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Oscillation ::: from the Mothership focuses on the technologies, tools, and techniques that are an important part of the apparatus of music-making. The festival departs from the observation that cultures are shaped by the way technologies are used, rather than by the intention behind their design. But while technologies might be invented with a certain goal for use in mind and against a backdrop of specific socio-political situations, this junction can be severed and new constellations and findings can emerge. Historically, new technologies have in this way often opened up spaces for marginalised or excluded artists to realise their music without constraints such as manuals or a canon.

On the opening night of the festival, Pom Bouvier b. and Marjolijn Dijkman will perform ‘Electrify Everything’. The performance translates the seductive and captivating magic of demonstrations of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment into a critical exploration of the origins of the units and language used to measure electricity.

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Between the Lines/Natura Rebellis is an installation by artist Marjolijn Dijkman and composer Henry Vega. In dialogue with a poetic film essay, a robot orchestra drums on dead tree trunks from a protected forest near Verdun. This multimedia artwork shows how a landscape struggles with the aftermath of human conflict, against a backdrop of drought and climate change. Henry Vega provided the music for the robot orchestra and also wrote the occasionally intervening tandem work Natura Rebellis for three singers.

Klarafestival is the largest broadcast festival for classical music in Belgium. Every year in March, captivating (inter)national soloists and ensembles bring classical, jazz, and contemporary creations to life at various cultural venues in Brussels, including Bozar and Flagey.”

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The live performance Electrify Everything, Marjolijn Dijkman and Pom Bouvier b. translates the seductive and captivating magic of demonstrations of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment into a critical exploration of the origins of the units and language used to measure electricity. The field of electricity has been developed, manipulated, and named for three centuries to control and apply it.

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Organised by LUCA’s Arts & Society expertise network, ENACT Festival presents innovative forms of transmission of research methodologies – from LUNÄ Talks, costumed round-table enactments, reworkings of oral traditions of song and storytelling, to radio essay as a research and expository medium.

The ‘LUNÄ Talk: Turbid Ecologies’ on November 5th, on a full moon, will explore how Enlightenment thought, the Industrial Revolution, and colonization have shaped and influenced water bodies, tracing their material and immaterial residues in sediment and flow. The discussion will critically address current practices of water “management” and the paradigm shifts needed to restore both aquatic ecosystems and our relations with the more-than-human world.

Contributors: Merve Bedir, Marjolijn Dijkman, Ifor Duncan, Shivant Jhagroe, Annelies Kuypers
Hosts: Marjolijn Dijkman and Maarten Vanden Eynde (Update: tickets sold out)

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From sunrise to sunset, artists will move in and between Mu.ZEE and KAAP in Ostend. Several performances will start, some ongoing.

Some are visible and loud, others barely perceptible.

The actions follow the rhythm of the sun, the tides, and the clock.

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First public presentation of the new film and robotic sound installation Between the Lines.

Première of the performance Natura Rebellis at O. (Festival for Opera. Music. Theatre.) and V2_ Lab for Unstable Media with new composition of composer Henry Vega.

‘Between the Lines’ (2024)
The film and sound installation ‘Between the Lines’ focuses on the effects of climate change in the forests of the Zone Rouge in the North East of France. It relates to the ongoing struggle to deal with the aftermath and remnants of WWI within the global climate crisis, which impacted this particular landscape on a monumental scale. An essay film and an orchestra of robotic drummers using trunks from the forest in Verdun as instruments will engage with these issues stimulatingly.

‘Natura Rebellis’ (2024)
The performance ‘Natura Rebellis’ builds on the installation ‘Between the Lines’ with artificial drummers who beat the dead tree trunks from the Verdun forest. This forest holds a special place for us as an example of a poisoned forest brought on by human conflicts while witnessing nature’s attempts to reclaim it in its own way. The performance highlights our conflicting nature while revealing our capabilities to live in harmony.

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This event is part of the exhibition Power Up, Technical Imaginaries, and Social Utopias, which refers to energy infrastructures from a feminist perspective.

‘Why Installing Women and Solar Panels is Not Enough’, lecture by Cara New Daggett.

‘Electrify Everything’ performance by Marjolijn Dijkman and Pom Bouvier-b
Electrify Everything is a critical exploration of the origins of the units and language used to measure electricity. The performance draws on the magic of the first demonstrations of electrical phenomena in the 18th century.

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On the evening of 25 March, when the moon is full, this LUNÄ Talk will focus on the transition from one energy to another, from one infrastructure to another. How can we envisage transitions without considering the need to bring history to a close before embarking on new projects? The history of energy is written as a race towards the new, towards renewal, without ever questioning the possibility of moving towards solutions of repair or transformation. It’s about turning pages and arguing that the future will be more efficient, appropriate, or cleaner.

Contributors: Fanny Lopez, Clémence André, Marie Lechner, Stéphanie Schmitt, and a written contribution by Cara New Daggett.
Hosted by: Marjolijn Dijkman & Maarten Vanden Eynde

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The première of the new iteration of ‘Electrify Everything’ with live sound composition by Pom Bouvier b., live film projection by Marjolijn Dijkman, and a recorded text by Jean Katambayi spoken by François Makanga

The 4th edition of the NOVA_XX Biennale will feature the work of 41 artists. Among the works presented in the anarkhè-exposition, several focus on cosmogonies in the liquid age, on the imaginary of space conquest, measuring instruments and nano worlds, and others on bio-art that allows us to measure the space of the duration of their display of non-human performativities, and still others on issues of geoengineering and artificial intelligence.

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The evening will be dedicated to what has been described as “green colonialism,” the development of renewable energy futures that often involves the dispossession of communities and the degradation of ecosystems. The event will focus on the consequences of the extraction of lithium, a scarce resource that plays a key role in the so-called green transition necessary for a more sustainable world. With: Marina Otera Verzier, Sammy Baloji and On-Trade-Off (Femke Herregraven, Alexis Destoop).

The evening will be followed by a conversation, moderated by Nikolaus Hirsch and Silvia Franceschini, and Electrify Everything, a performance by Pom Bouvier-b and Marjolijn Dijkman (with a text by Jean Katambayi Mukendi).

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With Pom Bouvier b., Marjolijn Dijkman and Jean Katambayi Mukendi.
‘Electrify Everything’ invites the audience to reflect on the structuring power of electricity and its relation to resources and exploitation. Pom Bouvier-b. and Marjolijn Dijkman will create a sound composition using the electric charge of specific objects and devices as a medium, playing on the variations of magnetic fields. Jean Katambayi Mukendi wrote a text for the performance based on the language of electricity. The units of electricity create different chapters that explore the history and the current state of energy production in an associative and poetic interpretation of electric terminology.

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The first LUNÄ talk in the US with a brand new copy of the table around which the Lunar Society met on full moon between 1765 and 1813 in Birmingham, UK. LUNÄ will be inaugurated on the last day of the exhibition Ars Memoriae surrounded by the artworks. Drawing inspiration from the themes of Ars Memoriae, the topic will be memory devices – past and future, bodily and external, real and imagined. The featured speakers are André Fenton, a neuroscientist at NYU; Elaine Sullivan, a curatorial fellow at The Met; Congolese artist Musasa; Jennifer Tucker, a historian at Wesleyan University.

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Live performance by Henry Vega and Jan Willem Troost with ‘Reclaiming Vision’ (Marjolijn Dijkman & Toril Johannessen 2018) at 30 October 2021 (20:30). This film reveals various processes in the water that are hidden to the naked human eye, and is a reflection upon the relationship we humans have with our surroundings, especially through what we cannot see.

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Auscultation is a public and experimental launch of the “Between the Lines” project in collaboration with Vent des Forêts at Festival Les Nuits des Forêts. Day with two gatherings with: Office National de Forets, CA et forêt privée, COFOR and artist Marjolijn Dijkman.

During the experimental session Auscultation, we can hear how long sound frequencies resonate in the trees and whether or not they are interrupted. The duration of resonance is influenced by the amount of water in the trees, the density of the wood, and whether the trees are alive or dead.

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In this Amsterdam edition – also moonlit – experts with different scholarly backgrounds will focus on the ecological, social and economic consequences of the extraction and processing of lithium and cobalt. They will look both at the history of electricity and the current use of raw materials from the DRC for electronics and energy storage.

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The Screen City Biennial 2019 aims to present, facilitate and examine art and artistic inquiry questioning the effect of human action on implicated ecologies.

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The LUNÄ Talk: Triangular Trade – Cotton will concentrate on the influence of cotton production and trade in relation to the abolition of slavery and colonisation / decolonisation, both historically and as an ongoing influence on contemporary global economy. With: Helen Elands (Art Historian), Wouter Elsen (Film- and Photo Journalist), Dr. Patricia Fara (Historian of Science), Remy Jungerman (Artist), Karin Lurvink (Researcher on Dutch Republic transatlantic slave-based activities), Prof. Dr. Eric Vanhaute (Prof. Economic and Social History and World History), Maarten Vanden Eynde (Artist) and Marjolijn Dijkman (Artist).

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Invited contributors: Prof. Sven Beckert (author of ‘Empire of Cotton, A Global History’ / Harvard University, US ), Prof. Peter Pels (anthropologist, Leiden University, NL), Christine Chivallon (anthropologist and directrice de recherche au CNRS, FR), Helen Elands (art historian, independent researcher, UK), Alioum Moussa (artist, CM), Marjolijn Dijkman and Maarten Vanden Eynde (artist and co-hosts, BE).

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The second LUNÄ Talk in Drenthe this year, organised with Land Art Contemporary, takes place at ASTRON. On the table lies the question of how science, philosophy and religion relate to each other, focusing on topics such as ‘deep evolution’, the (re)writing of history and speculative future developments in astronomy, anthropology, philosophy and religion. Among the guests: Professor Astronomy Michael Garrett, Professor Anthropology Peter Pels, artist Daniela de Paulis, philosopher of religion and theologian Taede A. Smedes. Hosted by artist Marjolijn Dijkman.

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This first of a series of LUNÄ Talks in Drenthe discusses the question of how science and fiction relate to each other, focusing on topics such as deep time / space in the disciplines of geology, archaeology and astronomy and the imagination of these fields in the arts. Among the guests include curator of Zone2Source Alice Smits, astronomer Roy Smits from ASTRON / Camras, curator archaeology Jaap Beuker from the Drents Museum, artist Maarten Vanden Eynde, physical geographer Enno Bregman (Province Drenthe & Utrecht University) and artist Marjolijn Dijkman.

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This LUNÄ Talk explores how science and fiction relate to each other, focusing on topics as immortality, robotics, extraterrestrial life. On this special full moon evening after the Super Blood Moon Eclipse, all guests will be seated around LUNÄ, an installation of Marjolijn Dijkman with a fascimile of the oval table which was used by the Lunar Society in Birmingham in the 18th century. With: Anke Bangma, Dirk van Delft, Marjolijn Dijkman, George van Hal, Jaap van de Herik, Maarten Lamers, Peter Pels and Dorien Zandbergen.

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This series of LUNÄ Talks will specifically focus on the notion of the future investigating modes in which the idea of future is seeded in our society today. With: Ramon Amaro, Rebecca Bligh, Stephen Boyd Davis, Owen Cotton-Barrat, Caroline Edwards, Mark Fisher, Jay Griffiths, Cathy Haynes, Ken Hollings, Magda Osman, Emily Penn, Mary Margaret Rinebold, Philip Sheldrake, Murray Shanahan, Maarten Speekenbrink, Jamie Ward and many others. (Developed by Marjolijn Dijkman in collaboration with fig-2)

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