The 13th edition of AVANT is a tribute to Michael Snow’s film So Is This. A film that consists only of text and challenges the idea that film, or language, refers to a surrounding world. This, in So Is This is simply the event that unfolds when the film takes place.

Besides Michael Snow (Canada) the filmmakers Els van Riel (Belgium), Esther Urlus (Netherlands) and Elke Groen (Austria) are invited. All three deals with film as an event and with the material specificity of film; van Riel with time, Urlus with the materiality of film colour, and Groen with the actual memory of the film material.

18h - Els Van Riel / Chiyoko Szlavnics / Johan Bossers- Gradual Speed (Els Van Riel, 2013, 16mm, b&w, 50')With links to the tradition of structural film making, the work by the Brussels based film-and videomaker, Els Van Riel, explores the fundamental elements for cinema: time, light and the matter of analogue cinema itself.“Gradual Speed is a work on and for black and white 16mm-film seen as matter, and at the same time as a metaphor for everything we cannot grasp”. (Els van Riel)

- Concert: Constellations I-III for Piano & Sinewaves (Chiyoko Szlavnics, 2011, 15’). Piano. Johan Bossers.The soundtrack for Gradual Speed was created in collaboration with Chiyoko Szlavnics (CAN/DE). She studied music at the University of Toronto, and privately with the composer James Tenney. Her approach relies on drawings as the basis for her compositions and on observations of the interactions between electric and sine waves and the sounds produced by instruments. Her Constellations will be interpreted by the pianist Johan Bossers (BE), co-founder of Champ d’Action, and active in the ensembles Ictus, QO-2, Spectra and I Fiamminghi.

20h - Bruce McClure- A Leak in the Thatch (Bruce McClure, 2014)Projector performance for two modified projectors and two bi-packed film loopsThe performances of Bruce McClure (US) are immersive physical experiences with obvious hallucinatory characteristics. Stretched in time they develop an intensity on the level of light and sound, texture and color, blur and flicker while exploring the interference of the images, though McClure (trained as architect) never loses the spectator and the surrounding space out of sight. The sound of the projectors can take on monstrous proportions, deformed by pedals, often used for electrical guitars…. As if the spectator and the cinematic space are sucked into the epicenter of the cinematographic apparatus itself, in the heart of the machine, in a burst of light and the sputtering of the engine. “To me, it’s an experience of nature like a rainy day or being overwhelmed by vertigo in an assault of snow blindness.”