HORNU.- Earlier this year Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Steven Fillet presented work from their artistic collaboration for the first time at Xavier Hufkens Gallery in Brussels. This autumn a new chapter follows at MACS with Belle-le: a series of seven monumental paintings to be shown in the Salle Pont.
Belle-le came into being in the autumn of 2024 on Belle-le-en-Mer, an island off the coast of Brittany. The project took the artists out of their familiar studio and into the open air, in a landscape that eludes control: open in character, in constant flux, and perpetually eluding itself.
At the edge of the ocean a canvas five by twenty metres was laid out. A striking white field, abstract and pure, contrasting with the surrounding space where the excess of reality holds sway: water, wind, light… Those hundred square metres of white space – canvas and dance floor at once – are not filled in but slowly occupied through movement and drawing that are, from the outset, inseparable. What emerges is an accumulation, a slow sedimentation of gestures and time that settles layer upon layer, ultimately making presence visible: a place, two bodies, a moment.
The performance
In dialogue with the works on canvas, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker also presents a new solo: Amnesia. Inspired by Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Opus 111 (Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111), the performance extends as a single horizontal line across the full length of the Salle Pont. The space evokes the openness of the ocean, the horizon of Belle-le where the project began. The solo, by contrast, stands as a fragile, temporary inscription in time and space, caught in the tension between remembering and forgetting.
As the drawing is built up from distinct layers of time, Alain Franco develops a ‘musical dramaturgy’. In what he calls a ‘counterpoint of fields’, dance, music and image are placed alongside one another without being fused into a single whole.
Amnesia
LIVE PERFORMANCE
by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker in collaboration with Alain Franco
On Saturday 5 September at 18:30 and 20:00, Sunday 13 September, Sunday 4 October, Sunday 25 October and Sunday 1 November at 14:00, 15:30 and 17:00
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (b. 1960) studied dance at Mudra in Brussels and the Tisch School of the Arts in New York. In 1980 she made her first choreography, Asch. Two years later, Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich had its premire. In 1983, De Keersmaeker founded the dance company Rosas in Brussels, during the creation of the performance Rosas danst Rosas. Since then her choreographic work has been grounded in a meticulous exploration of the relationship between dance and music.
With Rosas she has created an extensive body of work drawing on musical structures and scores from across the ages, from early music to contemporary compositions and pop. Her choreographic practice also draws formal principles from geometry, mathematical schemas, nature and social structures, resulting in a unique perspective on the movement of the body in time and space.
Since her groundbreaking project Work/Travail/Arbeid in 2015, she has continued to explore the possibilities of dance within the white cube: from the opening of The Tanks at Tate Modern with Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, Work/Travail/Arbeid at WIELS, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern and MoMA, and Dark Red at Fondation Beyeler and the Neue Nationalgalerie, to Fort at the Louvre, and much more besides.
For over forty years Steven Fillet (b. 1966) has worked away from the institutional art circuit – a deliberate choice to protect his artistic autonomy. His oeuvre moves between figuration and abstraction, between the intimate and the monumental, without ever submitting to the disciplining logic of style or medium.
The material contingency of his work – a preference for humble, impermanent materials such as roofing felt – is not aesthetic arbitrariness but speaks to a nomadic logic, an open and mutable attitude towards form and meaning. Like nature, which in his work serves not as motif but as model, Steven Fillet anchors his practice in a consistent refusal of fixity.
Alain Franco (b. 1964) studied piano and music theory in Belgium and Israel and holds a post-master’s diploma in twentieth-century musicology from the Ircam–Ehess institute in Paris. His deep engagement with contemporary music and art, both as musician and conductor, has led to collaborations with leading ensembles and musicians including Ensemble Modern (Frankfurt), Ictus ensemble (Brussels), the Lige Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Opra de Lyon, the chamber music ensemble of La Monnaie (Brussels) and the Oh Ton ensemble (Oldenburg).
As an aesthetic and artistic extension of his practice, he gradually developed an authentic and comprehensive body of thought on representation and performance. This has led to artistic collaborations with performers, choreographers and theatre directors including Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Meg Stuart, Thomas Plischke, Kattrin Deufert, Jan Lauwers, Romeo Castellucci, Isabelle Schad, Benjamin Vandewalle, Arkadi Zaides, Daniel Linehan and Karim Bel Kacem.
