"Chance favors only the prepared mind"
- according to Pasteur. But indeed: we compose our thousand daily decisions in the accompaniment of the millions of experiences we have had thus far. It is a second nature we build for ourselves and we expect it to be the commons. 24 hours are run in 40 minutes. Speech and intuition race against the clock. Bang! Everything is music.
Cantus Firmus
Cantus Firmus as a centrifuge for realites. So Beware of the fox that feeds the goose! No – Sabotage – and China does not exist. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow the postman will be whistling some Schönberg. All we need is: Oculus non vidit, nec auris audivit.
This is yet another group exhibition, yet another sacrificial ritual in the name of representation. Sounds, letters, sentences. We are writing texts and making references to the great thinkers – is it just a symphony of control? We want words to decipher, not to formulate. Trancendence should lead our way towards betterness and infinity: it is a trap for subject matter.
In medieval and renaissance music, a cantus firmus is a pre-existing melody (mostly religious, but it could also be profane), a sort of found musical object, which served as the basis and legitimation for the composition of larger and more complex polyphonies. Nowadays, cantus firmi serve the study of musical writing. They are understood as short melodies made of long note values, which are used as starting point for the exercise of counterpoint.
Chorus:
All is music
leave all behind
random is striking
a prepared mind
Cantus Firmus !*
Sounds are ringing
time is flushing
we stack up our dreams
and make space for more
Cantus Firmus !
We compose ourselves
as a 3 dish menu
just call the waiter
and wait here for dinner
Cantus Firmus !
Blow some candles
kill a brown goat
we paint our head blue
and believe it is true
Cantus Firmus !
Christophe Meierhans
Christophe Meierhans (1977, Geneva, Swiss) lives and works in Brussels. He works with and within performances, public spaces, installations, sound, music and video. His work consists mainly in developing strategies for interventions in our daily life protocols through manipulating conventional agreements, social habits or simple usages. Fragments of reality such as an existing speech, a café, a theater performance or our daily audiophile become frameworks for artistic operations which attempt to redirect banality so as to only let it reappear under peculiar angles. His work raises questions of norms and conventions by confusing casual contexts with another and confronting the spectator with some kind of otherness, the strangeness of being in the "wrong" place, or of the place itself being the "wrong" one. Next to his work as a singular artist, Christophe Meierhans ia a member of the Brussels-based performance collective C&H and of the experimental music group TAPE THAT.
Info
Opening: Friday, April 6th, 21h00
Co production: Kunst/Werk vzw
with the support of: VGC(traject subsidie), De pianofabriek, Nadine-Brussels
Mondriaan Foundation