Heritage

Within ‘Heritage’ we create space and time to (re)discover the stories of our ancestors and cultures, both individually and collectively.

How do you connect with the stories/expectations of your ancestors? How do these stories get a place in your body, in your community? How can we give our legacies of gestures, words, bodily pains, dishes and imaginations shared over generations a place? And how can we rediscover the lost stories, the stories that we have forgotten because they do not deserve a place in Western society according to a normative framework?

The trajectory has no end goal. It is a multi-layered investigation that arises from our own feverish, dreamy and identity-questioning search for how to give the past a place in the present towards a softer future. In order to do this, we travel back to our places of origin, we talk to ancestors and other searching souls.

Every now and then this leads to a stopover where we reflect and exchange. This takes the form of a performance, a circle evening, a work in progress, an essay, … Dialogue and research are always central. How can this new medium (or this collection of media) give us new insights and tools to better understand and honor our own history. And above all, how can we share this with the outside world so that every heritage has space to speak.

In 2023, each member of KIN C took the time to delve into their own heritage through artistic research. Kenneth, Lois and Sara received a development grant from the Flemish Government and traveled to their countries of origin; Thailand, Zambia and Vietnam respectively. Kenneth developed a writing language and performance style with which he could explore the intersection between his queerness and ties with Thailand both formally and in terms of content. This resulted in the performance ‘House of Kha’. Lois researched the transmission of Zambian Indigenous Knowledge through the oral narrative structures and traditions within her Kaonde and Bemba heritage. Sara explored her family history through writing and drawing as a story that resides in her own body. Daan met them with his own material around intergenerational trauma and the body in the form of photos, poems and recorded conversations with her 94-year-old grandmother. Within her research, the suppression of femininity by the Western patriarchal system plays an important role. Milan delved into the legacy of traditional masculinity in the West through interviews and literature analysis, which has led to a “crisis of masculinity” in our time.

When we presented these studies at Winternights in 2023 in the form of an archive, we noticed how valuable it is to allow various histories to enter into dialogue with each other and in this way to create cross-pollination between our individual and diverse studies. That is why we will delve further into artistic archiving as a form of research in 2024-2025. The research questions we want to answer are: How can we create a Living Archive that offers space for a multitude of stories and lived experiences, creating constantly evolving meanings, dialogues and connections? How do we decolonize the traditional archive that collects, categorizes and preserves? And how does the Living Archive become a work of art in itself where the public can also leave behind stories and associations?

After Winternights, the desire also simmered to create places where our ancestors can be commemorated, honored and celebrated. These spaces serve as a communal place for collective mourning, honoring and celebrating our ancestors. These spaces are deliberately not bound to a specific religion or belief, allowing diverse practices to coexist and participants to engage in rituals, share memories and connect with their cultural heritage. We investigate the following: How can we create spiritual and magical virtual spaces through gatherings? How can both virtual spaces and gatherings function as a communal place for mourning, honoring, remembering, confronting and celebrating our ancestors? How can these spaces help to (re)establish the inner journey of connecting with ancestors?