Courtisane festival 2014

2 April, 2014 - 6 April, 2014
  • Ghent

We are often asked these same questions: what is this thing called Courtisane? What exactly are you proposing? And every time our response falls short. Because the honest answer is that we don’t know very well either, and that, perhaps, we don’t really want to know. Sometimes we are told that we should define ourselves, that we should be clear about our ‘identity’. Yet we feel increasingly incapable of coming up with the right words, words that somehow feel right. Surely, we whisper hesitantly, it must have something to do with cinema, as a configuration of images and sounds, an experience of seeing and listening, a surface of perceptions and affects, a construction of a world that makes sense to us.

Glauber Rocha once recalled a Portuguese saying: We don’t know where we are going, but we know we can’t get there this way. Perhaps that is the choice we are trying to make: to leave the safe grounds and start trusting in what we see in front of us and behind us. To leave the categories pinpointing us to places that could be easily recognized and identified. To put our confidence in what resists us, what forces us to think anew. To realize what we have been sensing all along that there is something else at stake. To let go, slowly, of the certainties of knowing and accepting our place. To get lost.

Our ‘proposition’ is perhaps just this: to give you a few things to wonder about, things that make you want to wander. We do need to allow ourselves to dream, dream out loud, dream with our eyes open.

Welcome!