Friday, August 30, 2024
6:00 PM
Flax, baby! Flax! [Interludes]
Performance by LIZA PRINS & MARIE ILSE BOURLANGES
With Flax, baby! Flax! [Interludes] Liza Prins and Marie Ilse Bourlanges present outcomes of their artistic research project Songs of Flax. Over a period of three years, they have been delving into the material and historical realities of processing flax, a plant cultivated for its fibers known as linen, with a specific focus on historical work songs and the creation of a contemporary repertoire.
Articulated around the labour-intensive process of working flax into linen, Flax, baby! Flax! [interludes] becomes a performance, in which dancers and singers use sculptural ‘flax-tools-turned-into-instruments,’ and sing of bygone and contemporary work struggles, desires and natural resources, capitalist industrialisation and protest, political agency and love while aiming for cross-historical solidarity. The songs of Flax, baby! Flax! [Interludes] were developed together with sound artist Bergur Anderson and the lyrics were partly harvested from a series of workshops, hosted at A Tale of A Tub between January and April, 2024. The work will be performed with Joana Guiné, Logan Hon Mua, Robin Becker, Romy Day Winkel, Giulia Damiani, Bitna Youn, Miriam van Rijsingen, Pilar Mata Dupont and Berenike Melchior.
Throughout the week and between performances, A Tale of A Tub will be open as usual as Flax, baby! Flax! [Interludes] also presents Field Recordings, a series of mixtapes synthesising archival sound-based research and a video work as a record of Prins and Bourlanges maintaining their flax plot at the edge of Flevopark in Amsterdam over the years.
The workshop series of Songs of Flax was supported and organised by our education curator Lisanne Janssen.
Flax, baby! Flax! [Interludes] at Zone2Source
A third performance of Flax, baby! Flax! [Interludes] will take place in Amsterdam at Glazen Huis, Amstelpark, on September 22 at 2pm, organised by Zone2Source. More information here.
Accessibility
The performance will be mostly in English. Please refer to our ABOUT section for more information regarding the accessibility of our facilities.
Biographies
MARIE ILSE BOURLANGES (1983, Paris) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Amsterdam, whose practice combines tangible, performative and written matter. With particular attention to transience and materiality, Bourlanges explores the borders between the personal and the public, and how intimacy can resonate collectively. Through an eco-feminist lens, her work aims at reconsidering and shifting power dynamics [between humans and across species] and explores the ambivalence of care.
LIZA PRINS (1992, Delft) is an artist, researcher and writer based in Amsterdam. Her work focuses on feminized and pre-industrial labor, as well as the material conditions and tools for social organization that emerge from it. Using collaborative performative methods touching on re-enactment techniques and improvisation, she seeks to re-establish a connection with material histories and social imaginations.
Support
This project is kindly supported by the Mondriaan Fonds and co-funded by the European Union
Part of the exhibition