Transcultures, an interdisciplinary centre for digital and sound cultures (La Louvière-Belgique), has focused since its foundation in 1996 on the links between prospective contemporary creation / cultural practices, society, and technological mutations. Transcultures produces and disseminates sound and digital works / projects and is at the initiative of the international festivals City Sonic (sound arts) and Transnumeriques (digital cultures and emergencies), Arts / Sciences series of events (Vice Versa, Transdemo) and the Transonic label (dedicated to adventurous sound creation). In addition, Transcultures is developing an annual program of activities to raise public awareness on digital and sound cultures and conducts various exchanges and collaborations in Belgium and internationally.
transcultures.be 

The European Pepinieres of Creation coordinated from France by Transcultures Europe is a new phase of development of the “European Pepinieres for young artists”, with a vast network bringing together dozens of French and international cultural operators who welcome contemporary artists (with particular attention to emergencies and new intermedia practices), researchers and cultural professionals in residences. Pepinieres promote their mobility, professionalization, and skill-sharing as well as the dissemination of creative projects produced within the framework of these international collaborations.
www.pepinieres.eu

Philippe Franck
Art historian, sound and intermedia artist, cultural critic passionate about contemporary creative transversalities, Philippe Franck is director / founder of Transcultures – Interdisciplinary Centre for Digital and Sound Cultures (Belgium). He is also the initiator / director of the international festival of sound arts City Sonic and of the biennial of digital cultures Transnumériques (several cities in the Federation Wallonia-Brussels).
Since 2018, he has also been appointed general director of the European Pepinieres of Creation. He also coordinates the indie label Transonic and teaches sound creation and digital arts in several Belgian art schools.

No Lockdown Art Video Selection :

Visions of inside (Common Ground Project) / Kika Nikolela / 2020 / BRA / 8’51
Visions of inside is the first video made using the database of the Common Ground Project initiated by Kika Nicolela in April 2020 in reaction to the Covid-19 crisis. It promotes the creation of a shared database of videos, sounds and texts by worldwide artists, reflecting on the multiple issues raised by the crisis and the lockdown. Above all, the Common Ground Project’s goal is to collectively use creation as a mean of communion and resistance.

Prince / John Sanborn – Commando / 2020 / USA / 5’23
In the process of creating this video, the American queer writer/performer Lynn Breedlove provided this insight into the text: “I wrote this when Prince died, about how he affected me and my pals’ personal lives by speaking up and being himself. It’s about how an artist never knows how or where their work’s gonna land, whose life they’re gonna change. But if they make something with integrity, The World gets different….” This led her to focus on the feelings of longing and loss prompted by dealing directly with painful memories from turbulent times, and towards crucial voices, long neglected. The result is relevant, raw, and intensely intimate – a “home movie” (with a post rock soundtrack of her group Commando) of emotions confessed to camera and to the world.

Silent Noise / Tamara Lai / 2020 / BEL / 5’29
“What flavors here?” What scents now … “Nostalgia for the days before … Carelessness, freedom of movement, human warmth, nature … which the Coronavirus lockdown deprives us from cruelly. This new video-poem by Tamara Laï, of which the images were filmed in various places and countries (Belgium, China, Scotland, Italy, Netherlands), was finalized in a residence at home in Liège in the lockdown period.

No Lockdown Drift / Pastoral / 2020 / BEL – FRA / 5’09
Produced via connected exchanges during the first Covid-19 lockdown in Spring 2020 by the Pastoral post pop duet, Lockdown Drift captures the wait, the floating sensation but also the domestic reverie, the imaginary transfiguration, and a form of sweet melancholy. The images and sounds that dialogue between the residences (both in Wallonia-Belgium) of the protagonists (Huy for Christophe Bailleau and Mons for Philippe Franck) all come from the interior spaces and their close surroundings. An invitation to cherish the living in its different forms (human, animal, mineral, celestial …) and its power-hope of creative metamorphosis.

Flux & Densité / Alain Wergifosse / 2020 / BEL / 5’
In a set of prisms, filters and mirrors, Alain Wergifosse offers some fragments of opto-mechanical treatments on pure light and on some digital images put into video feedback.
These images and sounds come from a multi-channel video installation project in work in progress for the Vice Versa 2020-21 residency/exchange between Transcultures (BE) and La Chambre Blanche (QBC).

Triptyque Prototype / Thomas Israël / 2020 / BEL / 2’50
Triptyque Prototype is an enigma with an shattered temporality which allows associative, cross readings. Its protagonist (the dancer Marilyn Daoust on a choreography by Manon Oligny) is in tension between the doll or the android and the woman of flesh. This video filmed in Montreal in 2015, as part of the interdisciplinary performance project Les Oracles (initiated by Productions Rhizome-Quebec in partnership with Transcultures-Belgium), was finalized in Brussels in Spring 2020 with a minimalist soundtrack by Paradise Now.

Ces riens essentiels #4 / Gauthier Keyaerts / BEL / 3’19
Ces riens essentiels is an infinite work-in-progress, initiated during the lockdown. The journey started in 2018 when Gauthier Keyaerts was in Brittany, shooting images from the Ocean, the shore, the lichens… He brought back from there this particular energy and feeling of spirituality (felt by André Breton). Since March, it helped him to focus on the essentials: family, body, nature (insects, trees, flowers…), love… this sublime chaos.

After Covid_19 / Philippe Boisnard / 2020 / FRA / 7’
After Covid_19 is part of the research on disaster landscapes carried out by Philippe Boisnard in recent years. This creation, achieved during the first global lockdown, was made live from pure-data (graphic programming software for musical and multimedia creation in real time) in both sound and image. This landscape and its evolution attempt to aesthetically show the emergence of the vertigo of the epidemic. Like a metaphorical vision, its crescendo is that of the psychic panic of man in the face of the surge of the pandemic.

Post Human Survival / Didié Nietzsche – Radio Prague / 2020 / BEL / 5’20
On a meditative soundtrack by experimental group Radio Prague (Didié Nietzche, Jules Nerbard – electronics, Renata K – flute), a soft hallucinogenic evocation of nature taking back its rights and its tranquillity during the pandemic lockdown, but also afterwards, when the evil human species leaves earth…