Shut Me Down Lift Me Up

SHUT ME DOWN LIFT ME UP FESTIVAL

Online city (Brussels?) festival

As Belgium and many other European countries are going through a second period of partial or complete lockdown and society switched back to survival mode, the question of art and the role of artists seem to have become completely superfluous. Maybe the exact opposite is true. More than ever our societies seem to be in need of new strategies to restore social cohesion as an alternative for our capsular society in which we all seem to have become floating, isolated nomads. More than ever we need new imaginary spaces which can take us beyond the fatality of our everyday realities, which help us to imagine, to desire and to fight for other possible worlds. Everything is possible, even in our confined realities. We need new possibilities, more than ever. And most of all: we need to re-connect, with each other, with our neighborhood, with reality.

During two weeks, students from four different Brussels-based institutions and training programs – visual artists from ERG and ENSAV La Cambre, theatre directors from RITCS, dramaturges from ULB – intensely worked together. The first step of this experimental track was taken last year, during an introductory workshop hosted by La Fonderie, during which students tested new ways of doing field research in the city. The confinement of November 2020 obliged is to fundamentally rethink the next step in our research. Rather than giving in, we decided to confront the situation head on, in the hope to create new possibilities, new windows of creativity, new cracks in a reality that seemed to have come to a stand-still.

During the first week of the workshop, the student group participated in four masterclasses lead by Samirah Saleh, Myriam Van Imschoot, Joëlle Sambi and Benjamin Verdonck. Together with these artists our students explored new possible ways of working with and in the city and its stories. In the second work the students developed their own propositions aiming at creating links between individuals, neighborhoods and communities, whatever scale. All means of expression are possible: radio, video, performance, drawing, mail art, songs, masks, parades, magical acts, television, interventions of any kind, live, recorded/filmed or online

SHUT ME DOWN LIFT ME UP is about the stories and the people of the city, about the use of artistic strategies to create new inter-human links and social cohesion. Our goal is simple and straightforward: to set-up the first-ever online city festival in Brussels where we will present the results of this research. Our festival will not be a showcase of young upcoming talent, nor a platform to present personal work, but it aims to develop a framework to invent new ways of reconnecting with the city and its inhabitants. It is a gift back to the city. Its intention is dead simple and highly complicated: to give life back to the city, to re-open the minds and the bodies of our secluded city, to create new stories for a confined city through collective research, experimentation, entre-aide and participatory strategies.

A pedagogical project of ENSAV La Cambre (atelier Espace urbain), ERG, RITCS (Drama Department) and ULB (Master en Arts du Spectacle) generously supported by FONDATION BERNHEIM

Students:

Emilie Ade

Audrey Apers

Frederico Araujo

Ferenc Balcaen

Pauline Bernard

Oscar Briou

Febe Coysman

Julie Daddario

Tessa Daluwein

Jeanne Delmotte

Eduard de Vos van Steenwijk

Louis Ducamp

Evan Durand

Lucas Engels

Bérénice Gasc

Thelma Gaster

Léa Guillot

Maurane Hanff

Judith Hesselmann

Ophélie Hilbert

Gökhan Kizilbuga

Ronja Koch

Virginie Krotoszyner

Marie Lou Laforet

Marina Misovic

Elvira Nataloni

Emma Noïtaky

Nele Oeser

Agathe Perrin

Tjardo Planckaert

Céline Polart

Lucie Pousset

William Scaceriaux

Kénor Ospina

Simon Torbeyns

Alexia Uzumyemez

Lynn Vandenheede

Production and coordination: Sarah Caillard

Pedagogical team: Marie Feyereisen (ERG), Erwan Maheo (ENSAV La Cambre), Sanja Mitrović

(RITCS), Cédric Noël (ENSAV la Cambre), Marielle Pelissero (ULB), Karolina Svobodova (ULB), Karel Vanhaesebrouck (ULB & RITCS)

ERG TV: Monsieur Pimpant

Website: Mathieu Levet

Special thanks to: Nicole Sounou (ULB)