Plea from a Hermit Crab

 

Good evening, thank you for the invitation. It is an honor to speak at a gathering of a part of the Flemish performing arts sector.

Since this is a state of the future, and these days I have my doubts about the future as a space of thought in which we would be free, I would like to begin with a letter from 1984, written by the late Nand Buyl. In the 1980s he was, in addition to being a theater director, also director of the KVS, and it was in that capacity that he addressed the mayor of Brussels. In his letter, he complains about the “inhuman conditions” in which his team had to work, about the lack of space and, above all, about the fact that his set workshop was three streets away from his theater, with sky-high transport costs as a result. “We cannot make theater like this,” he writes, and he ends not with his name or a greeting but with HELP (in capital letters). Today, forty years later, I join him. But I do not address my letter to a mayor, but to ourselves, the performing arts sector. Because how far is the set workshop now from the theater? Can we still make theater like this?

What is the distance today, in our various organizations and practices, between the space where things are shown and the space where things are made? Between the space where bodies gather, watch, and move, and the space where materials—wood, iron, fabric—are worked on? Between the rooms at room temperature and the rooms where paint is allowed to drip onto the floor? I ask because it is urgent. For me. I believe I belong to a generation—or perhaps rather a movement—of makers who not only want to make work but also the way in which the work is made. How we make determines what we make. The two are inseparably linked. And so I repeat my question to you, to us: How great is the distance today between our set workshop and our theater?

In the case of the KVS, it is now 9 kilometers. Their set workshop is in Machelen. I found out ten years ago when I started working there as a young maker. Nine kilometers. Three quarters of an hour by bus. My first day at the KVS was therefore a real shock. Like a dancer entering the studio and discovering there is no floor.
Before that, I had been able to work at fABULEUS, Scheld’apen. Small organizations. They had little budget but the freedom I sought. That was not to be found at the KVS. So the first time I had an employment contract and could really call the work “my work”… I could make nothing. Makers must be able to make. But how do you do that in a city theater where the rehearsal space is 9 kilometers away from the building space? How do I collaborate with Menno Vandevelde, the technical director I have now worked with for twenty years? Where is he supposed to build? In Machelen? And should I then rehearse without him, without a set, in Brussels? How does Menno know what to build and how do I know what to tell when we are separated by nine kilometers?

For that reason, ten years ago, we founded Decoratelier in the KVS. Because we needed it. Their set workshop was too far away, so we made a new one. At first just in our heads, as a fictive, mental space, but we did have a little office in the props closet on the second floor of the stage tower. And a bell downstairs at a small fire door that opened directly onto the square behind the theater, where visitors could ring at “Decoratelier.” That way, we were part of the institution. Of course, that little room was quickly too small, but luckily we found the keys to an abandoned cardboard factory a few streets away where we could build our sets for a summer, while the real Decoratelier of the KVS was on vacation. But our Decoratelier was not a counter-movement, not an occupation, not a tomato action. Just the duplication of an existing department within an existing institution. A second set workshop, closer than the first. Decoratelier was maybe a fiction, but also a sincere attempt to collaborate with an institution, to weave our work into it and become part of the fabric, and, you never know, to change it from the inside out. And of course we did not mind that this caused confusion, that people rang our bell who actually needed to be in Machelen, and that suddenly people asked which decoratelier someone meant: the real one in Machelen or the one of Jozef and Menno in the props closet upstairs?

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A question to everyone here. Where is your decoratelier? Where, in your organizations, your houses, your institutions, is the place where things are made. With hands, working materials? Where are ideas made concrete? How accessible is the space? Who works there? How diverse is the group? Who learns from whom? Is there mansplaining? How are interns guided, and can they grow within the practice? How are guests received?

Because Decoratelier of Menno and I has now existed for ten years, I dare to claim this here: your set workshops are in your houses the places with the most potential. The set workshop is potentially your best space to further develop. Into a meeting place, into a school, into a rehearsal room, into a reception area. It is liberating to walk into a public building and see someone working, but not on a computer. It is in your decoratelier that thinking with hands can happen. It is the place where thought takes form and where laptops must be closed because of the sawdust.

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Decoratelier is actually just one of many fictive institutions I have founded. I also had a fictive architecture office in a social housing estate and a zoological institute for a while. And I was not alone. Many of my peers founded fictive institutions. They are concrete proposals of how things could be different. A form of constructive critique. I still find it exciting, even now. Every time someone invents a new school or founds a political party or sets up a German state theater. Each time I am curious. But I also wonder: where do all those fictive institutions go? Are they temporary fictions? Not meant to stay long? Are they not needed beyond the duration of a project? Do the founders get tired of them? Or do they find no space and support, no place to continue, no room to take their fictive institutions beyond the first step? Or have they gone on to do something else? Have they followed their fictions and therefore no longer make art as we know it? What does the arts sector do with makers who deviate from the path and question our idea of what art is?

Of all my fictive institutions, Decoratelier is the only one that still exists today. In the meantime, I think it is no longer fictive. Last week we had a team meeting where we decided on the length of the lunch breaks. 45 minutes, it turns out. No… I don’t think we can still call it a fictional institution.

But the fact that Decoratelier could grow from an invention into a real space with its own insurance and its own electricity meter is the result of a great deal of support we received from organizations, large and small, and many employees we were able to pay thanks to subsidies and co-productions. The joy of inventing an institution and slowly seeing it become real: I wish that for everyone. The joy, but also the difficulty. The complexity that arises when the space you make grows larger than what you need for yourself. And the questions. Who is allowed to do a residency and who is not? Who cleans which space? Who gets which key? Who is allowed to park where? Who is no longer allowed in? And who is allowed to decide that? That difficulty I wish for everyone. It is delightful not to have to complain about the institution, because you yourself are the institution. To have to choose yourself whether to install heating or put on a warm sweater. Seeing fictive institutions become real reminds us that real institutions are also just fictions. Only when Decoratelier became a real space did we encounter the obstacles I recognized from other institutions. We have now been at it for ten years and I am beginning to realize: it is really not easy not to fossilize, to remain relevant. Longer than ten years… not easy. Respect to all organizations that succeed in this.

What helps us for now is moving. We just moved to our fourth location in ten years. Four old factories, each totally different, but each time masterfully arranged by Menno and managed by Barry Ahmad Talib and Zohir Boumelha. Every move always starts more or less the same way: we walk around together in the dusty empty spaces and we read the new place, each in our own way. There are by now a few questions that help us with that: What is already here? Who is already here? What can we do here that we cannot do anywhere else? That is always how it begins, and yet we always build a different place. With different functions. A factory with thick brick walls and no neighbors became, also due to the pandemic, a sort of open-air art center with an experimental nightclub. And now, our current building—well, building, the walls and roofs are so thin and the neighbors live so close that you can hardly call it a building… well, that is becoming a sort of learning environment. And also a neighborhood restaurant (Cassonade). And a center for soil research. Because the soil is heavily polluted, we thought that was a good idea. The place, its history, the height of the roof, the seasons, the neighbors, and the conversations that take place there. Together they form the place. The building itself changes little in all that. The building as we find it is usually good enough. This really strikes me: that in every city there are organizations that can make something great of almost every vacant building, and that there are others whose building has to be renovated every twenty years. What do they expect from architecture that they cannot provide themselves? Why must their building adapt and not their practice? Can the institution not emerge from the place where it takes place? And can the work be a consequence of that? That is at least my hope: that my desires as an artist do not come only from myself but that they are a consequence of the circumstances, that those also want something, and that those desires will shape my work. That a fiction is the result of the neighborhood, and—sometimes, if you hold out long enough—also the other way around. That the neighborhood, which shapes the institution, also changes, and thus also changes the city that changes the institution, and so on. And the builders, their talent, their machines, and the reclaimed wood with which they build are with us then the guides of this process.

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Rebekka De Wit writes:
We don’t need imagination to save the world. We need the world to save our imagination.

I dream of an arts sector that bursts with it: spaces of all those makers who not only want to make work but also the way in which the work is made. All those makers who think their artistic proposal more broadly than what happens on stage.

Makers who know that what you make is a consequence of how you make it. That the budget is part of the imagination, and the imagination part of the world, and that your Excel file therefore has the power to change the world. I am talking about makers who understand that if you create a performance that is an indictment of capitalism and the rat race of life, and during the creation process your technicians and production leaders collapse one by one with burnout, then your performance means nothing. Makers who obviously do not go perform their ecological manifesto in Australia. Makers who make plays about the horrors of war and therefore denounce Israel’s genocide in Gaza, even when they are working for a German-speaking festival.
They are makers who devise projects in which the production leader is crucial, and who therefore know that they must take very good care of that production leader. They are makers who realize that a healthy technical team is more important than a premiere date in Avignon. They are makers, in short, who forgot the old fable of the lonely genius long ago and know that their work is only as good as the group and the space they build around it.

Worldmaking. Perhaps that is a good name. It is a proposal, maybe not immediately as a checkbox on a grant application, but who knows, maybe it helps if it has a name. Maybe it helps us to appreciate it?

How can we now ensure that more makers have the chance to let their practice become space? To test their fictive institutions in reality? To enjoy the difficulties that this entails?

What would happen if we devised a cultural policy that values and supports this movement of makers? In the past it has been shown possible, that a new movement arises, some innovative choreographers making exciting work that gives an impulse that reshapes and rearranges the arts field. That new categories arise and new forms of funding. And even an entirely new infrastructure: new art centers with new halls without a proscenium and with wider stage openings because the new movement needed them. Wonderful, isn’t it, how architecture is shaped around a movement that began small, in a few bodies that started to move differently!

Now: what other forms can we imagine in this way? If we take another movement as a starting point, what other kind of arts sector do we get? Worldmaking: what spaces do we make available for that practice?

Could we imagine, for example, that space, a building, is given to an organization as a form of temporary support and not as a perpetual concession? Now it sometimes seems as if organizations must be maintained because they are tied to an important building. Couldn’t more mobility arise there? If we want to let the practice of worldmaking grow, then really more movement is needed in real estate so that spaces open up where those organizations can temporarily find a place. Like a hermit crab can walk around a landscape with all kinds of shells that can be used temporarily. That should be possible, right?

Organize your houses so that you can hand over the keys. Or, perhaps more importantly: organize your organigrams so that you can hand over the keys. Hand over responsibility. Build a house without a fixed house style, a place where artists themselves can determine how communication is done, how reception is done, who must pay how much to get in and who is at the door. Choose artists who are good at this. Choose artists who see their practice more broadly. Makers who build their own dance floor because they know that is part of the dancing. Makers who care for their group of collaborators. Invest in the whole group. Follow their work and let it reshape your practice. Follow the work, and if sometimes it no longer looks like art, keep calling it art.

Link cultural policy to vacancy policy. But not just to make artist studios. At this moment there are 6.5 million square meters of vacant space in Brussels. And 10,000 people live on the street. That is actually indefensible. The knowledge to do something with that vacancy is nevertheless available. Organizations like Toestand not only show in their daily practice how it can be done, they also write manuals about it. Read those. Make vacant buildings available. But not only for art as we know it. We must radically change our notion of what art and culture is and open it to organizations and practices that will do very different things with that free space than what we are used to. I know already some artists, activists, collectives, and individuals who will set up beautiful social housing companies. Fictive nursing homes, schools, new trade unions, a new Sint-Katelijneplein that has not yet been sold to restaurant chains. When the minister speaks about cross-sectoral collaboration, this is in my opinion the best way. Not with cooperation agreements between institutions but through the makers. The worldmakers. But then vision is needed and policy, written by people with the knowledge and experience and who also seek the talent beyond the boundaries of the familiar cultural world.

Let that be the talent we develop. Let that be the potential we search for instead of continuing to hope for new directors who will fill the big theatre. If a young talent makes remarkable work, do not immediately ask for new work but ask about their way of working. Do not only produce their work but also their practice. Support the whole group that makes the work. Produce the way of working and allow it to change yours. Instead of us all chasing the same profiles, and then making end-of-year lists of who disappointed us most this year, let us ask those makers early enough to become a space larger than they need for themselves.

Let us start from the tendencies inherent to this time. If the arts sector is a place of imagination, let the artist be the guide, even if their work moves outside the familiar field. Let them invent and try out fictive organizations long before they write their first structural dossier. Let them imagine and test those new spaces in your buildings, in your set workshops, and in the empty spaces our cities are rich in. Place your set workshops central, put your best people to work there, and make your houses breeding grounds for other worlds, other ways of working. And, please, keep calling it art, even if it sometimes looks more like something else, and therefore no longer fits your house style and your tour schedule—just call it art, because that is exactly what it is.