Ghost party
Artist Manon de Boer and choreographer Latifa Laâbissi meet in 2015 during a workshop around the influence of Oskar Schlemmer and the fluidity of working across media and different artistic languages. For both, pluridisciplinarity is essential to their work. They decide to deepen their collaboration in a deliberately dilated, stretched temporality, and in diversified work contexts like itinerant conversations, memories of reading and gardening, correspondence and collages.
Their dialogue steps out from result-driven processes, steady rhythms and prefigured calendars. Both de Boer and Laâbissi have consolidated trajectories and working methods and saw in their collaboration an occasion to challenge inertia and function differently. In this way, and over time, they are building a common corpus of images, a mental map that they activate and explore, questioning each other’s discipline and advancing into a priori unknown territory.
The project Qui parle? / Wie spreekt? puts the voice at the fore front. It questions the voice’s timbre, language and accent.
The project has 2 parts: one choreographic Ghost Party (1) and the other video Ghost Party (2).
THE ARTISTS
Manon de Boer (1966, India), lives and works in Brussels.
Manon de Boer completed her artistic education at the Akademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Rotterdam, and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Using personal narration and musical interpretation as both method and subject, de Boer explores the relationship between language, time, and truth claims to produce a series of portrait films in which the film medium itself is continuously interrogated.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, at the Venice Biennial (2007), Berlin Biennial (2008), São Paulo Biennial (2010), Documenta (2012), Taipei Biennial (2016) and has also been included in numerous film festivals in Hong Kong, Marseille, Rotterdam and Vienna. Her work has been the subject of monographic exhibitions at Witte de With in Rotterdam (2008), Frankfurter Kunstverein (2008), South London Gallery (2010), Contemporary Art Museum of St Louis (2011), Museum of Art Philadelphia (2012), Van Abbe Museum, NL (2013), Secession Vienna (2016) and Groundwork, GB (2018), among others.
Latifa Laâbissi (1964, France), lives and works in Rennes.
Latifa Laâbissi mixes genres and redefines formats to bring onstage a special kind of camera layering of figures and voices. The use of voice and the face as vehicles for certain states became irrevocably entwined with the danced act in Self-portrait camouflage (2006) and Loredreamsong (2010). Then, continuing her examination of the theme of archive, she created Écran somnambule and La part du rite(2012), based on German dance of the 20s. Pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse (2016) is cosigned with the set designer Nadia Lauro. Since 2011, Latifa Laâbissi has been the Artistic Director of Extension Sauvage, an artistic and pedagogical program located in rural areas of Brittany. In 2016, a monographic book about her whole work is published at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and Les presses du réel. In 2018, she creates with Antonia Baehr, Consul & Meshie, a simian performance in a visual installation by Nadia Lauro. They also gather, in 2019, for the video Moving Backwards by the duo Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, presented in the Swiss Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale. Latifa Laâbissi is an associate artist at the TNB since the 2021-2022 season. In 2021, the TNB Festival hosted the premiere of its latest creation: La nuit tombe quand elle veut, by Latifa Laâbissi & Marcelo Evelin.
Image : Ghost Party (detail), Manon de Boer & Latifa Laâbissi