Blueprint + City of Progress

As part of Openbare Werken, Jubilee presents Blueprint. This performance by Justin Bennett at Kunsthal Gent includes a multi-screen animated film and live music by Otto Kint (bass), Joos Vandueren (saxophone), Chaeyeoni Lee (keyboard) and Lucia Pires (flute). The performance will be preceded by an introduction and a screening of Bennett’s related animated short film City of Progress (2008)

The video work Blueprint (2015) combines hand-drawn animated city-maps and stenciled texts with a live soundtrack. Each time Blueprint is screened, it is interpreted anew by the musicians. They follow rules and suggestions developed in close collaboration with a number of improvisers, including the MAZE ensemble from Amsterdam and the group Atolón from Barcelona. There are no restrictions on instrumentation or genre. Blueprint asks questions about the links between social, urban and musical structures. It asks questions of the musicians and the audience about work, creativity and freedom. The drawings are based on maps of real cities and different types of urban growth from around the world.

As a score or a counter-map, the images allow the musicians to improvise with their music as well as inviting them to explore the space – freely but in relation to one another, to the architecture, to the bodies of the audience present...and in relation to the passing of time manifested by the musical interactions of the instruments played. This performance takes place in dialogue with Jubilee’s collective research project Archipelago of Artistic Practices. It unpacks questions around the online counter-mapping environment Eavatea which is being developed to approach ephemeral and situated artistic research through the perspectives of sharing and tracing, dialogue and development, archive and activation.