Jen Debauche x Gaëlle Rouard x Fred Frith - L’Ancre (2024)
’25
Lange Steenstraat 14
B-9000 Gent
L’Ancre © Jen Debauche
Lange Steenstraat 14
B-9000 Gent
We welcome Jen Debauche to present her new film, L’Ancre. Composer Fred Frith and filmmaker Gaëlle Rouard, who both collaborated on the film, will each perform own work as well.
Gaëlle Rouard will bring a live 16mm performance of her new film, Beira Douro. Especially for the occasion, legendary guitarist, improviser and composer Fred Frith will accompany her with a live soundtrack for this originally silent work.
Fred Frith (1949) is one of the leading figures of experimental and new music. Since the early 1970s, he has played in many groups and numerous projects, such as Henry Cow, Art Bears, Massacre, Skeleton Crew, the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet and the FF Trio. He will close the evening with a short solo concert.
Jen Debauche lives and works in Brussels. She is a film and radio director, researcher, teacher and founding member of LABO BxL. In 2016, we showed her film L’œil du cyclope. Debauche’s work also takes the form of installations, performances and radio creations that travel to many international venues and festivals. L’Ancre (The Anchor) received the Jury Award and New Talent Award in the international competition of the Doclisboa film festival.
Jen Debauche
L’Ancre
L’Ancre plunges into the abyss of the human mind through a cinematic odyssey, combining archive testimonies and a polar expedition. The fruit of several years’ artistic research, the project fuses theory, practice and personal accounts to reveal an introspective vision of psychosis. In the icy embrace of the immense Arctic landscapes, intimate accounts of mental torment are transformed into climatic metaphors, calling attention to the fragility of our psychological and ecological equilibrium.
L’Ancre © Jen Debauche
Gaëlle Rouard
Beira Douro
Live Soundtrack: Fred Frith
In the air that shines and in the wind that passes, a river thicker than a grassy prairie,
A trembling river like a flame.
The Douro, full of shadow and fires, of silence and rales, loses its waters in the vast bosom of the seas.
Where are they, the waves embraced by light, drowned in black waters?
And what soul should one wear without stars?
This work was created last summer during a residency with the Laia co-op at Laboratório da Torre in Porto, Portugal, as part of the SPECTRAL project.
Beira Douro © Gaëlle Rouard
L’Ancre © Jen Debauche
Fred Frith © Peter Gannushkin, 2023