Biography
MOVEDBYMATTER is a transdisciplinary art organization led by performance artist Kasper Vandenberghe. For each project, MOVEDBYMATTER starts from an open-minded investigation into the relationship between performer, audience and matter. The organization is driven by the irrepressible desire to master that relationship, but at the same time it searches for the fatal point at which that mastery will inevitably fail. The performer sets matter in motion, but is ultimately also moved by it. This borderline experience is always translated in a distinctly visual, physical and ritual way.
This method brings MOVEDBYMATTER to various art disciplines, subjects, places, audiences and collaborations: from circus to video art, from ‘What exactly lies the power of vulnerability?’ to ‘What does the concept of ‘masculinity’ mean for children today?’, from black box from circus tent to viaduct, from families to teenagers to a seasoned theater audience. For MOVEDBYMATTER, wonder is central, as is the ambition to create artistically challenging and layered pieces that remain accessible to a wide audience.
Kasper Vandenberghe searches for the relationship between the flow of the masses and the willpower of the individual, but also for the physical translation of our constant streams of thoughts. Individuals often play a central role in a world determined by others, without considering what they actually desire.
In 2004 he started in Theater Class Dora van der Groen, and in the early stages of his career he worked for the renowned Dutch company Zuidelijk Toneel (Talkshow House, Crying Yellow Tears – 2018), Miet Warlop (Springville – 2012), and the Ghent theater collective Ontroerend Goed (The Smile Off Your Face – 2010).
In the past ten years, Kasper has mainly been on stage as a performer with Troubleyn/Jan Fabre. Since 2013 he has been teaching at the Teaching Group Jan Fabre in Antwerp. In 2018, Vandenberghe founded the company MOVEDBYMATTER, in which he takes on a varying role of performer and coach. Kasper was recently an actor in the cast of the fiction series Beau Séjour and Onder Vuur.
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Photo: Jan Fabre
In residentie DAR
02.04.2024 – 14.04.2024
A large industrial space. Course runners who move in repetitive patterns. A drone that floats menacingly and playfully above that scene and keeps everything in its sights. That drone enters into a dancing dialogue with a child. These are the basic elements for DAR, a new transdisciplinary work by MOVEDBYMATTER/Kasper Vandenberghe. The glue between all these elements is a self-questioning investigation into what it means to be human as a man. This constantly evolving theme forms the basis for this project and will form a common thread in the work of MOVEDBYMATTER in the future. As always, Vandenberghe and his team continue to look for recognizable and socially relevant themes that take shape in grand physical images. Together with DAR, they wonder whether violence and war are really male phenomena.
In residentie MYSTICA
13.01.2025 – 24.01.2025
MYSTICA will be a multidisciplinary ritual with hair suspension and choir singers in which we collectively come back into contact with the deeper layers of our consciousness and search for the possibilities for individual and collective transformation. Assuming that real change can only come about by incorporating our shadow side, space is created for betrayal and forgiveness, light and dark.
MYSTICA has as its ambition nothing less than the temporary liberation of the self and the use of the spiritual: not as an escapist desire, but in the radical acceptance of reality as it is.
The project starts from a fascination for the twelfth-century Hildegard Von Bingen. As abbess she wrote works on medicine, botany, cosmology, philosophy, musical compositions, poetry etc. When she was 43 years old, she had visions that were subsequently recorded and she thus wrote herself into history as a female, Western mystic.
MYSTICA goes beyond the biographical fascination with one individual and delves into the symbolic meaning of female, mystical figures in European history and recalls their presence. Many female mystical figures are on the margins of our historiography, present but underexposed. We vaguely know names such as Hildegard Von Bingen, Hadewijch d’Anvers, Margareta Porete, Teresa Van Avila, Evelyn Underhill, and others.
MYSTICA searches for the lost undercurrent of mystical, feminine energy in our culture and thus raises questions about what we can or should learn from our own underexposed aspects.