity is from Nairobi. Sounds communicate the different senses and properties of the respective cities: Berlin has more motor sounds, while Nairobi has more sounds of people. We experience these sounds on a daily basis and it is important that we know how they affect us. If they change, they might indicate that something is different, and if we are attentive, we will notice it.”