Sven Augustijnen (B)

Mission Mont des Arts, 2002
video | 00:53:00 | color | sound original version: French | available languages: English, Dutch

Twee toeristen uit Doornik zijn op zoek naar de ingang van het Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Brussel, maar kunnen die niet vinden. Een man en een vrouw, die zeggen dat zij van de zogeheten Koning Boudewijn Stichting zijn, bieden hulp. Volgt een schier eindeloze zoektocht langs alle hoeken en gaten van de Brusselse Kunstberg, via doodlopende stegen, onduidelijke deuren en poortjes, gesprekken met daklozen, veiligheidsbeambten en de museumdirecteur. Alles met een ongekende kalmte, op het absurde af. Augustijnen lijkt de kijker in zijn film mee te voeren in een parallel universum waarin het onderscheid tussen schijn en werkelijkheid vervaagt.

Catalogustekst:
‘However unambiguous reality might be or seem at first sight, in the work of Sven Augustijnen it is always unravelled as a complex and troubled subject. His video work explores the boundaries between report, research documentary and docu-soap. Appearance and reality go hand in hand, balancing on a fine line between revealing and concealing.’ (Paul Willemsen)

We’re in Brussels. A tidy man and a well groomed woman both dressed in neatly stitched duvet-like jackets Italians wear, one dark blue one red, clipboards in hand, run into two tourists from Tournai in the Place Royal. Not being able to find the proper entrance to a museum, our guides quickly offer the tourists their help in finding what they’re looking for. We learn they are from the Fondation Roi Baudouin as they introduce themselves, and as commissioners, on route to re-discover and re-evaluate the ins and outs of Brussels’ Mont des Arts (de Kunstberg), and are only too happy to share their knowledge and national interests. Through a labyrinth of closed-off alleys, dead end streets, blocked-in, abandoned corridors, partially indoors, partly outdoors we follow first the four and then later just the two royalists on an odd, very slow mission to, we grasp along the way, ascertain the usage of urban space. Their encounters with a group of skaters, their talks with the homeless, with the director of the Palace of Fine Arts, various doormen and other security officials, all occur in such a calm, almost languid manner that it is impossible to pinpoint any expected misgivings, prejudices or a characteristically conventional, even reactionary slant. In fact the whole unfolds enigmatically, with a naïve openness, and not without a hint of the absurd, but an absurd well grounded in tidy duvet jackets. Mission Mont des Arts (2002) is a 53 minute film by Sven Augustijnen, a Belgian artist and filmmaker who often in his work hovers between the specific and the general, the fabricated and the real or the seemingly unreal in the real. His films, although they afford clues here and there, never become a game in the discovery of what is fact and what is not. Instead the viewer is taken by the hand and lead through a world just parallel. Whether invented or sincere. A specific situation is the starting point. The viewer becomes privy to a particular mise-en-scene, is immersed in it, and from then on occupies a ‘space between voyeurism and complicity’ . In Mission Mont des Arts it is, for example, not necessary to know that our Fondation Roi Baudouin guides are playing a role, instructed beforehand by Augustijnen as to their route and their specific dialogue. In science there are two methods of research, deductive and inductive. The first involves the discovery of the particular from the general and the latter the general from the particular. Re-using the structures of our social, urban landscape, re-using ‘fact’, in order to explore an alternative reading constitutes, though slight, nevertheless, a defiance. Where CNN maintains the status quo, artists can question it, defy it. Question it and show their subjective misgivings in such a way that instead of terming their ‘research’ avant-garde, we should see it plainly as populist - and ‘populist’ in the best sense of the word possible. Augustijnen zooms in on the ‘popular particular’ affording the viewer a look at the ‘human general’. His works are not so much about the unmasking as they are the telling, for the ‘I’ of the maker, the ‘I’ of the author, like the ‘I’ of the embedded journalist writes himself into the research, becoming a biased witness in the story. As if to say ‘the camera cannot be pointed at all directions at once’ nor should it .

Maxine Kopsa

Une Femme Entreprenante, 2004
video | 01:12:00 | col. | sound orig. version: French | avail. languages: English

Ook in de andere film van Augustijnen wordt gespeeld met de grenzen tussen schijn en werkelijkheid. Une Femme Entrepenante houdt het midden tussen een reportage, een onderzoeksdocumentaire en een docu-soap. Het verhaal van een kordate dame, Sophie Le Clercq, die van een voormalige brouwerij een centrum voor hedendaagse kunst wil maken, vormt de rode draad. Daar doorheen worden andere draden geweven, zoals die over het verval van de brouwerijsector, over de Brusselse bouwwereld en politiek, en over de Belgische kunstwereld.

Catalogustekst:
Having turned upside down the site of the Kunstberg in Brussels in Mission Mont des Arts (2002) Augustijnen turns to the project Wiels! with Une Femme Entreprenante, about a new centre for contemporary art now in scaffolding in Forest. The figure of Sophie Le Clercq, building promoter and ‘la force motrice’ behind this cultural project on the site of the former brewery of Wielemans-Ceuppens is at the centre. On the one hand this video might be considered a hommage to the forceful woman who is in charge of the building promoter Blaton; on the other the author uses Le Clercq, who appears on screen only rarely, as a catalyst for all kinds of historical and genealogical trajectories on urban development in Brussels. As if by coincidence these trajectories get more and more entangled in the jumble of art, brokerage and politics, ‘le marais de Bruxelles’.

A fierce ‘journalist’, a highly enacted contraction of ignorance, enthusiasm and astonishment, takes the audience in tow for a further acquaintance with the protagonists behind the Wiels-project. In a saga full of unexpected complications a number of other actants from the political-economical and cultural world in Brussels casually pass in review.

Augustijnen switches between the age-old dream of setting up a contemporary art centre in Brussels and subtexts like the genealogy and the achievements of the Blaton dynasty or the downfall of the brewery sector in Brussels. In this documentary, shaped like a ‘report’ without actually being one, he manages to tie in widely divergent realities with great ingenuity. This results in a play between communicating vessels, the various levels of real estate, heritage and art intersecting with each other in predictable as well as surprising ways.

Une Femme Entreprenante puts the spectator at the centre of an all encompassing mosaic of perspectives. Augustijnen undermines conventional documentary codes or subtly erodes them. Between fact and fiction, truthful social representation and voyeuristic entertainment various cross relations take place. Stylistically, for instance, the way games are played with the relations between cameraman, interviewer, interviewee and producer creates situations way past the predictable or immediately legible codes of the audiovisual practice and the immediate legibility by the audience. In short one might say the audience is taken to a middle area where he would never come in other circumstances.

Paul Willemsen

Sven Augustijnen was born in 1970 in Mechelen, Belgium / Lives and works in Brussels
Selected solo exhibitions: 2001, Escale, Düsseldorf; 2001, Galerie Jan Mot, Brussels
Selected group exhibitions: 2005, Bevreemdende Verkenningen, Sint-Lukas Galerij, Brussels; 2005, Brussels’ Topologies, Argos, Brussels; 2003, Wiels!, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels)