Courtisane is een platform voor film en audiovisuele kunsten. In de vorm van een jaarlijks festival, filmvertoningen, gesprekken en publicaties onderzoeken we de relaties tussen beeld en wereld, esthetiek en politiek, experiment en engagement.
Courtisane is a platform for film and audiovisual arts. Through a yearly festival, film screenings, talks and publications, we research the relations between image and world, aesthetics and politics, experiment and engagement.
The Courtisane festival opens with a very special premiere: the documentary film Disorient by Brussels artists Florence Aigner & Laurent Van Lancker, will be presented for the first time in a new “expanded” performance version in collaboration with Sébastien Koeppel and Laszlo Umbreit. Before that, a selection of films by “Artists in Focus” Sylvain George and Robert Fenz will give a foretaste of the festival programme.
The result of an experiment with sound and image, composition and improvisation, in collaboration with Wadada Leo Smith, who will perform live at Vooruit on Friday. “The musical system in Vertical Air allows not only the predetermined to blossom but also the improvised to emerge. Improvisation and its cinematographic equivalent manifest themselves from the moment of shooting, and through the composition of the frame to the editing process itself. Verticality is drawn from the simultaneity of both arts, the creation of independent melodic lines that are echoed by the editing of images traversing in a bird’s eye view the vastness of the North American territory”. (Gabriela Trujillo)
A selection of what Sylvain George considers “petites formes”, excerpts from a series of intervention films or “contre-feux”.
Europe année 06 (Fragments Ceuta), 21’
“Rimbaud/Genet/Buñuel/Rossellini/Pasolini... A group of Algerian teenagers survive in an abandoned ware-house in Ceuta, waiting to reach Europe. A certain idea of youth is at stake. Of youth as migration, and of migrations as the spring that occurs every new year. The spring or the awakening of sexes as would say Pasolini, the art of encounter and a vagabond heart, forcing Europe and the established order to reflect on what they are: old (Postures of withdrawal. Self preservation. Fear). You will never be able to escape them anymore.” (SG)
Un homme idéal (Fragments K.), 12’
“A man walks in the city. Paris. Mister K. Just like the 30.000 families who have put their last hope in the circular of S., Mr K. waits and waits and waits... And while he waits, we discover a petrified face, that of French society in state of war...” (SG)