Guests: Lisa & Clara Spilliaert and Fairuz & El Moïz Ghammam

A program as a double ‘double bill’ with works by sister and brother Fairuz & El Moïz Ghammam, and sisters Lisa & Clara Spilliaert. Explorations from within the complex spaces that exist between different cultures and different generations.

In the presence of Fairuz Ghammam & El Moïz Ghammam, Clara Spilliaert & Lisa Spilliaert

In collaboration with Courtisane Festival

cultuur is a walk from the private to the public space (and back again) in a continuous movement. How many memories, storylines and sounds can coexist?

“Dear Grandma, you’ll be surprised to hear my voice in your language…” These are the first words in a recorded, spoken letter that was never sent, but was instead played aloud in real time by the Brussels filmmaker to her elderly grandmother in Mahdia, Tunisia. In the company of the camera, the lines easily turn into a voiceover that, as one listens and looks attentively, gradually transforms into a dialogue that spans languages, cultures and generations.

This video was a first collaboration between sisters Lisa and Clara Spilliaert and functions as a double transition. On the one hand a cultural reorientation from Japan to Belgium and on the other hand a transition from child to adolescent with reference to the emergence of sexual awareness. The emotional intensity of leaving a certain place or state is transcended by ritual gestures of singing, cutting and burning. In 2023, we celebrate the 10th anniversary of this work as a crucial point in the artistic path of both sisters.

In Spilliaert, filmmaker Lisa Spilliaert inquires into her blood relationship with the renowned Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert (1881-1946). Is she predestined to an artist’s life by this kinship, which may or may not be fictional? Is artistry genetically transferred? She reveals herself as a rapping, fanatical genealogist who probes into the origins of her artistic identity. Spilliaert visits archives and museums, painting a picture of the hopeless search for documents and clues concerning her origins. She eventually ends up in the middle of her genealogical fantasies, represented in a ceramic sculptural family tree designed and made by her sister Clara.