Bas van den Hurk and Jochem van Laarhoven

During their residency, Dutch artists Bas van den Hurk (°1965) and Jochem van Laarhoven (°1988) produced a film that involved the theatre director Suze Milius, among other cast members and features textile props produced by the artists at the Frans Masereel Centrum.

Since 2018 they have been researching the relationship between visual art and theatre. From this research, they bring together different media in installations and performances. In this multiplicity lies the urgency to revisit an important modernist question: how do we live together and how do we embody this? Bas van den Hurk and Jochem van Laarhoven are part of It is part of an ensemble, a non-permanent group of about thirty artists, theatre-makers, actors, performers, theoreticians and students who do residencies together and make exhibitions, performances and publications. Collectively, they research the relation between the social process of working and living together and the formal autonomous qualities of the outcomes.

Bas van den Hurk and Jochem van Laarhoven shot the film last year during their residency at Juliaan Lampens’ Woning Van Wassenhove with several members of It is part of an ensemble – a larger collective they initiated. The film employs the theatrical technique of ‘Viewpoints’, through which the characters relate their ‘being’, movements, emotions and bodies to the architectural space. Different kinds of printed textiles are used by the performers as a prop and a costume.