Aside from our research work and work with museums, and presenting organisations, Through Art We Care also invests in the support of innovative arts projects addressing or incorporating a care dimension, whether it is a project working in a caring relational setting with vulnerable groups or a project addressing our wellbeing and care in a more direct way. Our first two associated artists are the collective Spa for Spirits and Anais Chabeur.
Spa for Spirits / Huskrooms
Collaborators
Lili Vanderstraeten
Leonie Buysse
Renske Maria Van Dam
Julie Rodeyns
Projects
Spa for Spirits
Huskrooms
Services
Dramaturgical and
productional assistance
Year
2024- 2026
Website
www.spaforspirits.com
www.huskrooms.com
Performers Leonie Buysse and Lili Vanderstraeten have been leading the artistic platform Spa for Spirits since 2020: a nonconventional wellness center operated by otherworldly creatures. Together with colleagues and experts from various artistic and life domains, the duo creates installations and performances that invite participants to engage in collective play and wonder, share physical and mental time and space. The Spa aims to stimulate its collaborators and visitors to engage in sensory-rich actions and participate in peculiar, perception-altering rituals. Together with their audience, they explore how the wellness center can promote well-being, rethinking how we want to live our lives: What moves us? What is helpful? What opens us to the world and others, and what makes us close off? Through this exploration, the Spa invites visitors to reconnect with their senses and simply be present in their bodies.
As a solo spinoff initiative by Lili, Huskrooms is an installation project that can be activated through performance and continues to develop organically. The work is constructed from carefully collected and reworked textiles. Like a living organism, the nomadic structure interweaves itself with its surroundings engaging deeply with space, textures, and people in the places where it temporarily nests. It creates space for encounter, ritual, togetherness, and action. Huskrooms offers a space to actively digest and make tangible feelings of sorrow, farewell, and mourning, while inviting visitors to sink into a different perception of time.
Anais Chabeur
Collaborators
Anais Chabeur
Julie Rodeyns
Laurence Cheval
Project
Tactile Encounters
Visions for Crossing
Services
Dramaturgical and
productional assistance
Year
2022- 2026
Website
www.anaischabeur.com
Through films, installations, and participative offerings, she explores ways to recover our lost familiarity with death and the gestures of care that resist its disappearance. She often rubs against her own resistance to direct image-making. It is part of what interests her in the delicate subject she confronts: how to bypass its crudeness to reach a more intimate bond that is still visceral and yet tender?
In the making process of her films, there is a continuum between her body, the lens of her camera, and the object or subject in front of it. She considers the act of filming as a prolongation and a collaboration. It is a deeply embodied experience where the image arises from a fertile swirl of attention, connection, sensation, and emotion. The result is often meditative pieces that provoke strong sensorial responses in the viewers.
The installation of her work tends toward creating a synesthetic experience. She has explored mediums such as incense or hypnosis that can offer a particular quality of presence for the visitors. These mediums have the ability to expand one’s awareness both inward and outward, opening sensitivity to the common mysteries of time and finitude.
Visions for Crossing proposes to creatively and sensorially engage with our mortal condition. By looking closely at the gestures of care we offer our dead and developing alternative imaginaries around the threshold process of « becoming imperceptible ». How can we regain a comforting relationship with death? The project aims to share and produce embodied knowledge that resists the dramatic effects of the commercialisation of deathcare, and the general disappearance of the dying from modern society.
I will focus on the “laying out” of the corpse, an ancestral practice that consists in the cleaning of the body, and the way it is taught today. The prism of this specific act will allow me to explore important aspects of our cultural and intimate relationships to death. Questioning what we have lost in its institutionalization and what still persists. I will do so by using a methodology developed through my experience as a palliative care volunteer that emphasizes a deep quality of presence.
