The ARTONOV Festival, inspired by Japanese sensory and multidisciplinary art, fosters the convergence of music, dance, circus, visual and digital arts.
It promotes interdisciplinarity and creation in remarkable architectural venues across Brussels, offering the public a vibrant dialogue between the arts.
‘The past is not what precedes the present, but what becomes significant in the present’.
These words, inspired by Luciano Berio, aptly express what drives the 11th edition of the ARTONOV Festival.
Berio, a visionary composer, saw memory not as something to be preserved, but as a force to be transformed, to be made to vibrate in the present, to better map out the future.
‘The Future of the Past’ is an invitation to ‘cross over’: a dialogue between eras, forms and artistic disciplines, where legacies are reinvented in new ways.
This edition welcomes a new generation of artists – curious, audacious, hybrid – who refuse existing categories, who strive to find new ways of expression.
One such artist is Daniel Proietto, a choreographer and performer of rare sensitivity.
He is presenting a creation in collaboration with the Tana Quartet and Jean-Paul Dessy: an invitation to travel to the origins of art, myth and humanity, combining chamber music, contemporary dance and film.
For TARAB, co-presented with Charleroi Danse, choreographer Éric Minh Cuong Castaing brings together dancers from the Levant diaspora. TARAB focuses on the raw, almost mystical emotion generated by melodies, rhythms and breath.
Here, ‘dancing together’ takes on its full meaning. A work at the crossroads of politics, spirituality and memory, which explores ecstasy as an act of resistance.
This 11th edition will also feature a dialogue with Japan, through the presence of Japanese artists whose work questions tradition from a resolutely contemporary perspective. At the same time, Japan will be present in performances by Belgian and international artists such as Mute Dialogues – Mokkei (Casimir Liberski and Shoko Igarashi) and Mizu (水) (Satchie Noro and Élise Vigneron).
At the crossroads of history, spirituality and textile heritage, the festival is hosting an exhibition on Batik and the Borobudur site, bringing together photographs by Hugues and Caroline Dubois and Jonathan Hope’s exceptional collection of antique batiks.
The exhibition is less an ethnographic showcase than a visual and symbolic essay, a journey into sacred geometry and Javanese rituals.
Through a masterclass project dedicated to young performers, focusing on the repertoire of Mozart and Beethoven on historical instruments, the aim is to focus on the new generation of musicians. The event will be hosted by the ARTONOV Lab, the space that will once again serve as the festival’s home base.
Re-invented concerts, cross-disciplinary performances, site-specific installations and sensitive exhibitions: ARTONOV continues to strive to make visible what is moving, what is emerging, what may be disturbing, but above all what is enlightening.
A spokesman for the event said, “In an age saturated with instantaneity, we more than ever need artists with boundless curiosity and commitment to collaborative work, who can listen to the past in order to better envisage the future.”
