AAIR

Ploegstraat 27
B—2018 Antwerp

INFO

  • AAIR (Antwerp Artists in Residence) grants time, space and mobility to artists. AAIR operates both as an artist residency and a provider of studios, with the aim of fostering a dynamic and sustainable context for artistic work, at the intersection of local development and international ex­change.

    As a studio provider, we rent out workspaces in a growing number of buildings around the city. We currently provide studios to over 200 local artists and creatives across 15 locations. Our team ensures that they are affordably priced and well-maintained. We also actively engage in debates on studio policies and organize yearly open studio days.

    As an artist residency, we run a development program for local artists and set up international residency exchanges with partners around the world. Each resident is provided with financial, practical and curatorial support to develop their practice or project in an open environment that encourages critical dialogue and artistic experimentation.

    Located behind the Antwerp Zoo and Central station, the residency building is at once a workplace and a meeting place, and also occasionally hosts presentations. The former monastery adjacent to it houses the residency studios and garden, which we share with our partner Kunsthal Extra City.

    Ploegstraat 27
    2018 Antwerp
    info@aair.be

    Studio Start vzw:

    General director:
    Greet Vlegels
    e: greet@aair.be
    t: +32 (0)494 54 87 03

    Space and graphic design:
    Steven Holsbeeks
    e: steven@aair.be
    t: +32 (0)486 68 92 70

    Finance:
    Youssef Tarrahi
    e: boekhouding@aair.be
    t: +32 (0)3 430 80 20

    Building manager:
    Philippe Verdonckt
    e: philippe@aair.be
    t: +32 (0)474 56 48 77

    Board of administrators:
    Bruno spaas, Seppe Jespers and Barbara Wijckmans

     

    AIR Antwerpen vzw:

    Residency coordinator:
    Marie Vandenbosch
    e: marie@aair.be
    t: +32 (0)496 255 101

    Board of administrators:
    Olivier Onghena and Philip Huyghe

     

    Artistic advisory board AAIR:
    Grégory Castéra (co-Director, Council, Paris), Marnie Slater (artist, Brussels), Michiel Vandevelde (Programmer, deSingel, Antwerp), Guy Woueté (artist, Douala/Antwerp), and Joanna Zielińska (Senior Curator, M HKA, Antwerp).

    Graphic design:
    Indianen

    Website:
    atelier Haegeman Temmerman

     

    interested in:

    Program

    2020 — 2021
    RAAT
    2021 — 2022
    AAIR Development Residency: Cycles I-III
    2019 — 2021
    Everyday Forms of Resistance
    13.08 — 14.08.21
    12:00 18:00
    Irina Jasnowski Pascual — Arresti Domiciliari
    25.06 — 28.06.21
    20:00 18:00
    RAAT: Kaori Ishiguro & Anton Lambert — Invisible Threads
    15.05 — 16.05.21
    14:00 18:00
    Rrubeli
    13.05 — 23.05.21
    12:00 18:00
    Hatice Pinarbasi — Witch, Wish, wAllahi, Which? & Zinaïda Tchelidze — Ons dagelyksch brood
    12.05 — 12.05.21
    13:00 15:00
    Ruimte voor kunstenaars in de stad | UFO Symposium
    03.05 — 23.05.21
    00:00 00:00
    RAAT: Anthony van Gog – LYPEMANIA RAAT
    02.04 — 23.04.21
    00:00 00:00
    RAAT: Nicoleta Moise — Memory of the World
    14.03 — 04.04.21
    What Stories Want — from a programme?
    12.03 — 04.04.21
    12:00 18:00
    What Stories Want
    06.02 — 21.02.21
    14:00 18:00
    RAAT: Dummies Dummies RAAT
    31.01 — 31.01.21
    14:00 18:00
    Peer Production – STRT Kit 2019 publication launch STRTKIT
    22.01 — 31.01.21
    14:00 18:00
    Wim Catrysse — Showing Presence
    16.01 — 02.02.21
    14:00 15:30
    City Sessions SESSIONS
    09.01 — 24.01.21
    15:00 19:00
    RAAT: Who is the Other?
    13.11 — 13.12.20
    Traveling Words
    13.11 — 18.12.20
    14:00 15:30
    Cinema Sessions SESSIONS
    30.10 — 22.11.20
    05:00 00:00
    RAAT: Bram van Bree — Flags for the Future
    28.10 — 28.10.20
    13:00 17:00
    Anna Godzina – Thunderbolt STRTSHOT
    23.10 — 28.10.20
    14:00 18:00
    Zoë Field — Trust Issues & Katinka de Jonge — Collection of Doubts
    12.10 — 18.10.20
    13:00 18:30
    RAAT: Domoor – De Onderste Boven
    03.09 — 20.09.20
    15:00 19:00
    RAAT: S.W.E.E.P.S.
    11.07 — 25.07.20
    11:00 18:00
    RAAT: And the Sap Will Flow Upwards
    19.06 — 28.06.20
    14:00 18:00
    Prospectuses
    08.05 — 08.06.20
    Traveling Images
    30.04 — 31.07.20
    Four Flags
    15.01 — 16.01.20
    18:00 00:00
    Introducing: RAAT 2020
    01.01 — 31.12.20
    STRT Kit 2020 YEARLY PROGRAM
    2021 — 2022
    AAIR Development Residency: Cycles I-III
    21.12 — 05.01.20
    14:00 19:00
    Pierre Coric: We could not see it, yet, it was here
    06.12 — 07.12.19
    STRT Kit 2018: publication launch
    29.11 — 01.12.19
    17:00 21:00
    These inventions came too late
    22.11 — 24.11.19
    Baptiste Audousset and Karina Beumer: presentation
    29.10 — 29.10.19
    13:00 20:00
    Info session cultuurloket
    24.10 — 24.10.19
    13:00 20:00
    Info session cultuurloket
    19.10 — 20.10.19
    14:00 18:00
    Nicoleta Moise: S+S=BFF, exhibition
    17.10.19
    18:00
    Nicoleta Moise: S+S=BFF, League of Gorj Women
    02.10 — 02.10.19
    14:00 17:00
    Release – by Alice Pamuk
    30.09.19
    13:00 20:00
    Info session cultuurloket
    13.09 — 06.10.19
    STRT KIT #5 Objects vs. Things
    11.09.19
    17:45 19:30
    Screening and talk about the artistic research on the pré-Columbian art collection at MAS by Monica Restrepo
    04.08.19
    16:00 17:30
    A conversation between Lina Laraki and Pieter Van Bogaert
    13.07.19
    20:00 23:59
    Event – david, the cop
    16.05 — 10.06.19
    Null Island
    03.04.19
    19:30
    Hinterland Hub
    20.03.19
    19:00 22:00
    Publieke Bijeenkomst met Matěj Pavlík
    13.03.19
    19:00 22:00
    Pantea Shayesteh & Sebastiaan Willemen (Chepas Collective)
    08.03 — 12.03.19
    18:00 22:00
    Where are you from?
    07.01.19
    20:00
    film screening Saddie Choua & Stijn Van Dorpe
    01.01 — 31.12.19
    STRT Kit 2019 YEARLY PROGRAM
    01.01 — 31.12.19
    Excavating Contemporary Archaeology YEARLY PROGRAM
    06.12.18
    16:00
    The Living Room: Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa
    06.12.18
    18:00
    LODGERS#16: finnisage
    28.11.18
    18:00
    The Living Room: Pepa Ivanova & Elvia Teotski
    01.09 — 02.09.18
    Open Studio’s 2018

    Residents

    Sort by name
    Sort by date

    Jumana Emil Abboud

    Anne Kluytenaar & Michelle Woods

    Paz Ortúzar

    Theresa Büchner

    Hatice Pinarbasi

    Zinaïda Tchelidze

    Ilan Manouach

    Irina Jasnowski Pascual

    Pierre-Antoine Vettorello

    Daniel Cabral

    Joud Toamah

    Béla Juttner

    Tom Hallet

    Bram Van Breda

    Julia Dahee Hong

    Che Go Eun

    Laurens Otto

    Anna Godzina

    Anna Housiada

    Cléo Totti

    Guy Woueté

    Aurélie Bayad

    Jakub Hošek

    Zoë Field

    Valentin Cernat

    Pierre Coric

    Maxim Ryckaerts

    Lola Daels

    Eva Van Tongeren

    Arthur Cordier

    Baptiste Audousset

    Karina Beumer

    Katinka de Jonge

    Nicoleta Moise

    GLUKLYA

    Alice Pamuk

    Mónica Restrepo

    Stefan Cantante

    Alexis Gautier

    Wim Catrysse

    Lina Laraki

    Amalie Smith

    Matěj Pavlík

    Marnie Slater

    Cristina Lucas

    Pantea Shayesteh

    Sebastiaan Willemen (Chepas Collective)

    Pepa Ivanova

    Elvia Teotski

    Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

    Ans Mertens

    Chloë Delanghe

    Céline Mathieu

    Puck Vonk

    Aura Rico

    LODGERS#16: Heterotropics

    Marc Buchy

    Pieter Geenen

    Maurice Doherty

    Gary Farrelly

    Merle Vorwald

    Tea Palmelund

    Lodgers#15: baumusik

    Bruno Zhu

    Romana Drdová

    Sidney Aelbrecht

    LODGERS#14: ARIA

    Koyuki Kazahaya

    Ksenija Jovišević

    Hemant Sareen

    LODGERS#13: Oushoorn & Milius

    Phumulani Ntuli

    Amir Farsijani

    Saddie Choua

    Line Boogaerts

    Tom Castinel

    Jeroen Bocken

    Polien Boons

    Amber Vanluffelen

    Karen Moser

    Mathieu Verhaeghe

    Kitty Kamp

    Ciel Grommen

    Luisa Ungar

    Lifepatch

    LODGERS#11: Drop City

    Koba De Meutter

    Paky Vlassopoulou

    Arnaud Eubelen

    Eva L’Hoest

    Rowan Van As

    Jelle Spruyt

    Razen

    Wim Catrysse

    Aymeric De Tapol

    LODGERS#10: Jubilee

    Matin Abedi

    Ada van Hoorebeke

    Leda Bourgogne

    Scott Raby

    LODGERS#9: Hotel Charleroi

    Eduardo Cruces

    Tomáš Kajánek

    Tamara Van San

    Liesbet Grupping

    Nicolas Valckenaere

    LODGERS#8: Pages

    Elen Braga

    Jim Campers

    Ode de Kort

    Maika Garnica

    Timo van Grinsven

    mountaincutters

    Pierre Clèment

    Chantal Peñalosa

    Lodgers#7: lonelyfingers

    Marie Zolamian

    Jayne Dent

    Alexis Lagimodière-Grisé

    Roya Keshavarz

    Gauthier Oushoorn

    Serra Tansel

    Mirte Van Duppen

    Karl Philips

    Ani Schulze

    Luis Lázaro Matos

    Alberto García del Castillo

    Victoria Wigzell

    Robert Šalanda

    Niek Hendrix

    Levent Kunt

    Ghislain Amar

    Karolien Chromiak

    Jane Coppin

    Elise Eeraerts

    Daan Gielis

    Lodewijk Heylen

    Lore Van Roelen

    Nel Aerts

    Lennart Lahuis

    Baptiste Croze

    Volker Zander

    Yan Tomaszewski

    Maryam Ashkanian

    Bianca Baldi

    Timo van Grinsven

    Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen

    Donna Kukama

    Pieter Huybrechts

    David Armstrong Six

    Nihan Somay

    Joris De Rycke

    Simon Feydieu

    Stefanie Pretnar

    Bisan Abu-Eisheh

    Bert Jacobs

    Savage

    Nicholas J Hoffman

    Carla Filipe

    Laure Prouvost

    Oscar Murillo

    Augustas Serapinas

    Reg Carremans

    Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen

    Thomas Grødal

    Philippe Van Wolputte

    Fabian Rouwette

    Antoine Van Impe

    Xavier Mary

    Kasper Bosmans

    Claire Liengme

    Kato Six

    Jonathan De Winter

    Rumiko Hagiwara

    Mathilde Du Sordet

    Berten Jaekers

    Stine Marie Jacobsen

    Sarah Hendrickx

    Bhagwati Prasad

    Mark Luyten

    Memymom

    Johan Daenen

    Gwendolyn Lootens

    Post Brothers

    Naneci Yurdagül

    Luciana Lamothe

    Ilaria Lupo

    Edgardo Aragón

    Darren Roshier

    Philip Janssens

    Pedro Barateiro

    Isabelle Schiltz

    Mounira Al Solh

    Liesje De Laet

    André Romão

    Francesc Ruiz

    Ella de Burca

    Olivier Foulon

    Ryan Siegan-Smith

    Alicia Frankovich

    Nina Könnemann

    Arin Rungjang

    Stéphanie Giorgis

    Malthe Stigaard

    Caner Aslan

    Oscar Hugal

    Bradley Wester

    Roberta Gigante

    Nicolas Field

    Jaime Fennelly

    Pontogor

    OHNO COOPERATION

    Fritz Welch

    Lena Henke

    Michael Fliri

    Idan Hayosh

    Rachel Lowther

    Peeesseye

    Morten Norbye Halvorsen

    Matteo Lucchetti

    Luigi Coppola

    Danilo Correale

    Francisco Camacho

    Jim Skuldt

    Eylem Aladogan

    Pieter Vermeulen

    Kate McNamara

    Shaun Gladwell

    Hans Petri

    Goran Skofic

    Doa Aly

    Sophie Macpherson

    Paul Becker

    Nadia Hebson

    Alex Frost

    Mahmoud Refat

    Iman Issa

    Sepake Angiama

    Alien Oosting

    Sylvain Gélinotte

    Tobias Collier

    Jennifer Caubet

    Andreas Golinski

    David Maroto

    Lou Hubbard

    Open Calls

    U-jazdowski Warsaw

    where
    U-jazdowski Warsaw
    period
    01.02.2022 – 30.04.2022
    deadline
    01.08.2021

    RAVI Liège

    where
    AAIR
    period
    01.07.2021 – 30.09.2021
    deadline
    03.05.2021

    AAIR Development Residency 2021-2022

    Where
    AAIR
    Period
    Cycle I: 01.04.2021—31.08.2021
    Cycle II: 01.09.2021—31.01.2022
    Deadline
    14.02.2021

    RAVI Liège

    where
    RAVI Liège
    period
    01.10.2020 – 31.12.2020
    deadline
    15.07.2020

    Résidence Croisée, Antwerp/Clermont-Ferrand

    where
    AAIR & Artistes en résidence
    period
    01.10.2020 – 30.11.2020 (Antwerp)
    01.04.2021 – 31.05.2021 (Clermont-Ferrand)
    deadline
    15.06.2020

    RAAT

    where
    RAAT – Everdijstraat 30, 2000 Antwerp
    period
    01.04.20 — 01.04.21
    deadline
    15.02.20

    Everyday Forms of Resistance

    where
    Ramallah, Warsaw, Antwerp, Helsinki
    period
    01.06.20 — 30.08.20
    deadline
    31.01.20

    AIR Frankfurt

    where
    AIR_Frankfurt, Germany
    period
    01.04.20 — 30.06.20
    deadline
    30.11.19

    STRT kit

    where
    AAIR
    period
    01.01.2020 - 31.12.2020
    deadline
    15.09.2019

    MeetFactory Praag

    where
    AAIR & MeetFactory, Czech Republic
    period
    01.01.2020 - 30.06.2020
    deadline
    31.08.2019

    Artistic Research Residency Programme on Industrial Heritage in Iran and Europa

    where
    AAIR
    period
    01.11.2019 - 30.11.2019
    deadline
    30.08.2019

    I_Portunus

    where
    All EU Member States and also Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Iceland, Kosovo*, Norway, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Tunisia and Ukraine.
    period
    03.06.2019 - 24.06.2019
    deadline
    24.06.2019

    RAVI Liège

    where
    Residence Artistes Internationales Vivegnis, Liège
    period
    01.10.2019 - 31.12.2019
    deadline
    15.06.2019

    Artistes en Résidence, Clermont-Ferrand

    where
    AAIR Antwerp
    Artistes en Résidence, Clermont-Ferrand
    period
    01.10.2019 - 30.11.2019 Antwerp
    01.04.2020 - 31.05.2020 Clermont-Ferrand
    deadline
    15.06.2019

    Lugar A Dudas, Cali

    waar
    Lugar A Dudas, Cali, Colombia
    periode
    01.09.2019 - 30.11.2019
    deadline
    15.04.2019

    Spaces

    Ploegstraat — AAIR Residency, Antwerp

    Ploegstraat — Monastery Studios, Antwerp

    Ploegstraat — Monastery Refectory, Antwerp

    Ploegstraat — Monastery Garden, Antwerp

    Appelstraat, Borgerhout

    Berkenrodelei, Hoboken

    De Blikfabriek, Hoboken

    De Wolkammerij, Hoboken

    Gijzelaarsstraat, Zuid

    Hertstraat, Deurne

    Kielsevest, Antwerpen

    Klappeistraat, Antwerpen

    Kloosterstraat, Antwerpen

    RAAT, Antwerpen

    Ridder Van Parijsstraat, Merksem

    Tweemontstraat, Deurne

    Zendelingenstraat, Borgerhout

    Reflection

    A window in the world.

    Article

    AAIR and Le18 selected artist Lina Laraki for a residency at AAIR from April until July 2019. This residency was supported by Darna, Flemish-Moroccan cultural house which allowed Lina to produce the film PLANT.MOV during her stay in Anwerp. The production was closely followed by Belgian art critic Pieter Van Bogaert who reflected on the film in this writing.

     

     

    A Window in the World.

    By Pieter Van Bogaert

     

    Looking at Lina Laraki’s PLANT.MOV

    For André Bazin, the great film critic and inspirer of the French Nouvelle Vague, film offers a window on the world. It allows you to look at the world without moving. Film as unmoved mover, so to speak. A cinephile, Bazin loved cinema, yet at the same time he strove towards its end; awaiting the moment when film and reality would merge, such that film would represent reality unambiguously, rendering cinematic techniques -photography, editing, postproduction,…- superfluous.

    Sixty years later, Lina Laraki appears to cut up, double, and twist Bazin’s dictum. For her, film is a window. Period. And this window stands in the world. Always in the middle. From there, she peers inside and outside. Because Lina Laraki’s window reflects. It is a frame for looking through, but also a mirror that returns the image to the spectator. With her, you look at the world through yourself and at yourself through the world. From outside to inside and back again. This makes film an invaluable and absolutely cherished technology. Here, cinephilia is no longer looking forward to its end. The end no longer lies before us, but behind us. And the technology of film helps us to see and understand where.

        For Lina Laraki, film is a space in which to move. This is what happens in PLANT.MOV. Her title’s extension leaves little doubt: this is a film, and clearly one from the digital age. Taking away that doubt, however, she introduces a new ambiguity. Are we looking at a plant as a film? Or is this a film as a plant? Plantfilm or filmplant? Perhaps this is not so important since what matters is the reversal that opens up another space for reading, the potential to move.

         And in a sense, it makes what we see here so Bazinian. Despite the unlikely connection, Lina Laraki comes off as a distant heiress of the French film critic. How else to think of a plant than as an unmoved mover (like film) in the arms of the last observer (such as the cinephile who cherishes film, protects it, but also always has the last word). Perhaps this is really the moment wherein film and reality, reality as film (and as a plant) coincide. This film offers a space in which to move: a walk through the city either from the vantage of your lazy chair or the pot under your butt, and importantly: a move towards a time (future, present, past) which is no longer or not yet. This makes her film a metafilm. Bazinianner than Bazin. Metabazin.

      

    Super 8

     The window here is not a frontier (as with Bazin) where the world (or the film) begins and ends. The window stands in the middle of the space, like a mediator, an intermediary, between inside and outside. The window is at the center of this film in which Lina Larki keeps looking for those connecting holes in the walls that allow you to look inside and out, those transparent surfaces that permit you to look back. The window as see-through and as a mirror. Do we not get at the core of what film is there? A medium that shows and looks back? A medium where both looks meet and distort each other in both directions? The window as a carrier of a chemical process? It all comes together in the texture of those beautiful images on Super 8, in the texture of the grain of the film emulsion, the texture of the reflection in the windows that she looks for with her camera.

    By using Super 8 film, Lina Laraki explicitly chooses a medium from the past (and not unimportantly: for amateurs) to look at the future. Because that is what this film after the end is about, this film from the last observer; this film about the future that lies behind us, about this futur antérieur. More than just a metafilm (a film about film/windows/unmoved moving), this is a science fiction film (a film which dares to exaggerate the world as it is in order to understand what’s coming) and even more a fantasy film (a film that captures the imagination, putting fantasy to work). Beyond Bazin, this film makes me think of Tarkovsky (the journey in space and time in Solaris, the ‘zone’ as a place that doesn’t exist, yet does, in Stalker) or Wenders (the angel in Der Himmel über Berlin as the last observer and protector, the angel who is always present but not really).

    Glancing back towards a future that is not yet; looking beyond the “amnesia for a future to come” is the essential condition for those who really want to be ecological today, the essential condition to think about the real ecological catastrophe coming our way, to see beyond the end. For that, we need cinema, that is what science fiction is for, therein resides the power of the imagination: to think what becomes and to see beyond what is.

    PLANT.MOV is a film like a world, like a cosmos. This plant (as film) and that film (as plant) are metaphors for the world. Potted (canned) yet adrift (in motion), this plant/film is in exile. This joins this filmplant with “her,” the figure who steps through the film/world/cosmos with the pot in her arms. Both are in exile: “potted yet adrift.” From the shrubs, they look together towards the city on the other side of the river. They go there, wandering through the streets, looking through and in the windows, noticing the plants left behind (in exile: cacti and yucas in Antwerp houses) and themselves. The space, the foil, and the plastic covering the plants find an echo in the plastic pot at the bottom of the plant. Together they form the remnants of consumer society, from an attention economy so fleeting that its most important product is trash, left behind to roam the city and the world.

     

    Arabre

     That is how Lina Laraki turns herself into a plant/film and this PLANT.MOV into an oneiric self-portrait. Long before this film, she played, with the invented word “arabre”, a cross between the French arbre (for tree) and Arabe (for Arabian). This sounds like a magic word in a fairy tale that changes one reality into another. It recalls Slavoj Žižek who at a certain moment (in his In Defense of Lost Causes) describes people as symbolic plants. He refers there to Hegel’s notion of plant roots as entrails, which in contrast to the animal, the plant has externalized, plunging them into the earth to prevent it from cutting itself free from its roots and roaming where it will. Isn’t this what happens with technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI) that binds plants and people in PLANT.MOV? Isn’t AI like our externalized entrails that provide a grip on the world? Isn’t this precisely the challenge of AI to make the transition from plant to animal and to plunge us into the abyss of liberty. Post-human, post-plant, post-nature…

    There is another term that fits this eternal return of what resembles: post-memory, or the memory of ancestors that live on through generations after them. And isn’t this the theme that keeps returning in each new Lina Laraki film? The way she searches for herself through her conversation with Abdelaziz in Entretien 0.0, the access that Abdelaziz searches in himself through the world of the other (as man among men, father among children, guardian in the street, or son of a mother). The way in which she appropriates the freedom to speak about herself as distinct from an established Arabic discourse in Atlas of the Elements, through the dream, the incarnate, the gesture. Or the way (in La Palestine comme geste) in which she looks from Amman at Palestine as a metaphor, gesture, method and state (of being, which we carry within us and can always be reactivated), but also the body as a place that not only traverses the country, but is also crossed by the country. Post-memory also, as a rejection of the one-way narrative, as in Si02 her film in reverse that opens with the words of a child: “When I dream, I am planted in my head.” Isn’t this what happens in PLANT.MOV wherein Lina Laraki films herself planted in her head and in her dream? Or the way in which she (re)creates in Karama (Dignity) a people for this earth out of a people who are missing: a question of putting yourself on the map again; always again in the world, rooted wherever you are.

     

    Rhizome

    Gilles Deleuze discusses the idea of the missing people (that comes back in Lina Laraki’s notes on Karama) towards the end of Cinema 2: The Time-Image, where he writes about the cinema from the “third world” (Third Cinema: cinema of the in-between, as a mediator, which in a Kafkaesque sense works with the media, the language of another). There, the mass art of cinema becomes political art: in inventing a people who are not yet there, “le peuple à venir,” or a populace of artists, inventors, creators. It will invent its own language by speaking the language of another. So shall the people become themselves: “If the people are missing, if they break up into minorities, then I am the one who in the first place is a nation,” writes Deleuze. It is not the people who become artists, but the artist who takes the place of the people.

    That idea of Deleuze leads once more to the idea of rooting in PLANT.MOV, to what is visible and what isn’t, what extends above and lies underground, to the tree and the rhizome. This is of course the starting point of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy book that for a long time was read as a work of science fiction. This book that served as inspiration for the thinkers of the networked society that came later, the book that writes the future as something that lies behind us. Opposing the hierarchical thinking of trees growing vertically from roots, higher and higher in the air, Deleuze and Guattari set the image of the rhizome, which like the roots of the grass, spreads non-hierarchically and in different directions beneath the ground. That is how ten years before the advent of the Internet and the networked society, Deleuze and Guattari wrote about artificial intelligence that links us as plants with externalized entrails (a picture that comes close to the imaginative body without organs in A Thousand Plateaus) to provide guidance in an ever-moving network. It is this networked society that we paradoxically embrace every day via our smartphones and laptops, but simultaneously reject via our hesitant attitudes towards migrants: a wanted and an unwanted anchoring in the world via technology and nature that increasingly interconnects ideas, people and plants and is only strengthened by the influence of a changing climate in and of the world.

    In this and earlier films, Lina Laraki casts herself as the archetype of a networked artist: always on the move, always connected via the rhizome to what is posthuman, post-plant, post-nature, or post-memory. All those things that she keeps carrying along, again in her role as artist-in-residence which brought her to Antwerp: potted, posted, sent. This film is her poste restante to the temporary residence that she left behind. The way she feels at home and not, “potted yet adrift”, in each of those places where she lives and works, between Casablanca and Amman, between London and Antwerp. It is in the recognizable generic images of frames, glass, plants with and without people behind windows, of the film. It is in the choice of those typical images that make a place what it is: the Scheldt, the pedestrian tunnel, the city towers, filmed thousands of times by filmmakers- professionals and amateurs- who proceed her. This makes Lina Laraki a full-blooded post-filmmaker, a filmmaker par excellence of the future that lies behind us.

     

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