The Lichtenberg Figures

“In those days police hauled in all bugs, then birds, then stars, and the sky fled underground.”
Ben Lerner

This concert with acclaimed Brussels-based ensemble Ictus juxtaposes two disparate and disquieting works spanning four decades. They form a strange bipolar couple and speak with a multiplicity of voices, about the darker side of our minds and our times. Palestine’s low-fi videos confront isolation and powerlessness. They feature the voice of a man on a mission impossible. Trying to flee from an island with his motorbike, he is oscillating between a desperate mantra of escape and the chanting of a timeless battle cry. “I gotta get out of here … I am trapped inside my mind …”

Eva Reiter in turn has named her piece a “sounding psychogram of society.” She gives rise to a musical universe driven by anger, fear and unrest. The sonic energy unleashed in this piece is raw, disturbing and fierce, dominated by distorted voices in line with American poet Ben Lerner’s haunting and haunted sonnets.