Between Bodies & Walls
Collective experience
Saturday 16 – Sunday 17 September 2023
16h00 — 22h00
When a house wakes up from a long sleep, sometimes surprising things happen.
Between Bodies & Walls is a project built around the historical house of Les Passagées. The Heritage Days seemed to be the ideal moment to share with a wider public the personal and intimate history of this house between 1904, when it was built, and 2023. The house as an organic body of bricks, stones and emotional charges that have passed through it. A house as a landscape of time.
For the occasion we gathered artists, poets, historians, creative chefs and sensitive souls to explore its traces and stories. A multi-sensory installation outside the house, a way of staying in touch with the neighbourhood and making people feel this place rather than just see it.
conception Alexandra Swenden
sound piece Isabelle Douillet – de Pange (voice and editing)
Nicolas Dernoncourt (musical composition)
video Agnès Guillaume
poetry Constance Chlore
taste Christophe Hardiquest
graphic design Uma Naddermier
photos Caroline Dejonghe
•••
“As we gathered on the closed off roundabout Place Antoine Delporte in the heart of Saint-Gilles, space and time seemed to stretch all around us. We travelled back in time, exploring the history of the house and the neighbourhood, and projected ourselves into the future of endless possibilities. The air vibrated with excitement and curiosity from artists, neighbours and by-passers.
I am ingesting the history of the neighbourhood through sound and taste.
In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin redefines the earliest human tool, proposing that it was actually the receptacle rather than the weapon. The recipient, the holder, the story. ‘Before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.’
The house, as a living entity, a receptacle of new energies, was once more brought to life through this new project. And our bodies, like our own houses, were to be experienced and listened to.
As I find a seat in the middle of the street, I suddenly see my city from new angle.
Through this public experiment outside the house, we had our first sparkling encounters with a broad audience eager to come in. Each with an individual link and story to the history of this place. It felt as if we were able to truly reconnect with its history, with the neighbourhood, while leaving us with so many additional questions -as if the house was buzzing to tell us even more.
This new chapter of the house is most definitely a story of people, of connections, and we cannot wait to be part of all the exciting things it holds for us.“
les passagées
Figures that matter to us
· 512 Brussels sprouts eaten
· 341 inscribed to our newsletter
· 467 audio pieces listened
· 247 poems read