Vincent Meessen / 2016 / digital / 35min. (Belgium)
　
In ONE.TWO.THREE, Vincent Meessen begins by circumventing the trap of Situationist mythology, in which Guy Debord has been consecrated as the hero and epicentre of a revolution. Instead, the work revisits a part of the history of this movement which has to date been ignored. The starting point for the work is the discovery, in the archives of the Belgian Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, of the lyrics to a protest song that Congolese Situationist Joseph M’Belolo Ya M’Piku composed in May 1968. Working with M’Belolo and young musicians in Kinshasa, Vincent Meessen has produced a new rendition of the song. The fragmented cinematographic display of the work offers a spatial translation of this collective arrangement of subjectivities.
The multi-coloured labyrinth of Un Deux Trois, the club that was once home to the world-famous OK Jazz orchestra led by Franco Luambo, a key figure of artistic modernity in the Congo, offers the perfect setting for a musical dérive. Against the background of Congolese rumba – a popular and hybrid genre par excellence – , threatened vernacular architecture and revolutionary rhetorics of the past – the film puts to music the narrative of unexpected meetings and one of the forms that resulted from it: M’Belolo’s song.
　

Vincent MEESSEN

Born in 1971, lives and works in Brussels. Meessen is interested in the influence of realism and colonial rhetoric on the development of Western modernity. Through the use of various media (video, installation, prints, music and others) he re-animates hidden narratives and traces of the colonial. Meessen questions the operational capacity of interpretation, refers to the friction between fact and fiction and researches the potential of the speculative narrative, both in his work as an artist and in his para-curatorial activities.
　　

Schedule

TOKYO：5/1 18:45, 5/5 18:45　K program
KYOTO：5/16 19:00　K program
FUKUOKA：6/4 16:10　K program
NAGOYA：6/25 19:20　K program