PLATTEAU, GROUPE THEATRAL                                                                                                                                     

JOSEPH KUSENDILA

WIELS

BRUSSELS June 7th - August 11th










In the street where I live, an evangelical Latino community preaches their mass on a ground floor no bigger than a night shop. The space has a tiled floor and white walls, a ceiling of neon lights, and people sit in rows on gray folding chairs. At least, that's what I catch a fleeting glimpse of through the glass front door. The rest of the storefront is obscured by a white curtain. But usually, when I walk past, it's a metal curtain with the words ÉGLISE LA LUMIÈRE DU MONDE (Church the light of the world) written on it, which closes off the space. Another day, each of the curtains was raised and the space showed itself empty, with only a table at the back (perhaps the one used for the altar) and a TV screen fixed to the wall above. A newspaper or TV program was playing on the screen and commentaries scrolled below across a shiny, reddish banner. Last year, for whatever reason, I was transcribing several dialogues between a researcher and some priests for a meager salary. The researcher's subject was the internal relations between Brussels' various religious communities. Evangelicals, according to some interviewees, are a difficult group to forge a bond with. They insinuated it as a complex relationship, as if there was an invisible, impenetrable wall keeping them at distance. Also, some of those small evangelical churches move without notice, and this is partly due to their functioning: intimate, community based, generally in rented spaces, therefore subject to precarious situations, and also to secular and xenophobic mistrust. In return, they too, distrust non-affiliated. They distrust the exterior and remain discrete, opting for non ostentatious looks.


***

When you take the big elevator at Wiels up to the second floor, the large sliding doors open onto another, closed double door. It's behind this door that the exhibitions normally take place. The antechamber with which you're now obliged to make do, where you'd normally encounter a large introductory text, is home to two pieces; 100,000 and Le Complexe du Peintre by Joseph Kusendila. A display case in Takali wood set on a cardboard board raised by two black metal trestles, and a seat in oak varnished with beeswax, painted in oil and reinforced with steel squares. These details are listed on an A4 sheet, nailed behind a glass plate of the same format, which is located directly to the left of the elevator above the call button. The list of works also includes a third piece, Verre Cathédrale, visible only on the outside of the building on the first-floor windows - which run around the east, south and west facades. The windows have been covered with mirror-effect film, which makes the floor in question stand out from the building and accentuates the texture of the hammered glass. In the short corridor leading to the stairs, two other A4 sheets are presented, also nailed behind glass sheets. The first gives the dates to see Kusendila’s film; Groupe Theatral, at the CINEMATEK, the other shows two blurred pictures of floor plans, or more accurately, burned by a flash of light. To me, those maps seem to have no function here other than their mere presence, but in a form that has become unusable, shapeless, which makes me think of what Jacqueline Lichtenstein wrote about color and light, and that if all objects were illuminated in the same way, there would be a terrible confusion in all things; without shadows, everything would appear flat, even the roundest bodies. Which then makes me think about what Godard said in Chambre 666 about the invisible being what we don't see, just like the unbelievable, and that cinema is about showing the unbelievable, and that's what we don't see. A map is meant to show and confirm an established reality, but here instead, the light dazzles to make this content disappear, to erase it from the field. Shadowless, light can only render invisible. 

Outside the large showroom (albeit within the institution's complex), which I imagine to be empty (or which forces me to imagine it), the wooden display case just outside the doors becomes a fortuitous model of what I'm confined to. Later on, a friend of mine would use the word "maquette" literally to refer to it, as if there were no doubt about the object's role: that of being the reduced scale of an emptiness, but where any light can penetrate, and like all greenhouses every summer, become weighed down with heat. This empty display stand - a copy of those used in West African markets to sell jewelry or telephones - has as its base a black colored board, where fingerprints suggest its emptying. Two scenarios come to mind: everything has been sold, or it's all been stolen. And in the second case, the burglar was kind enough to make his move without breaking anything, and above all, to have closed the small door behind him. Despite the fact that there are no valuables to watch out for, the guard didn’t leave his post. While there, the museum guard, lined up with 100,000 and Le Complex du Peintre, and seated on his stool, watched one after the other my movements and his telephone. In another corridor running alongside the main elevator, a door was left wide open, leading to a room where the guards deposited their belongings. There was a fridge, a coffee maker, some tables and other objects I didn't have time to recognize. I hesitated to ask the guard if this open door was part of the set. Meanwhile, another guard had arrived by the staircase and entered the room to collect his belongings, greeting his colleague. About to leave, he stepped back and asked the other guard, "Can we close the door? The guard didn't reply, so he added; "I'll close it, it looks better I think.” 


Another door, swinging and black, belongs to the small projection room in the basement of the CINEMATEK, which screens several consecutive Sundays, each time at 5.15pm, its short film; Groupe Theatral. The film opens on a white monochrome, then the title, the actors' names, then on a closed gate painted black. The next 20 minutes show the daily life seeping through a static frame fixed on that gate. Sometimes people enter or leave through a smaller door in that same gate. They are dressed in work clothes, some carrying bags of cement on their shoulders. Then we see the scene at night. In the morning, someone sings off-camera. Further on, the gate opens fully or half-open to let a car in. It remains there for maintenance. The hood is shown wide open, facing the camera, the engine rumbling, moving, spinning, and here I wonder if there's a link between the word 'entertain' and the French word ‘entretenir’ which means ‘maintain’.

***


- But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are (...)
- “When it's free, you don't complain", or however you want to put it.






Julien Jonas