Launch of a new performance and research project (concerts, seminars, lecture-performances), featuring 16th century Antwerp, a new Babylon, as it was called by moralists of the time. Very pleased and honored to collaborate with musicologist Jorge Martín of Ars Subtilior Editions, providing us with new scores of unknown repertoire, including a lot of never performed polyphony (Severin Cornet, Hubert Waelrant,…!)
The libertines in the title (taken from the novel by Antwerp writer Georges Eekhoud) are not to be confused with later doctrinal libertinism: it is an umbrella name for the heterogeneous and diverse population of artists and thinkers, and common people politically or religiously engaged in a profound criticism and rethinking of the global situation reflected in contradictory economic, religious and cultural tendencies experienced in the city of Antwerp, leading to the iconoclasm of 1566 and the so called Dutch revolt. Antwerp was in the middle of the 16th century, be it only for a small time, a haven of relative freedom and emancipation (“la grande libertade” as Giovanni Zonca called it), in the midst of political wars and confusion, religious ruptures, rising colonialism, plugged into the exceptional boom of mercantile wealth, paving the way for later world capitalism, and our modern condition…
Art and music are not a direct reflection of the historical situation, neither are they just a nostalgic escape, evoking a realm of harmony and without contradiction. Rather they are explorations of (new) subjectivity, giving a twist to symbolic culture, capable of evoking its conflicts and ruptures. Are the paintings by Bruegel and colleagues sentimentally conservative or critically modernist avant-la-lettre? Even more difficult is the engagement with musical works of the same period. Instead of bypassing this question, this project engages with the unsolvable, intrinsic contradiction of art works and how they involve subjectivity through performance, and that’s how they still speak to us today.
