This is the archived netwerk-art.be. Please refer to netwerkaalst.be for our activities from September 2017 onwards.

concert, festival

ONE Festival

Pierre Bastien / Jozef Van Wissem / Toytone (Patrick Catani) & Marc Nostromo / Sun Ok Papi K.O.

SA 08.11 2008 — 20:30

Jozef Van Wissem at ZXZW, 2007
We live in the age of the total availability of music. Music history, music theory and even archives of music itself – the internet grants access to everything at any time. This fires people’s imaginations, but it also makes one feel dizzy. The possibilities of choosing and combining musical archive material are boundless – and the examples of its reinterpretation and reframing by contemporary musicians also seem to be without limit. Today, music is perceived of as a matter, which can be combined and modified as one chooses. In this context, artistic freedom has come to resemble the freedom of the customer in a gigantic supermarket. His choice is devaluated; it becomes almost arbitrary through the oversupply of goods.

ONE is a concept of artistic limitation. Therefore it is a counterpart to the new arbitrariness. With their festival, the curators create fixed structures for artistic concepts. The dogma functions as a source of friction and an anchor at the same time.

“Necessity is the mother of invention“, says the proverb. If your resources are limited, you’re forced to make the best of it by being inventive. The idea behind the first Dogma festival is easily explained: ONE imposes a restriction. Do what you want, but do it on only one instrument as your source of sound. What happens within those boundaries is up to the resourcefulness of the curators and the musicians. Large ensembles, orchestras or soloists – everything is allowed. Also, the sounds can be modified in any imaginable way. The only condition is that only one instrument should audible at a time. Due to this imposed restriction, works are being created, which would not have been conceived in total artistic freedom. Originality emerges through the working within a limited sphere, through the developments that come from this basic restriction. To ask musicians to restrict themselves to one instrument can lead to an intensive examination and rethinking of the possibilities of an instrument. And it encourages and inspires the “misuse” (i.e. other that its intended uses –whatever they might be) of an instrument and thereby breaking up the “rules” of its customary use. ONE encourages the manipulation of “ordinary” instruments and even the creation of new ones.

Pierre Bastien (FR): meccano constructions
Jozef Van Wissem (NL): lute
Toytone (Patric Catani (DE)) + Marc Nostromo (BE): gp2x game consoles
Sun Ok Papi K.O. (BE): bicycle horn