Interfaces is a project focussing broadly on audience development. We are particularly interested in artistic projects that look at ways to connect to the city, experimental modes of producing knowledge, and discursive or educational formats. Residency proposals should demonstrate the applicants motivation and field of interest, as well a clear outline for the residency. There is no requirement for the presentation of finished work during the residency, but participants should be open to exchange with other artists and neighbourhood communities (e.g. workshops, talks, work-in-progress showings etc.)

Who should apply
Artists / practitioners / theorists / educators working in the fields of sound, music, site specific, or participatory strategies.

We offer:
1-2 months accommodation
a working studio (including sound, video, and lighting equipment)
technical support
750€ living expenses
travel allowance to and from Brussels (within Europe)
contacts and network within the city of Brussels
possibility of public presentation (performance / exhibition / talk etc) if desired
curatorial and dramaturgical support

Residency proposals should include:

Presentation of your practice (portfolio etc)
Project or research proposal 
Statement of intent relating to the thematic (no more than 1 A4 page)

Please send all applications to info@q-o2.be by October 31, 2017.

 

Selected residens:

• Alice Pamuk’s

Her proposal is to develop a sound installation in which short phrases of pop music are looped and broadcast in the space. For Pamuk, the proposal arises out of several years of research around pop music (for example a previous project of analysing interviews of American rappers and hip hop producers). Despite this fascination for pop music, Pamuk is not trained as a musician and sees herself as very much outside the tradition. She plans to use this lack of musical literacy as a tool to provoke contact with people from other musical backgrounds - both a trained music arranger and a pop singer from “The Voice Belgium”. The original phrases of pop music are filtered “through” the skills and interests of her and her collaborators into another kind of material and displaced from their original context.

* Alice Pamuk (FR/BE) is a visual artist living and working in Brussels. She typically works with sound, video, and text.

 

• Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsayis an Edinburgh-based media artist whose work mediates emotional encounters with musical, art historical, and Queer cultural material, encouraging deep listening and empathic viewing. The proposed project evolves from his recent work with museum audioguides: seeing the audioguide as a way to think through “the act of spectatorship”, and to choreograph relations between spectators, objects, and contexts. In Brussels, he is interested in developing this practice through work with private libraries and Queer archives, 

developing audio tours and choreographic scores that mediate encounters with private or non-institutional spaces.
*Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay (CA/UK) is a media artist, whose primary material is the voice; through audio-guides, scores, and performances.

 

•  BolwerK

Since 1998, BolwerK is a moniker of Antwerp based activist and performer Marthe Van Dessel; developed to explore software and hardware based thinking as strategies for activism. She creates interfaces, devices, & protocols to investigate questions around the commons and collective identities. For the Interfaces residency, she proposes CQ CQ - a continuation and implementation of PAN PAN PAN; a code used in maritime and aeronautic transport for spreading urgent messages. This will be developed into a performative interaction for ham-radio operators across the city who are all invited to tune in to a single frequency and contribute to the “urgent need to establish communication.”
* BolwerK (BE) is an Antwerp-based activist and performer; exploring software and hardware based thinking as strategies for activism. She creates interfaces, devices, & protocols to investigate questions around the commons and collective identities.Isabelle Stragliati’s research is taking place in our everyday urban sound environment. In Brussels, known to be an especially noise-polluted city, she wants to develop participative practices for deepening the consciousness about the sounding environment in the city, and developing ways to deal with it via meditation techniques. In part alone and in part with a group of people, she will explore the city via soundwalks and field recordings, in order to get familiar with the variety of sounds and subsequently develop a response – or rather, a non-response – in a contemplative way, and search means to implement it in the everyday life.

 

• Isabelle Stragliati

Isabelle Stragliati’s research is taking place in our everyday urban sound environment. In Brussels, known to be an especially noise-polluted city, she wants to develop participative practices for deepening the consciousness about the sounding environment in the city, and developing ways to deal with it via meditation techniques. In part alone and in part with a group of people, she will explore the city via soundwalks and field recordings, in order to get familiar with the variety of sounds and subsequently develop a response – or rather, a non-response – in a contemplative way, and search means to implement it in the everyday life.

*Isabelle Stragliati (FR) is a sound artist, field recordist, radio producer, musician and DJ living in Grenoble.

 

• Jonathan Frigeri

Jonathan Frigeri reveals inaudible messages, like “oracles“ that are hidden to the human ears, “probably telepathic messages, from other minds deep in thought” (John Cage). Equipped with a special recording device that capture electromagnetic waves through the air, he will explore public and private spaces in Brussels. Whenever he finds an interesting “message" he will install an object (translator and amplifier). The final outcome will be a cartography of possible oracles spread out over the city. A final presentation of this network of oracles will be broadcasted via Radio Campus.

*Jonathan Frigeri (IT/BE) is a musician, DJ, and curator of Radio Picnic (Radio Residency Program) and lives in Brussels.

 

• Justin Bennett 

Justin Bennett will during his residency explore and observe the city of Brussels, layering architecture, stories, history, languages, and maps. He will collaborate with individual inhabitants who are willing to guide him on their daily or favourite walks in different neighbourhoods of the city. This collection of urban paths will be then transformed into audio walks with open headphones which a public can experience, and a sound map. The aim is to mould the individual stories into more general observations about Brussels. The project will also be linked to the 'horn of Brussels', an instrument Bennett developed in an earlier stay, which is shaped on the metro tunnels of Brussels.
*Justin Bennett’s (UK/NL) work uses field recordings, drawings, performances, installations, photographs, videos and essays, focussing on urban development, technological progress and the relationship between architecture and sound, with an interest in the elasticity of the concept of ’space’.

 

• Klaas Hübner

'A pipe of different color' is Klaas Hübner’s proposal in which he wants to offer his service to the citizens of Brussels. He will use his handcraft skills for simple repair works of household items and furniture to prevent them from beeing disposed. The process of repair will be documented with pictures and sound for a final presentation where all the participants can meet and exchange.
*Sound sculptor, improviser and instrumentmaker Klaas Hübner (DE) has developed a body of work which honours sound as a live medium with which to craft, shape and play in realtime. His playful practice ranges from installation based works, to live improv, to theatre and sound design.

• Lucie Vítková

Lucie Vítková is a Czech composer and performer based in New York. For her time in Brussels, she proposes to develop a number of “sound portraits” of the city which manifest into a sound installation and accompanying performance.The installation aims to develop different kinds of ‘scores’ based on material found in specific parts of the city; objects are collected and assembled into a 3d score, sound recordings are analysed and re-transcribed into a graphic score for live musicians. In the installation, Vítková will present the scores and recordings of their interpretation as well as play some of the scores live on accordion, voice and synthesizer, during the opening.
*Lucie Vítková is a Czech composer, improviser and performer (accordion, voice, harmonica, hichiriki and tap dance).

 

• Melissa Logan

Melissa Logan will investigate on the medium of music distribution in an artistic way, as a work itself. The research is about how sound is moving around the world wide web as compressed data, and the different ways how sound waves can propagate: through air or water or as ultra sound in directional speakers. The outcome will be a collection of sound works, in order to reflect different environments for sound. She will give a final presentation of these works and a public talk.
*Melissa Logan’s approach is critical towards social structures, such as gender roles, national identity and ecology. She is an interdisciplinary artist, who is a part of the collective Chicks On Speed, a feminist music-and art ensemble, formed in Munich in 1997, around performance art, electronic dance music, collage graphics, textile design and fashion. Originally from New York, she now lives in Cologne.

 

• Paulo Dantas

Paulo Dantas’ project ‘Between Flanders and Wallonia, the effort to be modified by the field’, will be an attempt to let the artist’s own body be shaped by the experience of local languages. Learning the languages will be equated to a form of field recording. Paulo Dantas will immerse himself in the city and communicate only in local languages, he will avoid speaking English. His experiment is: how can one make such an endeavour, namely to rewire the brain through being a foreigner, a true commitment through life? The Brussels experiment will be documented with phonography, photography and chronicling, from a subjective position throughout.
*Paulo Dantas is a Brasilian teacher, performer, sound technician, composer / sound artist and improviser.

 

• Wederik De Backer

Wederik De Backer’s proposal ‘Enlightenment for Children’ is inspired by a series of texts (1912/32) by Walter Benjamin which explains philosophy to young people. Together with children and youngsters of Q-O2’s direct neighbourhood Wederik will ask the question: what do young people in Molenbeek see as imminent dangers of today, and how can they prepare themselves to counter this. Through discussing, listening and recording, these topics will be explored. The outcomes will be presented by the youngsters themselves, right on the spots of exploration.
*Wederik De Backer is a Belgian radio maker, specialising in radio fiction and radio documentary, and everything that lies in between.

 

• Shelley Hirsch

Shelley Hirsch n.t.b.