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The Curating Lab developed by Christine Eyene will take Pelt (Belgium) as point of departure, and its position as border municipality, neighbouring Germany and the Netherlands, to explore the notion of ‘man-made’ or ‘unnatural’ borders. It will propose to consider nature as a porous or permeable environment and a collective reconciliatory space.

While Belgium is a country which capital is home to a ‘borderless’ continent, freedom of movement remains a relative concept when approached from the perspective of migratory histories and displacement. The Curating Lab will envisage sonic memory as a form of anchorage to histories and places, like a score one carries within oneself, through life and migratory journeys. These sonic anchors are also imagined as repositories from which one draws comfort and healing in times of uncertainty and unrest.

The project will also examine how sonic experiences in new territories contribute to the formation of new identities and how, conversely, new identities transform the sonic landscapes, not just in terms of the aural, but also in ways that address forgotten or silenced voices, and in doing so, contribute to social change.

The Curating Lab will include a workshop led by Christine Eyene with local community groups in view of facilitating the emergence of new voices, diversity representation, and new forms of agencies in the field of arts and culture. The groups will be actively involved in the creation and curation of new commissions by Paris-based South African artist and DJ Mo Laudi, and Berlin-based Cameroonian artist Elsa M’bala, who will perform at OORtreders Festival on Friday 23.10.2020 from 8.30pm to 11.00pm.

Christine Eyene is an art historian, critic and curator. She is a Research Fellow in Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) where she collaborates to Making Histories Visible, an interdisciplinary visual arts research project led by artist and Professor of Contemporary Art Lubaina Himid. MHV aims to document, support, and share the histories of creative practices from the diversity in Britain and globally through collaborations with artists, art professionals, independent organisations and major public institutions.

Eyene’s areas of research and curatorial practice encompass contemporary African and Diaspora arts, feminism, photography, and non-object-based art practices notably sound art. She is also interested in socially-engaged initiatives, urban culture, music, design, and new media.

Her previous sound art projects include: Sounds Like Her – Gender, Sound Art and Sonic Cultures, New Art Exchange (Nottingham) and UK touring (2017-2020); Resonances: Second Movement, Espace Croix-Baragnon (Toulouse), as part of Printemps de Septembre 2016; Curator’s Series #8: All Of Us Have a Sense Of Rhythm, David Roberts Art Foundation (London), 2015. In Belgium, Christine Eyene curated RESIST! The 1960s protests, photography and visual legacy and Where We’re At: Other Voices on Gender as part of the SUMMER OF PHOTOGRAPHY 2018 and 2014 at BOZAR, Brussels. She is the current Artistic Director of the Biennale Internationale de Casablanca which 5th edition will take place in 2021.

See here for more information on OORtreders Festival’s programme.

Curating Lab is developed in the framework of Sounds Now, a Creative Europe project.