Matters of Being is an experimental screening program exploring the medium of film and its borders, this edition looks at everyday realities contrasted with incidental sounds and dreams.
This Matters of Being edition is taking a deep dive into different lived realities and their socio-historical entanglements. In an audiovisual choreography by Britt van den Boogaard A fine line between a wearable instrument is played as an act of relieving stress during daily interaction. The tactile film footage of Ana Bravo Pérez Mother Earth’s Inner Organs takes us from the coal hills in Amsterdam to the impact of its extraction in the North of Colombia. Lastly, No One’s Sister by Njaay Mame Saliou Assile is a film with a shifting narrative that establishes how the stories we tell ourselves matter and how they are continuously tested against everyday reality.
The artists and their work
Britt van den Boogaard
A fine line between
Britt van den Boogaard is an audio/visual instrument creator and performer. With a background in media design and film, she currently studies ArtScience at KABK and KonCon in the Hague. She is currently exploring aspects of sensory interference in physical phenomena, like spring reverb and string vibration, which unfolds into a wearable instrument. Intrigued by neurodiversity and the influence of sound on mental health, she aims to extend and share her experience of stimming, a coping mechanism to relieve stress and improve concentration. As a result, her projects evolve into a meditative composition of light, sound and body movement.
Performance
A fine line between is an audiovisual choreography where a wearable instrument extends the body. Physical phenomena like spring reverb and string vibration create complex harmonics which are constantly changing. Body movement as a reaction to sound, sound as a reaction to the body, the body plays together with the instrument. The instrument is played as an act of stimming. A coping mechanism to find the space between overstimulation and understimulation, which Britt finds hard to reach. It is A search for incidental sounds and little details, leading the attention to the present.
Ana Bravo Pérez
Mother Earth’s Inner Organs
Ana Bravo Pérez’s work draws on migration, memory and violence. She uses her own migratory and diasporic experiences as a starting point for her artistic projects investigating suppressed narratives and collective histories. An important theme in her work is how to deal with violence visually without imitating it, so it can heal colonial wounds instead.
Ana’s work is shown at EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; TarraWarra Museum, Healesville; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Cinematheque, Bogotá; Salt Beyoğlu, Istanbul.
Film | 22 mins | 16mm, 4K
Wayuunaiki | Dutch | Spanish | English Subtitles
Mother Earth’s Inner Organs is a journey from Amsterdam to the Wayú territory in the North of Colombia following the smoke, the rotten smell of burning Mma (Mother Earth in Wayuunaiki). Bravo-Pérez weaves a narrative that goes from the surface of Mma to its depths. From the experience of the Wayú people and the filmmaker’s reflection on extractivist practices to plastic experimentations that create a lucid dream, an eye opener to how the extraction of coal affects life.
Njaay Mame Saliou Assile
No One’s Sister
“I lie, and lie, and lie, and I will call it a story” Njaay Mame Saliou Assile’s work is poetic. He often asks himself, how can I make it more simple? This way he is able to tell complex stories. Using highly original language that always has its feet firmly planted on the ground. He refrains from the use of complex words, because the simple ones are hard enough. But in the simple, he lets you dream Of stories and worlds that aren’t really there. And in his writing he will build tension, and then just leave you wondering. His ultimate goal is to make you forget your feet.
Film
No One’s Sister takes place in the space between the concrete and the imaginary. It plays with poetry and a painterly visual language in which a brother dreams of his sister whom he has never met. He sees her appear and disappear at the most unexpected moments. Through the search for the sister, themes such as identity and migration are explored in a personal yet abstract way. A tension is created between what exists in the mind vs everyday reality.
About the Curator
Nele Brökelmann is an artist, writer and researcher. Deeply intrigued by the human need for structures of meaning, the perpetual search for and fabrication of meaning are recurring themes in her practice. These human made structures, and mental and worldly concepts create (physical) borders and either/or thinking which Brökelmann continuously seeks to challenge by playing with the experiences and concepts of distance, repetition and parallelity.
Apart from her artistic practice and curating Matters of Being, Brökelmann writes for the contemporary art magazine Metropolis M.
Program
15:00 – 15:10 Welcome by Nele Brökelmann
15:10 – 15:25 A fine line between (2024), Britt van den Boogaard
short break (10 min)
15:35 – 16:00 Mother Earth’s Inner Organs (2022), Ana Bravo Pérez
16:00 – 16:40 No One’s Sister (2024), Njaay Mame Saliou Assile
short break (10 min)
16:50 – 17:20 conversation with Britt van den Boogaard, Ana Bravo Pérez and Njaay Mame Saliou Assile moderated by Nele Brökelmann
Doors close: 18:00
Matters of Being is supported financially by The Creative Industries Fund NL and The Municipality of The Hague.
