Glowachrome Garden

^{image: Evelien Cammaert}

In a space midway between exhibition, slide show and performance, you venture into twilight darkness. You are invited to spend time with analogue projected images and sounds in a scenography that is slowly and constantly changing.
Performers operate slide projectors and make images appear, disappear and travel through space on quasi-architectural spatial elements that are reminiscent of chamber screens but equally act as filters for light and for, the projected images, which mostly seem to do their best to fade, as memories and also slides do when they exist for a long time.
The environment also changes. In the in-between space, new places keep emerging, little corners and squares bare different atmospheres each time. Everywhere there are spaces for you to sit or lie down.

Different levels of abstraction and recognisability, visual and audible, are placed next to, over and opposite each other. Projections show a photographed reality in picturesque images that evoke dreamy memories. The images appear alongside more abstract, graphic compositions. The narrative potential is perceptible but mostly remains unresolved in a quest for atmospheric sophistication and spatial precision.
A soundtrack live created evokes its own space, with dynamic sound extracts referring to a natural environment, a landscape, a garden.

As a viewer, you feel your attention meander through colour and light in a space where sounds of howling wind, synthetic crickets and a buzzing sinus tone almost bring the pictures to life.
You witness a slow and meticulous compositional process. Images are carefully brought into resonance with time, space and sound, while you stroll to find new ways and places in space.
The longer you walk around, sit and lie down in this garden of colour and light, the more layers, connections and aspects reveal themselves.

For this installation and performance, Evelien Cammaert started from a search for places that acquire meaning through the atmosphere they breathe.
The artist undertakes her creative process slowly, carefully and intuitively, travelling around, relating to the landscape in her own particular way and looking at places and photographs in an immersive way to unravel how they present themselves to her perception at that moment. It is this way of looking at the world that Evelien Cammaert wants to share with the viewer. Over a period of three years, she photographed two 35mm rolls of film of analogue slides of landscapes, gardens and houses. The choice of analogue photography reflects the deceleration in the artist's meticulous working process and in the pace of the performance to which you are also invited as a spectator.

Credits:
Concept, performance and images: Evelien Cammaert;
dramaturgy, performance: Alice van der Wielen; scenography, performance: Joris Perdieus; sound design: Harpo ’t Hart; Artistic advice: Bart Van den Eynde, Meryem Bayram, Mesut Arslan, Simon Baetens; Joris Perdieus; Coproduction: Platform 0090/ C-Tact/ Workspace Brussels/ Playground Festival; residencies: C-Takt Dommelhof, wpZimmer, Performance Art Forum (PAF), Workspace Brussels; M-Leuven
In collaboration with the Master in Theatre Program, Institute of Performative Arts, Maastricht (NL); Tiny Things vzw

Première: November 17-20 at Playground Festival, M-Leuven