Contredanse interviews Stef Meul

So, Steph, for a start could you introduce yourself, perhaps you can give some key aspect of your career and your identity that I've led you to Kittoki?

Okay, yeah. Actually, when I finished high school, then I took a year off and I traveled a lot. I was doing a lot of capoeira and I was very fanatic so I went to Brazil and Spain and then when I came back to Belgium, I was thinking to study video.

Because my older brother is like a scenario writer but then he was like a film director. So I didn't want to do like narrative film but I wanted to do something with images so I went to a video design school and then after two years there I basically felt that I was like too static.

So I changed side of camera and I went to a dance school and in Amsterdam. So when I started studying these were like the two poles and my being, being a libra, so always kind of finding these extremes. So like being behind the camera, being in front of the camera and feeling what's the difference between those kind of two places.

That was kind of like the base of my studies later I studied like multiple other things, like applied arts but that's kind of where also this project actually goes back to, like one of my first kind of interactions which was with the body and with the camera.

Offcourse nowadays it's in a very different setting, but that's what's at the ground of like what is this project and how it is at the base of always working between media.

And why you were interested in the video and video art? Were you also watching at what was produced historically with this medium and trying to find your own path through it or mostly interested into the image and what it can produce as movement and how it can translate movement?

Yeah, my specific interest in video and how video brought me to dance was through experimental art and experimental video art, and what I found really inspiring is that in the video it was seen as a kind of a effemeral medium.

So video doesn't really exist, it's kind of an electronic medium and Nam yung Paik and electronic highway, fluxes movement, all forms of like different ways of actually working with images or visuals but outside of Hollywood, so not a capitalist propaganda machine but thinking of ways which could actually empower creators themselves to tell their own stories.

In early video art like the Sony BetaMaxx I think or like one of the early machines that people could actually afford to create their own, what nowadays I would call selfies and stories, but this was kind of for me like the initial point where I found video more interesting than Pelicule, because that's like a high budget way of producing which implies this whole crew and production pyramid which is kind of inherent in the film industry.

So what I found really interesting was this more small crews or individual artists like experimental video artists also working with cameras in different ways, and how it actually brought me to the dance was that I saw something on the images of video art which is almost not visual. It's very difficult to explain that there's something in dance which is invisible which is much closer to music so this kind of indirect relation between a dancer, a person looking at the dancer but this kind of invisible field. Which also is like in the social choreography they try to explain this there's a lot of tries of like trying to explain what is this thing called dance, because people feel it but they don't really know how to notate it every time they try it kind of misses something and when they try to put it in a camera there's something there which isn't the images but it's also not really visual, it's more the vibe you get when you're listening to music so this whole research and dancing and images was thinking of yeah like what's the visual aspect and what's the limits of an image, because an image often pretends to have like a totality like imagine everything, but it's actually very limited and a very narrowed way of looking at an objective in that way.

For me this whole research with the body is not about like trying to capture the body and make it like fit on the screen that's what a lot of artists also in the Kitoki database they're still thinking that way like how to be someone that fits into dimensions but it's actually about seeing what are the limits of this medium and what actually gets lost in the process and that's actually something that you cannot commodify and that was my main interest in switching between dance and video.

alright

yeah like a bit like what Peggy fell and used to talk about about

what the performance facing camera and how so the yeah the medium can be a part of the process not as a performance down for the camera to document the performance but all these other artworks that really in in implied kind of an energy passing through the people acting and the one which is filming or people acting and filming at the same time with the yeah I see I see what you mean you speak about the vibe I'm also thinking about yeah this kind of energy because still behind the action of the medium of the video there is a human being that is taking but there is this remote situation where we as viewers we are not in the same time and space on this question that we are going back and forth when we speak about performance on a video you were also speaking about the beginning of video art and the desire I'm speaking about desire this is the way I interpret it but the will to get out of the capitalist system I'm also thinking about your other not so much speaking about the artist now but about the the activist I can I say activist or the I mean the your engagements in all the association you have started and all the collaboration you have built around the idea of autonomy and how to express artistic work with our own resources how to share it maybe you want to name all those associations or it's part of a wall for you but yeah we like for you to speak about about this

I used to have a tendency to always like make a long discourse about all the ways that I've been trying to do things differently very much in this activist sense but as many activists I also came to a point in my life where I had certain insights about activism itself that I have to like rethink like what I'm actually doing meaning I used to start a lot of organizations kind of with a punk attitude like whoever comes the right people open door policy and like trying to make things with what we have.

Of course most people they think of sustainable communities in like some far out nature but the whole idea was to bring this in the city as a alternative way of living as an alternative way of producing art. Which kind of leads to many complications because first of all I was not very schooled in economics or in how to run a business so then very fast it falls back to this kind of traditional forms which come out of the family and the education of the family and like the whole logic of this way of organizing mostly falls back on this kind of yeah what we have from childhood basically, like father and the maternal authorities and then how to do a good household, and so a lot of these kind of projects if I think back on them. Came in Brussels with like an art space and for them which I was running for 10 years and then I started the artist commons with a few others and then from there I've been doing a lot of other work like res gauche involved in aujus as a team member and Kittoki now as a kind of also Bosangani festival and helping them so I'm like often involved more than I could actually take care of, because I don't get paid for these things so I came to a point where I had to tell myself, okay like if I'm producing value that others are benefiting from I used to be more naive I don't want to become exploitative, but I should create certain boundaries because the result is that I'm not creating my own work.

So and that sounds like to rethink something so if I talk now about organization yeah I'm really thinking about how to work with and within the system in different ways than the system knows but that's already a very difficult thing is how to actually work within a symbolic organization that everybody has a role but how to actually embody these kind of roles instead of like thinking of an outside but to actually remain within. and then from there to if you say innovation it fails, if you I mean like every word that you address will have a certain metonomy of desires or certain ways that these things always kind of end up back into the old bourgeois structure where everything is as it's supposed to be which is also not such a bad thing on the one side since we enjoy the privileges of these kind of societies, but then like thinking about Kittoki and participating in Bosangani festival in Congo last year, I kind of started to see what are capitalist societies when these welfare structures aren't there, and it's a very tough way of living it's a bit like, yeah like nothing is there everything's commercialized, so it becomes kind of a pirate ship and Las Vegas at the same time, so it's a really weird way of thinking of life's values. Of course when I came back to Belgium I see how privileged we are as artists, we complain a lot and we have very limited resources but still compared to other spaces I was very surprised how safe we are here as we work.

You know like we can try out things we can get the funding to do some research that maybe doesn't produce anything so there's like a huge volume of work being produced by many artists here that maybe doesn't really matter so much. I know that's a hard thing to say but at the same time it makes me reflect also as an artist, what are the things that matter.

Is that my friends like me that I go to see the same shows with all the same people year after year going to the parties where we all celebrate each other's wonderfulness, and then we compete for the funding is that kind of like the arts industry, or is there something else can we really make a difference.

I'm not a person who's gonna be proclaiming to make that difference, but what I can do within my own practice is at least think about how can we manage our resources that there's not such a big difference between the ones that have all the funding or the others that don't have anything.

Because like just giving a lot to people that don't have anything that doesn't solve anything they just will need more. Like that's kind of the problem often, so trying to find the balance and thinking about this sustainable development goes as some kind of balance to actually start to rethink an artistic practice which is not a social practice because then they say that's kind of like social cultural work and make like art as some kind of occupational therapy to keep people busy that's kind of the first thing that happens they're like oh this is not really about art anymore so for me it's really about art but to really rethink within art how can art be something different than just riding the trend of the next anti-movement, because you know every year they need something to shout about to keep the party going but actually they keep doing the same so they don't really make a difference in the end, they just call for attention on certain topics that they oppose, but there's not a lot of artists that actually think about outside of activism, but within the art how they can reflect with their practice on actually doing something that does change things from within. so yeah that's a little way to think about it.

I would like to come back later about the term of punk and parrot that you used but also to refers to Bosangani, the first time we met you translated for me the the word kitoki that means, have we like mix them beauty in lingala

yeah beauty comes from Lingala that's like where I started to think of like how you can create something that my mother always said to me like hey step you make things more beautiful like you go to a place and like it's uh like some squat that was like deserted or it's an old building and then five years later it looks great and people are really happy so she always at this kind of approach that like by going somewhere have an impact on my environment just probably because I just like to be in nice places and I don't have a lot of means so I just transform environments so kittoki as a name is also about beauty, not just as a as a pretty being, but thinking of beauty of being so how you can bring the best out of every person by being it's it's actually a tantric way of thinking. Like whatever the energy is how it can be so it becomes beautiful not beautiful in the aesthetic sense but beautiful in its spiritual sense.

Then in Lithuania it means difference so Lithuania they think about yeah like how kitoki is different, which can relate to more yeah like the philosophy of differences but also differences in the economic sense. And then in Japan it means time.

and this is something you added from the last time yeah okay like time another level of meaning I like also this I the sound it has like we're about having any idea of what it actually means but the kitoki the like back and forth like this idea of giving and having back that I think can also reflect what you proposed to the artist here with this platform

yeah yeah definitely it's like the name kitoki of course there's a video platform so there's actually four themes that we're addressing, so the video platform like a nor sustainable development goes like what is actually the base of the whole transdisciplinary art foundation and then how kittoki interacts with this like the second goal is like gender equality, we're addressing only four of the 17 goals. Quality education is all about creating an interaction between the artists like doing interviews with the artists actually connecting them into a new form of our website where there will be probably also this interview presented and ways for artists to interact and work with each other eventually that's like the purpose, but also to create quality education so if an artist knows something they can actually share that knowledge make it available for others, so that's like the first goal, but that's like a broad way of thinking it's more like a knowledge commons something that I wanted to make since a long time that there's a space in society where not commercial forms of knowledge sharing can exist in a qualitative sense.

Kitoki as a video festival has to do with gender equality, and why I'm using the video dance for this is basically you don't end up in identity politics. You don't end up with the questions around gender which address sex or gender or gender theory. You can actually work with the body itself and work with the video dance with an indirect way of empowering different forms of gender and striving for gender equality make actually giving space to the body to express itself regardless what kind of sex that body has so it's actually looking at it in a different way.

and so in your sense it's this medium of video is you have it will be easier for you in a sense to avoid this identity and this lack of space that is given on the stage, do you make a difference here between the video as a remote object and the stage or

yeah of course like in the stage it's in real time it's presented with an audience you have a direct interaction but there's also the perspective which is kind of a given like you can play with distances and breaking the fourth wall in a performance but you're limited to a certain setting.

With video you can actually go in a very, you can even swallow the camera nowadays, like you can go through the body you can do things which are out of time, which travel through time so there's a whole different way of thinking of what actually the video produces and how it actually represents the body.

When I speak of the body here it's more thinking of to use a weird term like a concrete universality, so not so much in the way of enlightenment thinking but actually thinking forward in the world where we deal with bodies which can be very diverse, but they're still human. So that's kind of like the main question that I'm addressing also with all the forms of artificial intelligence and the amount of new dancers we will see doing incredible things because they're not human.

So that's kind of the next wave of generative video so I'm still looking at like the empowerment of the body as a human body and what's the language of that body when it's dancing which is a very direct language can be a language which is difficult to place in any category so it's still something that I find quite of course there's a whole field of social dance where people will just dance and then it will become folklore and or it's dance which is about empowerment or about racial justice so there's always like categories for everything in the industry, but my interest is actually empowering the being regardless its gender, but finding some kind of equality by actually allowing the body to express itself in dance, and with video that's actually easier to address as a relation than with the relation with an audience.

I see within the categories you listed for the call for your call to artists you had pop culture, poetry, music video, I'm forgetting one empowerment. and I was going to end there but maybe there is one still missing or maybe not anyway an empowerment and in actually my my feeling watching all this proposal was that this category was quite representative of the full range of the videos that were included on on your platform and we already gave you some clue about how you will define this notion and the link to gender and equality or the expression of a more fluid identity that are not to be stick to some normative readings but maybe you want to see more about this empowerment.

Yeah that's a bit like the central theme in my work which is coming out of like my personal experiences of having to explain to people that being an artist is also work, even if it doesn't pay the bills.

So that's always this question that's easy to talk about empowerment in an oppressive culture because then it's this kind of David against Goliath kind of narrative which people love and they always buy into this because then it's very clear who's kind of yeah it's just a very unequal situation in a more equal situation to talk about empowerment also to have like a male body like I had to hetero sexual preference and being quite pale, like it gives me a lot of like privileges that if I talk about empowerment it's often not well received.

In a lot of spaces it's very difficult to speak or just to have a discourse which is not, how to say actually the new normative discourse. So to think about empowerment in lots of different ways can often lead to very interesting discussions which open up kind of yeah like a hidden form of power struggles which often aren't addressed and seen as normal.

So that's why I also brought it into like the kitoki project and a lot of dancers they applied immediately through this.

Because I have a feeling that persons are living in a time where so many things are possible but the moment some kind of preference or choice starts to appear everything is already organized. It is this kind of new semantic of of the psychology which comes out of cybernetics. that the moment you think something there's already an algorithm which will guide you through the next 20 years of like what you can imagine within that experience of lifestyle so to actually come back to the body and to rethink things being aware of those forms but not to necessarily have to address those forms just seeing them as their limited form although it's a huge field but yeah that's kind of an understanding empowerment.

I think it's like this small difference between the choice and making the choice inside the brain that is still seen as this kind of what I would call free will basically.

Although it doesn't matter what you do and everything is kind of predefined but still that kind of little space between what is already known that is supposed to be, like the things that are considered ideologically normal, and then actually you as a consumer subject deciding, do I do this, or do I do this knowingly that I have this choice, because yeah that's kind of like the options. Yeah then talking about like neuro marketing and all these new forms.

and so you launched the the call like November 2024 and today there are around 200 videos that you have almost like 130 like when you wrote 200 I was like there are like 70 missing will be back with you remember so I realized afterwards that I was a bit over yeah it's not the main thing oh yeah sure but we are getting there I think 134, 35 yeah so yeah we can say that the artist responded to the call and maybe you already have some conclusions or some I don't know guidelines to describe this first nest of creations that we have here yeah it's a lot of materials

so in the first iteration I just opened it up as an open call and what I will do now is basically interview the participants to interview 130 participants takes a lot of time and then from there the idea is regarding empowerment and all these goals that were striving for like quality education gender equality and then of course like reduced inequalities that's something I didn't address yet but that's why with Kitoki by bringing artwork together it puts people into seeing each other's artwork and then getting to know each other that's what I'm working on now how to build an application that allows persons to contact each other not necessarily through social media but through this platform. and then from there to start a solidarity economy.

So that's how I see the first iteration of the participants that have joined while it stays open and new persons can join and hopefully other exhibitions will happen next year's, but the whole idea behind building this is by actually getting me outside of the equation and participating maybe as an artist by actually building an application format that allows artists to upload their own videos to basically yeah that they start to do it themselves kind of that's how I like to build things.

That yeah like that this project can run and have its economy and provide artwork for artists and collect funds for doing their project without me needing to be there as an application developer, but just maybe participating as an artist.

since you are speaking about this solidarity economy this kind circular economy somehow

it's not really circular now okay definitely not but maybe this

but I still have a difficulty to understand this idea of flow that you are pointing on your website and maybe you can start by explaining and I can tell you where I see not a problem but a difficulty to comprehend how it will actually work

yeah so it's very very simple in my brain so I'll try to explain it in a very simple way I'll leave out what the coin itself is because I'm working on creating a stable coin and nowadays you hear a lot about like the dollar being devalued so in a lot of countries that means like difference between buying food or not having food. Like how much this is worth so this question I'm addressing by actually creating something which will be the currency that we use.

Can be like whatever can be a mandarin a piece of fruit like whatever we use to kind of like buy into this, so that we'll have some kind of stable value, so that's the currency, but that's not so important let's say that's just a number so you buy five of something or one of something but what that one represents is a kind of average value of the five most used currencies that are in the fiat markets. So the dollar the yen the Juan the pound and the euro. So if you take an average value then it doesn't really matter so much like how much it's worth, it matters more how stable the value is like people think of gold in that way but even gold is not very stable nowadays. So that's kind of like how I address like creating some kind of form of stable value that is not interesting for speculators. So that's the first step like how do you get something that you can actually use.

Then once you bought that with your euros or dollars or whatever you bought it with you have something in your wallet that you can give or send to someone else. So you can give it to a project that you want to start like a crowd fund, or you can send it to another artist of like hey I want to support you. So that's like two ways that you can like spend that kind of thing or like or currency.

Then what happens on the other side is like ah me as an artist or a project receives funds so .I would like to get paid once I as just having funds in my wallet I cannot take that money out so I need to make a project. I'm making you solo make a new video creates an album like whatever artistic work is, it falls within that field for now it will just be artistic work like.

What I'm talking about this is like coming in the next year and a half one maybe two years. So that's kind of like the way the money will come out of it is by having a contract and having worked as an artist. In Belgium that gives you also social protection kind of building up your artist status and all these things so that's how the money comes out and then in between the money going in and the money going out so if you buying something having it in a wallet giving it to a project that projects receiving ah we have enough funding because that's actually what funding is it's like you receive some kind of funds on some kind of project balance so then okay there's enough funds now we can employ whoever's in that project.

So then these people they get paid the fair wage and they're actually not being exploited they're actually working in the conditions that they have addressed themselves within the confines of like a collective like you say ours and I call the CAO committee like all the things that are necessary to create a decent work.

So that's the flow of money going in and out where it's kind of different and most projects because in most things that I know in crowdfunding or in state funding or in getting investors to like your project it's kind of winner takes all. So that's most things that I know this like you make a project you hope all your friends are there they will give you money you get the family involved and then boom you have this huge project that you can realize and then you spend all your money and then you have to start again. That's like most artists that I know they kind of work in that way or they get funding from the state and if they didn't spend all their money then boom maybe next time we don't get that much because we have to give.

You know like it's just consumer culture so it's all about spending that money to the wages yeah like often goes back to the big corporations like they mostly use that money to just buy things from those so in that way it always flows back up, because those corporations of course don't need to pay the tax on it, so that's actually how state money is recycled into a private company on the long run by artists spending their budgets.

So what I find weird with that kind of wealth transfer is that it gives in eventually more to the already rich and by using the persons that really need resources, giving them very little but then what they use with this goes back to the rich which is an absurd system, because it's coming from tax money or from private wealth or all this kind of forms.

So instead of this I thought of a system where if you have a wallet and somebody else has a wallet or you have a bank account and you also have a bank account. If that one bank account starts to be like really popular or that project receives a lot of support at four times the amount of the poorest person that starts to flow over automatically.

Like that's just the design of the system so that's kind of what I'm programming nowadays, is that between us nobody can have more than four times, cannot be four times richer than someone else. So that's like what I call limited disparity, there's not so much how much you have but how much difference there is between the ones that have little and the ones that have a lot so that's kind of like what I'm working on.

That's why I was thinking about maybe the the term I'm using means something I'm using in the as in the economy but about this idea of circular economy like the idea of for example in a village that we put everything something in the middle in the case this guy has to get married but in the end the idea that everyone will get married and everyone will I have here the very traditional way but that that everyone will get married and everywhere we get back the money at one point and I'm just still curious about what we buy and this idea of of buying in relation to art and how to expect and by who you expect this money to enter in the beginning.

Yeah this will be from a diversity of persons I'm looking for investors but I'm also looking for funding and why I want to do this in that way. Let's say if we have like five artists that each want to make a project one of them gets funding the other four don't happen. That's a pity from an artist point of view it's like maybe those four other artworks would have been great but they just didn't know how to write the application and you know or they wrote something and it wasn't popular, so they kind of left out.

So I'm looking for a structure that actually allows artists to apply and that actually won the money arrives it actually arrives in this common pool, with some kind of form of fairness between, so that's kind of the basis of this way of thinking. From a political point of view it's also maybe more interesting to support a project that actually gives work to many artists and each their work, than to select like an artist that then employs maybe a few.

So that's kind of what I'm looking for for getting the funds inside of this system but probably that will happen through the Transdisciplinary Art Foundation. So for this now I'm researching how to start a private foundation and then eventually start a public foundation, so it's like a longer process to actually build something in the Belgium state with like the foundation of Roi Boudewijn what do I maybe like work with them to actually set up a structure that allows for such kind of funds also for benefits for people that donate and all these kind of things so that's what I'm slowly figuring out how to create a vessel that actually can deal with it on a large structural form on a long term way of thinking also has like a long term way of growing and letting slowly like let capital exist within an ecosystem that then can actually empower others by having redistribution alongside this way of thinking.

So yeah that's what I'm doing in this yeah kind of a life project and kitoki is like part of this way of thinking but it's not the whole project like all project is really thinking about transgenerational wealth transfer, how to deal with property, how to actually create not collective but empowering individuals in structures that they can trust others even if they don't know each other. Like in that way I've been like participating in web3 communities which are all about decentralization and everybody has their own secret keys and you know like they sign each other's things on cryptographic things to redistribute funds but it all happens in the kind of like banking finance way logic which is for me a bit to abstract, or it resembles too much the ways that are prevalent there.

Is kind of other way of thinking about money and greed and all these things, so what I take from that is just yeah how to build things on the long run and how not to get caught in this kind of thinking immediacies, because often in the art world if you're not on Instagram for a week like you know you don't exist anymore.

So I'm really thinking of how to build things on a longer sense that are stable maybe not very popular, but can exist by the way they are organized.

and maybe I ask you one last question I would have to make a meeting up with maybe I can open if there is a question from the audience but so the relation between this economy you you are working on and the the videos that you are hosting under the same foundation the connection between two so with those videos that you are no placed on the sharing space with the idea to connect the people behind them and to enhance and create an emulation around the sharing of knowledge in places will those videos became something like to sell or you will get involved because at one point it crossed my mind yeah the idea that at one point we from the outside we will vote because on your website we are speaking about action votes election and wage so the remuneration and I was wondering with this idea of competitions of many platforms that open videos and so I was wondering if it will turn out to be your coin the video and if it's a question that the artist also ask

yeah I received this question because if there is existing video festivals mostly they work in that logic it's like okay we get people together then people can vote on it and then maybe voting cost a bit of money so we put it in a pot and then we give a part of that back to the winner it's like a classical way of like buying drinks in a bar kind of a which is cool and it actually does work.

But this is not what I'm busy with the other ways of thinking is like ah you're building NFTs you know like every artist is gonna have like a non-fungible like a unique piece of digital art that then you can sell and they can get royalties every time it's resold, it's also not this, because these are like already existing forms which are indeed making a lot of money, but that's not the idea behind this project.

This project is basically starting with an invitation for artists to share their work which belongs to them using our service which basically I'm providing for by paying a company to host those videos and presenting them to an audience which is online and in physical spaces like this space so that's basically the proposal regarding the property of the artwork and the artist can decide at any given time, hey I don't want my video there, anyways it are their videos so I don't have any royalties or regarding all this that keeps belonging to them in every case which I think is important, because that's what I like when I make my own work, is that it that I don't get ripped off by a festival to say it like that.

So I built this festival exactly in that way that artists are representing themselves in the ways that they want to be represented by giving information and by sharing that information so that's basically it's regarding ownership on the second level what the foundation can provide for these artists that otherwise wouldn't see or know each other is some kind of services in starting a project learning some new things and maybe also getting work so that's just what it's about of course yeah like I thought about it because if you say foundation mostly people think okay the artwork will be down to the connection so there's ways of thinking and I think it should be also possible but I don't know yet how to set up a structure you know like I run a small gallery and sometimes people are like I don't want to pay but you get a painting like I don't want another painting you know like I don't know where to put all these things and you know that's the kind of logic that would be the collection logic but that's kind of what I'm thinking of like how can this also exist as form of payment you know like how can you fund projects by dancing so instead of giving money you move or even you walk in the street and you know like there's a lot of new economies thinking in that way of like you get some credit if you do about good fitness or if you do three pirouettes what's you know like even thinking in like outside of the regular economy there's a lot of exploitation happening through the body.

So I'm rethinking those logics and getting them in a clear sense out of that economy and rethinking what capitalism actually is you know like what actually you buy and what you sell and then reversing that logic into something more equitable which can actually benefit persons involved without having to be exploited and also without exploiting their work.

thank you I'm video the adaptation there is a political side but I understand you are happy that it's more than poetry it's also spiritual and in addition to the small things etc I'm very happy to have participated in your work and better understand all the processes maybe

too too close I would like to take the risk to ask you what you think about selection I have made for this exhibition what is represented what is not represented if you have something to say

actually I had an interview with Dancer from a dance for the end of the world which was also one of my favorite videos and I told her like yeah actually you were like seductive she was like thank you I was like no it's not me it's like the creator of the contredanse she was like oh yeah cool yeah like for me that's like one video of course it's kind of also a typical development but I like the energy of this so this kind of energy videos I appreciate I see in your selection it's like two times eight so it's a very two series which makes a lot of sense I find it amazing you managed just to choose 16 out of all this because I cannot do that.

Like I always end up like selecting so many in the previous exhibitions like the artist were coming to me like hey can you fast forward this playlist because I don't want to be here another three hours I was like yeah okay so yeah that's quite well done I was excited

I will respond to that I think I have changed this selection like one hundred times and when you told me I will put the deadline to stop the video arriving so that you can do the selection oh god this is at least I have this this limit this is good but still I was I guess the the way it is stage here and the space we had that does not offer so much the the possibility to show on different levels to have the noises that that mixed in everything in imply this more traditional way of compilation and what I I liked from the exhibition you had that I'm mixing the two I'm sorry oh au jus was actually the the different layers so I did that you were projecting screening and the videos on the first and the ground floor and that the noises were mixing in each other. and you had more the possibility to okay this video is not at all talking to me but I'm listening this and I will go there or I'm here and I liked pretty much this atmosphere where you the viewer is the one selecting somehow what he will watch of course and decided to have that we we have reflected on to have these two loops was kind of trying out this play that's at one point the viewer could switch but it's it's I mean it's two options.

audience member: it's it's not just often before I was looking here with the but I also have a look on this one and I just realized that I was looking this one with the music of the and so I was okay it's it's more interesting to be here than here because you have like two options and you can really switch like my intention was always switching and I found it really interesting to yes to it is maybe less multi-dimensional that you say I wasn't in the other space but yeah the idea of the noise and the image can also respond to it's it's already happening maybe not that big that you experience but for me it was quite interesting to to put it like that or so visible to other people from the. so it's already different than just looking at it in on the computer or I just wanted to say.

stef: yeah it's really thinking a lot about how to get it out of the computer frame or out of the mobile phone I don't yet know how to do that in an optimal way because every situation is different, but what I like in the presentation format is when persons meet in real life from something that they saw online. So if there's this kind of connection of an artist that has a I'm on this website and then they appear in real life and they actually see each other there, is the whole purpose of this kind of work which is kind of bypassing you know like if you see a lot of social media is like people are there to be online, but this is thinking about making something online that you can actually be in real life.

relating also to the space aujus the idea of the window and the relation of again we then it's I have something with mise en abime, I've been the frame of the frame and the frame and the viewer passing that can take the flow stop watch and I was thinking about one street full of windows with many many many videos that are online and yeah kind of a path you could draw and the people could walk walk alone stop whenever yeah to have this co-presence

still sounds like a plan we need to find a solution and we will do like in the wood we'll make a cross on the windows that way we like and then knock on the door what do you think if you use your window oh my god

yeah that's a huge project maybe yeah the next challenge is to bring this to Bosangani festival yes that's also a bit where the idea originated like this idea of Kitoki I get the base of it was when I came back from the festival and then I met all these dancers there because I was giving yoga classes and it's a generation of really young dancers some break dancers that do like amazing things on concrete floors with like one meal a day and I'm like coming back here thinking of like okay like dancers here dancers there is a huge difference how can I make something that those dancers can also be represented within this European network so that's already Bosangani festival the Joli NGemi is doing that work by actually bringing those dancers there you know famous choreographers from here they go there to teach and some people from there they go on tour with their company but then this project was thinking of like how can I seeing those dancers there constantly like posting themselves on TikTok and Instagram and like they're just fueling their energy inside of this kind of 'like me' systems,

I thought of like what can I make that those dancers can actually be represented on Kitoki and then how can I connect it to a kind of economic system that is not just how can I get the money because that's mostly the question but how can I create something that they can actually produce work in the conditions that we benefit from so that's kind of like the challenge.

But then of course yeah this will be the first iteration of going there in August right yeah in September yeah I hope I can make it this year because I'm applying for funding last year I funded everything myself, but you know I don't have infinite resources, so I have to like think of yeah I want to go there physically again otherwise it will just be the project.

But then it will also be questioned there, like a lot of the videos that are online you cannot present them to an audience they're like regarding like male nudity is like you know war starts literally in the audience, like there's things that you cannot show on the screen there because people just they freak out it's not like here when people see an image or then they see a dance show like last year when we were there there was one trans dancer from an African band trans dancer presenting a bit of male nudity dressing up like a woman, the audience was just shouting all the time, basically it's like a football match. So like presenting images it's very different way of thinking because it's a different culture they're not so yet yeah they don't have so much numbing that we have with our society of the spectacle.

So you know at the same time when I ask you what is not represented you are very kind to me because we were working when we arrived with the screens here and you were speaking about the difficulty even in Brussels sometimes to for for people to walk with their full identity expressed like maybe in Amsterdam or in other places where you can for example dress the way you want without having the gaze chasing you and I was thinking about this and I was thinking about Perimeter at this video from electronic music to Vienna that I liked so much and I censored myself not to include it because of this kind of standard way of thinking and my own limits towards for example sexuality and and a way to show, and I was trying to convince myself that the reason why I did not put it was because I was thinking maybe some children will come to visit.

I thought yeah look this is a well-good excuse it is it's the reason like if I go to Bosangani I have to talk with Joli and she will basically you know like the queen of the house say this is yes this is now but that's also required if you have a certain institution and if you're carrying responsibility it's impossible to make the perfect choices so there's also this kind of guilt trip that we often like find ourselves in of like do I make the right choices but often that guilt trip is becoming a form of exploitation towards oneself like I cannot make the perfect choices so I'm constantly guilt-ripping myself but then others start to benefit from this so I end up like working for free doing like crazy things that otherwise I would never do because I feel good not good about like the ways that I actually give access to my own house so that's a question of like my boundaries which is for Kitoki is something that I have to also empower myself for they have to say like okay if I manage this project if there's something there that obviously is not according to our rules that we presenter I have to be quite assertive if I'm not assertive in that way of course it will dilute and you will see a lot of videos that are very far from video dance and it ends up in this kind of typical exploitation thing so of course it makes perfect sense that you as a curator you know it's your choice and not there to question those choices

and so in Bosangani it will be someone from the team from the festival over there that would help you out also we will help you out collaborate with you on the on the compilation on the selection

yeah basically it's a person that is there responsible for their festival of course I don't want to put anyone in a situation where an artist applied to a festival is on our database and the institute that is hosting an exposition is coerced in having to accept that would be absurd like already just providing a platform where artists can present themselves gives them a chance that others might select them but those choices of course there's certain limits so we have an ideology which is on our website it's about this kind of united nations sustainable development so there is a framework but then within that yeah like I'm not there to say yes or no to what another creates and there to make sure that I'm not the only person curating because that I find really absurd you know like that's kind of the situation that I'm working on now to how to get this kind of linchpin situation that a lot of people find normal in ways of organizing especially in arts and in small communities, you create your tribe and you create this kind of like momentum and it becomes again this kind of form of organizing that for me is kind of a regression into like a pre-modern past.

I think the way forward would be to actually think of ways that artists can help each other without having to give up their individuality, but be able to be part of communities.

So kind of new balance which I don't see in many places yet because often it's or individual isolated or collective like you know like brainwash almost, so there's a new form that I see is possible but yeah that depends on everybody's choices that's. So yeah if you want to bring the other video in like you can always change your mind.

so let's get started thank you