Artists in residence:
Ka(a)te Dejonckheere and Ester Bosschaert Devroe
When:
1/1/2025-30/3/2025
Sterkat on the bleaching field:
As part of the Memento Festival 2025, the two-person collective Sterkat explores the space between language and image. Sterkat delves into archives, folk tales and agricultural jargon in an attempt to spread out and reorder history and myths. This gives rise to a poetic installation of image and word. The installation reflects on the process of bleaching and staining, concealing and revealing, rolling up and spreading out the field/body to be sown. Sterkat on the bleaching field is part of their cyclical research into agriculture and female labour and pays tribute to the annual bleaching season.
We were inspired by the ‘waiting girl'. She watches and is also watched herself. It reminded us of how women today exhibit themselves online and (want to) be watched.
RESIDENCY
Inspired by the annual cycle of growing and processing flax, Sterkat delves into the history of linen bleaching during their residency. The bleaching season traditionally began in March. The Texture collection contains many images and materials that form the basis for their own interpretation of the process. They also search for more images in online databases. One of the images that intrigued them is that of the spread-out cloths on the fields, which appear completely white from March onwards. In addition to images, text is another important source of inspiration: folk sayings linked to linen production, manuals on the bleaching process and canonical literary fragments about women in a Flemish agricultural context (including De Vlaschaard (1907) by Stijn Streuvels, De boer die sterft (The Farmer Who Dies, 1918) by Karel van de Woestijne and De oostakkerse gedichten (The Oostakkerse Poems, 1955) by Hugo Claus).
To bleach the linen clean and white, It must first be soaked in lye: Watered and spread out on the field, Everything was restored by the air.
SHOWCASE
All of this is brought together in Texture in a poetic film installation (14-30 March 2025) as part of the Memento Festival. On the bleaching field, a hard-working bleacher, a watchmaid (the maid who guards the cloth), a bleaching factory boss and a figure between human and cow in search of a suitable role spread out the linen robes. The video explores the blurred boundaries between past and present, between the tradition of the bleaching process at the intersection of agriculture and factory labour and contemporary notions of cleanliness, equality, work and gender.
Three poems accompany the images. They offer a contemporary view of some principles that were important during the bleaching process from the 18th century to the first half of the 20th century: labour and femininity, surveillance and power, cleanliness and perfection, and roles that seem predetermined within a collective process. The poems contain reflections on these themes and quotations from the texts that served as inspiration.
On Sunday 23 March 2025, the first Sunday of spring, the installation will be brought to life in an experience of communal washing, poetry and dance. The public is invited to clean a linen cloth, accompanied by a ritual that honours the history of textile work.
Residency in collaboration with Memento Festival Kortrijk
