For the past few years I have been primarily occupied with the creation and running of a space with my collective Heylàbas and the DAK group who focus on turning disaffected buildings into cultural and social events spaces.
Our collective's involvement at l'uZinne (75 quai de l'industrie, Molenbeek - edit: with the current pandemic, this space is, sadly, pretty much dead) was initially the Labyrinth: we built a large three-dimensional, multi-levelled labyrinth, with a variety of installations throughout, a stage and a rhum-bar. It is constructed entirely out of found materials in an empty, roughly 700m³ room.
Our labyrinths are invariably impossible to document visually... The images and videos below do not do justice to the atmosphere and the experience of wandering through it - our openings involve concerts and performances (including a hairdresser on one occasion, a tattoo artist on another) as well as a regularly evolving series of installations - we change everything around every now and then so people who have been several times continue to get lost.
There is a grotesquery to the experience that is powerfully effective - people who don't know what to expect (after all, a "labyrinth" sounds like a children's game - and it is, in that it makes children of everyone) come out drunk on the atmosphere (the alcohol doesn't hurt either). The experience is completely immersive - once you enter the space, you no longer have any external frame of reference. It is a world unto itself, a step or two beyond the familiar.
I have posted a video I made here - but professional videographers have tried and failed to capture the thing, so don't expect much. It is excessively long, so feel free to skip around it just to get an idea of the thing. We have not made much effort to publicise and advertise, to document the undocumentable - we do this with zero funding and have more public than we can comfortably manage most of the time. The income we generate from the voluntary donations more or less cover our costs and we don't buy into the malignant obsession with growth that seems to push so many enterprises into twisted, morally and materially unsustainable practices. Our aims have been to make something happen to people that will pull them out of normalcy for a moment, perhaps to offer them a platform from which to call normality into question. Our aim was to have a good time without compromising our values.
It feels like a minor betrayal of this process to be using it, the credit of my participation in it, in order to sell myself as a "viable venture" for people potentially looking to invest in art in some way. But hey, I just needed to explain the gap in my "standard art career" cv.
You can follow Heylàbas' activities via our Facebook page.
