Opening Limburg Biënnale #2, 2022 Photo: Rob van Hoorn
With great pleasure, Odapark and Marres invite you to the festive opening of the Limburg Biënnale 2024!
Every two years, the Limburg Biënnale connects the professional and amateur arts in a special group exhibition with works selected through an open call. It highlights anyone who feels like an artist, from starting hobbyists to established professionals. This year, our jury of 18 professional artists reviewed an impressive 3,000 submitted works and made their selections. The selection will be on show at Odapark and Marres from June 29th through August 25th, 2024.
This is the third edition of the Limburg Biënnale and the first that we are organizing in collaboration. We therefore welcome you at both our locations, in Venray and Maastricht.
Date
Saturday, June 29th, 2024
Location & time
Odapark Merseloseweg 117, Venray 2:00PM (walk-in from 1:30PM, open till 5:00PM)
On May 29, Kaleidoscope is organizing a Show Your Talent (Toon je Talent) market at Centre Céramique. Marres will also be present here from 3-4PM. Schools who want to get acquainted with the education department of Marres and subscribe to our cultural offer for next year, can visit our info stand. Here you can learn all about our sensory roadmap, the soft round blanket and The Invisible Collection.
ELEMENTS 2024: an unique Euregional cultural program
After the first successful edition of ELEMENTS in 2021, 11 Euregional art and culture institutions joined again. This network celebrates, together with its visitors, the diversity and quality of contemporary art and puts the Euregion Meuse-Rhine in a cultural spotlight. In between Sittard and Liège and from Hasselt to Aachen ELEMENTS 2024 presents a month full of actual, divers and groundbreaking exhibitions and activities. A feast for the senses.
In ELEMENTS all elements of art experience will be presented: creation, science, experience, cocreation and talent development. The paricipating institutions will organize extra activities, beneath their rechtbuigend and presentations, such as performances, lectures, tours, free eveneng visits, workshops and open studios.
ELEMENTS 2024 takes place from Thursday May 23th – Sunday June 23th.
Participating art museums and art institutions in 2024:
Visit Marres on May 24th! Especially for this Friday Night, Marres organizes guided tours in three different languages: Spanish, English, and in Maastricht dialect.
Enthusiastic guides will take you through the wonderful exhibition Opaque Spirits by the Peruvian artist Arturo Kameya.
From 5:00 PM onwards, you pay €5.00*, including a drink. You can also experience Opaque Spirits on your own if you like, without a guided tour.
Guided tour programs:
Mestreechs 7:00-7:30 PM
English 7:30-8:00 PM
Español 8:00-8:30 PM
There is no extra charge for the language tours, but we kindly request a reservation via reserveringen@marres.org. Group reservations are welcome!
We would love to expand our new guided tour program. Are you or do you know someone who would like to guide visitors through the various exhibitions at Marres in one or more languages? Then we would love to hear from you via info@marres.org!
*Icom and museum card holders, students from Maastricht art schools, and children under 18 always visit Marres for free.
Elements at Marres
Sign yourself and your colleagues in education up for the Training the Senses Symposium!
On June 4, 5 and 6 from 4-7pm, Marres and the six European partners of the Erasmus+ SensesSquared project will organise the Training the Senses Symposium: a three-day program filled with workshops and trainings teaching you to enrich your teaching practice by implementing sensory and embodied learning.
Training the Senses Symposium will take place at Marres and aims to get primary and secondary school teachers, pedagogy students, and educational workers from the arts and culture sector to creatively think about teaching practices by way of sensory trainings.
Participants are free to choose their own schedule, meaning that you can attend single workshops on different days, or follow a full day program. All workshops are exclusively taught in ENGLISH and participation is completely FREE OF CHARGE.
Last January, Marres, VIA ZUID, de Brakke Grond, Dansateliers and FASHIONCLASH presented the performance festival Rooms.
This summer, Merette van Hijfte & Pleuni Veen will give a reprise of their performance PAL in the ice house at Marres.
They will present the visual poem PAL, which gives shape to the moment when we exchange freedom for safety. In doing so, they respond to the various meanings of the adverb, which refers to the original, Dutch expression “pal staan”, and its figurative meaning “to be immobile” or “to stand firm.”
Pleuni Veen As a mathematics student, Pleuni Veen (1994, NL) is intrigued by the balance between the certain yet indeterminate nature of the world, and between the understandable and the intangible. Contact, friction and wonder are central to her work.
MeretteVan Hijfte MeretteVan Hijfte (1994, NL) is a playful performer and energetic maker, who is not afraid to act from her intuition and impulses, making her work explosive and gritty. Following her graduation at the Mime School, she has been active as an actress, a filmmaker and member of the Collective BAMBAMBAM.
Photo: Samuel van Keeken
We hope to see you again at the next edition of Rooms, scheduled for January 25-26, 2025.
Mark the next edition of Museum Night in your calendar: April 11, 2025. Like every year, Marres will be one of several venues in the city where the doors will be open until late!
From October 5 to 10, Marres, Bureau Europa and de Nederlandse Dansdagen present the performance Motus Mori RELIQUIEM by German choreographer Katja Heitmann. Motus Mori RELIQUIEM is dedicated to human movement and will take place in the main hall of Bureau Europa in Maastricht.
What moves humankind? In Motus Mori RELIQUIEM, you experience other people’s motions in the most direct and touching way possible: through your body. You put yourself in the shoes of the archive’s many donors and incorporate their personal “movement relics” into your motion repertoire. Heitmann calls this “kinetic empathy”.
In the multi-year art project Motus Mori, Katja Heitmann collects and preserves human movement. Up to now more than 1900 people have already donated their personal movement to this embodied archive, an ever-growing foundation from which the choreographer creates new artworks. People from Maastricht and surrounding areas also donated their movement to Motus Mori in 2019. This year, the choreographer returns to the city with RELIQUIEM.
Katja Heitmann is fascinated by the human attempt to escape their own mortality. This paradox is the muse of the movement archive Motus Mori. As movement goes and vanishes, we are at the same time epi-central master of our own life and just a spark in eternity.
With RELIQUIEM, Katja Heitmann takes her archive research to the next level; creating a collective shared movement heritage to secure it for the future. The archive will be transferred to ‘everyone’. After all: doesn’t every human being want to keep moving, for eternity?
Dates and times
October 5 and 6, 2024: 10:30AM, 12:00PM, 2:30PM, and 4:00PM
‘My mother died 12 years ago, my father last year. There is nothing left of them, no material belongings, no house, no will or farewell letter. Sometimes I manage to make a hand gesture that I recognize from my mother. Or my father’s shoulder-head-pupil-chin combination, a gesture that indicated he was struggling. Sometimes I see an older man walking down the street and suddenly I think it’s him. His tired body going on and on, back arched, shoulders hunched forward, while his head tried to look up. Often I wish I had observed them more closely, so I could keep their movement heritage alive.’
– Katja Heitmann
Background
For several years, Katja Heitmann has been working to create an archive for human movement. This is a question that is often raised in dance, since the discipline has no standardized notation. The body of a dancer, it is often said, is the archive of dance. But the same question also applies to the world outside dance. Our archives and museums collect portraits, objects, and writings but not the gestures and movements of important people. In our homes, we also save letters, objects, and photographs of our loved ones, but we lose the poses, movements, and reflexes that make them instantly recognizable. Katja Heitmann and her team make that loss tangible by collecting and preserving human movements.
In 2019, de Heitmann presented her project Museum Motus Mori at Marres. In this project, she created a museum of dying physical movement with ten dancers. For six weeks, five hours a day, the dancers and the choreographer took on the remarkable challenge of sensitizing visitors to the deep humanity hidden within the body. They developed a choreography for belly fat, a dance of the belly button and rib cage, the anatomy of a sigh…
Motion interviews
As a source, the choreographer used movement interviews. Every day people were invited to these interviews in which they told how they stood, sat or slept, whether they shared traits with family members, whether they had ever had an injury or accident that changed their physicality or movements. The dancers analyzed these traits and learned to embody them. Heitmann focused primarily on capturing involuntary human behaviors. She became fascinated by unconscious, sometimes transmitted movements, which are very awkward or make life difficult or arduous, but at the same time give a deep insight into human identity. The audience who witnessed this living archive saw a prolonged performance of human movements, including their own and those of their loved ones.
Photo: Hanneke Wetzer
Biography Katja Heitmann
Katja Heitmann (1987, Germany) operates on the interface between dance and visual arts, performance and installation. In her visual-choreographic work, she investigates what moves people in the present era. In doing so, she always questions what it means to have a body, often in relation to rapidly advancing technology. In Homo Avatar (2016), she was inspired by the countless digital alter egos roaming the Internet. In Siri Loves Me (2017), a work she made with 50 young dancers, she wondered if technological advances and the surveillance that comes with them were going to hinder free movement. In Pandora’s DropBox (2018), she presented a disturbing image of the perfect man in a perfect world. Starting in 2019, Heitmann worked on various forms of her extensive Motus Mori project, an ode to the forgotten and even extinct movement. In 2016 Katja won the Prijs van de Nederlandse Dansdagen (Dutch Dance Days Award), in 2020 she was awarded the Gieskes-Strijbis Podiumprijs, the largest performing arts award in the Netherlands.
Photo: Rob van Hoorn
Press about Katja Heitmann
NRC “In Museum Motus Mori, Heitmann collects, describes, archives and exhibits the minute movements we all make every day that immediately disappear again – the beauty and fragility of dance in one thoughtful concept.”
De Theaterkrant ‘Heitmann has a mission! Undeniably. In Motus Mori, she gives the body back to a society that is in danger of losing sight of its value. Art could not be more urgent. But beyond urgency, Reliquiem is also very moving. After all, the body is transient and confronts us with finiteness.”
De Standaard: “It’s kinetic empathy at its best.”
De Volkskrant (Anette Embrechts) “I recognized my ‘translated’ tics and gestures, whispers mixed with those of Pavel, Monika, Tosca and Herr Stamm. Highly original.”
The New York Times: “Turning the gestures of everyday life into art.”
Museumtijdschrift (Edo Dijksterhuis): “Museum Motus Mori is a kinetic portrait of all of us. And the way it takes shape, through the body rather than the mind, is more direct, effective and poignant than any video, photograph or text can ever be.”
For the press
For press requests, visual materials and interviews, please contact communicatie@marres.org.
Visit Marres on May 24th! Especially for this Friday Night, Marres organizes guided tours in three different languages: Spanish, English, and in Maastricht dialect.
Enthusiastic guides will take you through the wonderful exhibition Opaque Spirits by the Peruvian artist Arturo Kameya.
From 5:00 PM onwards, you pay €5.00*, including a drink. You can also experience Opaque Spirits on your own if you like, without a guided tour.
Guided tour programs:
Mestreechs 7:00-7:30 PM
English 7:30-8:00 PM
Español 8:00-8:30 PM
There is no extra charge for the language tours, but we kindly request a reservation via reserveringen@marres.org. Group reservations are welcome!
We would love to expand our new guided tour program. Are you or do you know someone who would like to guide visitors through the various exhibitions at Marres in one or more languages? Then we would love to hear from you via info@marres.org!
*Icom and museum card holders, students from Maastricht art schools, and children under 18 always visit Marres for free.
The Extended 2024 members in the Opaque Spirits exhibition Photo: Rob van Hoorn
Over the past four months, the members of Extended (aged 14-21) have creatively explored their sensory experience regarding culture and identity.
During Museum Night on Friday evening, April 19th, they will present their project at the Jan van Eyck Academie.
The educational program Extended is a collaborative project between Marres and the Jan van Eyck Academie, where young people work in teams for four months on a socially engaged art project.
Making art accessible to the elderly, Marres’ education department organized another roundtable talk on May 2nd together with Stichting Met je hart.
Stichting Met je hart develops special tours, workshops, roundtable talks, and participatory activities at Marres to lower the threshold for lonely elderly individuals, people living in poverty, and asylum seekers and regularly cooperates with Marres.
FASHIONCLASH @ Marres 2023 / Tim van der Plas Photo: Mitch van Schijndel
The 16th edition of the international and interdisciplinary FASHIONCLASH Festival will take place from 15 – 17 November 2024 in Maastricht. Marres will be one of the venues where you can discover work by a new generation of designers and performing artists from all over the world.
The three-day program with an exhibition, performances, talks, workshops and fashion film screenings, showcases projects that explore, contextualize and celebrate contemporary fashion culture. During the festival the work of more than 100 designers, artists and makers from more than 30 different countries can be seen.
FASHIONCLASH Festival is all about discovering, stimulating and co-shaping current developments in fashion and opening up these developments to a wide audience. Participants of the festival belong to a generation of designers and artists who explore and question the boundaries of their discipline. With their works they move between the transdisciplinary domains of fashion, social design and visual arts.
On June 4, 5 and 6 from 4-7pm, Marres and the six European partners of the Erasmus+ SensesSquared project organised the Training the Senses Symposium: a three-day program filled with workshops and trainings teaching you to enrich your teaching practice by implementing sensory and embodied learning.
Training the Senses Symposium took place at Marres and aimed to get primary and secondary school teachers, pedagogy students, and educational workers from the arts and culture sector to creatively think about teaching practices by way of sensory trainings.
Each day offered two workshops highlighting different aspects of sensory education. On day 1, you could experience what sound massage can do to the body and learn how to use ethnography as an alternative method of noting down learning outcomes. On day 2, you could work with voice and listening exercises that help students connect with themselves and their environment. Day 3 will focus on different forms of artistic research as an enrichment method for education.
Participants were free to choose their own schedule, meaning that you could attend single workshops on different days, or follow a full day program. All workshops were exclusively taught in English and participation was completely free of charge.
SenseSquared is a collaboration between Musica Impulse Centre (BE), Companhia de Música Teatral (PT), Marres House for Contemporary Culture (NL), Sisters Hope (DK), Stavanger University (NO) and Maastricht University (NL).
Before every official opening, the Friends of Marres get an exclusive preview.
Date
Saturday 9 March 2024
Time
4PM
Location
Marres
By becoming Friend of Marres, you directly support young makers in Limburg. Your contribution makes it possible for them to continue to create and grow in their artistic practice. It enables them to experiment, innovate and inspire the art world with fresh perspectives. In addition, you contribute to the preservation of Marres as one of the few remaining places for contemporary art in Limburg.
Extended End presentation Food & Love, January 2024 Photo: Rob van Hoorn
Can you evoke memories simply by smelling a work of art? And imagine not only looking at art, but also tasting it to become one with it.
All this and more was on the menu of the sensory experience developed over the past four months by the Extended youth (ages 14-21). On January 6, they presented their projects in the house of Marres, concluding this season of Extended.
Saturday, January 6, 2024 12 – 2 PM Marres, House for Contemporary Culture Capucijnenstraat 98 6211 RT Maastricht
The education program Extended is a joint project of Marres and the Jan van Eyck Academy, where young people work in teams for four months on a social art project.
Let’s open up! Museum Night took place on 19 April 2024. Marres is one of the 14 different venues across the city that opens their doors until late at night each year.
Exhibition Opaque Spirits
During a very busy Museum Night visitors could discover the intriguing exhibition Opaque Spirits by Peruvian artist Arturo Kameya (Lima, 1984). A tiled bathhouse that functions as a restaurant, a multi-armed beer fountain, and a large upstairs room with mechanical fish: Kameya has transformed the house of Marres into a ghost hotel. Every room represents a debt owed by the state to the people of Peru. The rooms are inhabited by ghosts who have come to collect these debts.
Youth programExtended
The members of Extended presented their end project ‘The Scent of Heritage’ at the Jan van Eyck Academie.
Performance PACHAMAMA (or: how some of you unexpectedly became a potato…)
During Museum Night visitors could see the performance of Uruguayan artist, dancer and performer Amalia Herrera and Dutch artist, performer and director Woody Richardson Laurens.
Mark your calendars for the next edition of Museum Night: 11 April 2025.
FASHIONCLASH @ Marres with work by designers and artists Roumans, UGO WOATZI, TIM VAN DER PLAS and André Konings.
The 15th edition of the international and interdisciplinary FASHIONCLASH Festival will take place from 17 – 19 November 2023 in Maastricht. The garden of Marres is also one of the venues where you can discover work by a new generation of designers and performing artists from all over the world.
Admission to the garden is FREE.
The three-day program with an exhibition, performances, talks, workshops and fashion film screenings, showcases projects that explore, contextualize and celebrate contemporary fashion culture. During the festival the work of more than 100 designers, artists and makers from more than 30 different countries can be seen.
FASHIONCLASH Festival is all about discovering, stimulating and co-shaping current developments in fashion and opening up these developments to a wide audience. Participants of the festival belong to a generation of designers and artists who explore and question the boundaries of their discipline. With their works they move between the transdisciplinary domains of fashion, social design and visual arts.
Marres, VIA ZUID, de Brakke Grond, Dansateliers and FASHIONCLASH proudly present performance festival Rooms.
Young makers and established talents offered performance, theater, visual arts, dance, fashion and music. A weekend during which fragile dresses brought colorful stained glass to life, where conductor’s bodies turned into living scores, manuscripts got dictated and a shoe merchant brought you along into absurdist power relations.
Line up: buren Merette van Hijfte & Pleuni Veen Kinga Jaczewska Mauricio Limon David Maroto Genevieve Murphy Ika Schwander in collaboration with Fran Hayes
Regular: € 40,00 Student: € 20,00 Day passes are not available anymore.
A ticket provides full access to all performances on either of the two days. The program of Rooms remains the same on both Saturday and Sunday, with the exception of David Maroto’s performance, which will take place on Saturday. With a valid day pass, you get to see the entire line up. For a break, you can visit the Marres Kitchen restaurant or relax in our public city garden.
The next edition of Rooms is scheduled for January 25-26, 2025, we hope to see you again!
Line up
buren presents the prelude of their work shoe/farm, which will premiere in February of 2024. Departing from their respective backgrounds, a farm in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen and a shoe store along the Belgian coast, Melissa Mabesoone and Oshin Albrecht merge the worlds ‘farm’ and ‘shoe’. They step into their ancestors’ shoes and play with the habits, customs, sayings and vocabulary connected to farm life and shoe sales. In doing so, they link their experiences to broader social issues surrounding production processes, working conditions and consumerism.
Mabesoone (Knokke, 1988) and Albrecht’s (Bruges, 1986) two-woman collective buren bring critical, absurdist sketches about community, domesticity, gender, (art) history and neoliberalism. Their work has been shown on many international stages, amongst which at Centrale Fies (Italy), Teatro Nacional D. Maria II (Portugal), Szene (Salzburg) and within the discursive program Feminist School. The collective published a graphic novel titled STW, your favorite station! and became resident artist at Kaaitheater in 2023.
concept by buren (Oshin Albrecht & Melissa Mabesoone) created with: Oshin Albrecht, Melissa Mabesoone, Benjamin Cools, Benne Dousselaere, Vera Martins, Famke Dhont, Margaux Janssens produced by: au bureau co-productie: Kaaitheater, Kunstencentrum BUDA, workspacebrussels, C-takt, KAAP, de Brakke Grond, Theaterfestival Boulevard, Playground festival (STUK, Museum M), apap-FEMINIST FUTURES, a project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, Marres
Pleuni Veen and Merette van Hijfte present the visual poem PAL, which gives shape to the moment when we exchange freedom for safety. In doing so, they respond to the various meanings of the adverb, which refers to the original, Dutch expression “pal staan,” and its figurative meaning “to be immobile” or “to stand firm.”
As a mathematics student, Veen (1994, NL) is intrigued by the balance between the certain yet indeterminate nature of the world, and between the understandable and the intangible. Contact, friction and wonder are central to her work.
Van Hijfte (1994, NL) is a playful performer and energetic maker, who is not afraid to act from her intuition and impulses, making her work explosive and gritty. Following her graduation at the Mime School, she has been active as an actress, a filmmaker and member of the Collective BAMBAMBAM.
Credits camera: Samuel van Keeken Muziek: Rint Mennes
Foto: Samuel van Keeken
Kinga Jaczewska (Poland, 1991) is a dancer and choreographer whose work focusses on what is often rendered invisible or commonly escapes our attention. Accordingly, her Rooms performance Raw and Tender, which she has made in collaboration with Agnese Forlani and composer Raphael Malfliet, looks at the functionality and corporality of motherhood – at the contradictions which it consists of. It comes as a response to Jaczewska’s earlier poem mothers.
Jaczewska’s previous works encompassed performance, video, installation, text and photography, and have been presented in theater spaces including Kunstcentrum Nona (Mechelen) and Magdalenazaal (Brugge), as well as at the Kunsthal Antwerp. In 2021, she was awarded de PrixFintroPrijs in the category of theater and dance.
Agnese Forlani (1997) is an Italian dancer and textile maker who is currently completing her Master’s degree in dance. In her artistic practice, she experiments with costume, scenography and materiality in dialogue with the dancing body.
‘Time it takes’ Photo: Diego Franssens
In 2022, Mauricio Limón de León launched Les petits pois sont verts… Les petits poissons rouges; a collection of stained-glass haute couture dresses in collaboration with Adriana Gonzalez Hulshof. In Rooms, the collection is presented in the performance Flowing Sands Slogans. Here, the dresses are shown in a collaboration with Mahoalli Nassourou, Justine Olguín, Laia Vancells Pi and Manu Sol Mateo, performing a choreography of fluid geometries to music composed by Alejandro Contreras Pascual and Limón de León. Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s short television play Quad (1981), Flowing Sand Sloganstakes Beckett’s sequence of movements as its primary structure.A meeting between four characters culminates in a disjointed catwalk performance of mechanized movements.
Previous shows by Limón de León (Mexico City, 1979) presented include A gigantic broom to uncover compelling narratives (Rotterdam, 2020), El primero que ria (Paris, 2023) and his current exhibition Memoria ciega at Museo Cabañas (Guadalajara), curated by Victor Palacios. He is represented by Ellen de Bruijne Projects (Amsterdam), Pequod.CO (Mexico) and Wild- Palms (Düsseldorf).
Adriana Gonzalez Hulshof is Director of Museum Kranenburgh, a museum of modern and contemporary art in Bergen. She was founder and director of Amsterdam Art|Weekend, worked for the Dutch National Opera & Ballet, and has developed art programs for the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, the Prince Claus Fund, ArtHub Asia and others.
Vancells Pi (Blanes, 1993) completed her formal dance training at Codarts Rotterdam, before joining the Tanz Luzerner Theater company, Habemus Corpus and the companies of Roberto G. Alonso and Mari Rovira Crea. She currently works freelance, performing with the Dutch National Opera & Ballet and at festivals across Europe.
Transdisciplinary artist Sol Mateo Rivas Álvarez (Mexico City, 1989) takes his own sexuality as a starting point for his artistic explorations of gender stereotypes, beauty and morality. His works have been shown internationally, most recently at Temporada Alta International Theater Festival (Peru) and at the Centre National du Costume et de la Scène (France).
Nassourou (Mexico City, 1983) works at the intersection of performance, theater, film and still photography. She directed and presented the monologue Medea Redux in 2013 and is a part of the international collective Entre Minas. As a performer, she has collaborated with Barbara Foulkes (Arg- Mex), Pablo Helguera (Mex-USA), and Maj Britsen (Germany) among others.
Lepke Olguin Oaxaca (Mexico City, 1999) attended Paul Valery University in Montpellier, studying Anthropology from 2019 to 2021. Interested in dance, performance, music and spectacle, she currently works freelance, performing in collaboration with cabaret collective Las Suculentas, Manu Sol Mateo, and Limón de León for his show Les petits pois sont verts… Les petits poissons rouges.
Photo: Mauricio Limon
DavidMaroto’s performance is titled after his most recent novella Not All of Me Will Die. This novella exists as an original manuscript in which the author reflects on memory, writing and the desire for posterity. In the performance, Maroto publishes the novella by dictating its contents to a group of participants who each write their own copy by hand. In this way, Maroto distributes his ‘oral novella’ in handwritten unique copies.
Maroto (Spain, 1976) is a visual artist who obtained a PhD from the Edinburgh College of Art for his research The Artist’s Novel: The Novel as a Medium in the Visual Arts. This is the first in-depth study into the artist’s novel as a phenomenon and follows from Maroto and Joanna Zielińska’s project The Book Lovers; a collection and bibliography of artists’ novels that they started in 2011. Maroto’s autonomous workhas been shown at Kanal Centre Pompidou (Brussels), EFA Project Space (New York), and Vigil Gonzales Gallery (Buenos Aires) amongst others.
This performance will only take place on Saturday January 27, 2024.
An initiative of Technology Driven Art, a research group within the art schools Zuyd in collaboration with Out of Sight VZW and Marres. technologydrivenart.org out-of-sight.be
Genevieve Murphy’s Rooms performance Somewhere Someone Is Conducting Right Now views the body as a score. Four conductors, each in a room of their own, depend on fading music and memory as they orchestrate a self-chosen piece in partial silence. This not only draws attention to the individuality of each conductor, but also to music genre and environment. The spaces in between the rooms where different works merge become sonic spaces of their own. When all conduct together and all is heard in synchronicity, the house of Marres will sing.
Murphy (Scotland, 1988) graduated from the Royal Conservatoire of Glasgow, the Birmingham Conservatoire for music and The Royal Conservatoire of The Hague. In her work, she combines performance and visual art with contemporary classical music, to deal with subjects of psychology and disability. Her compositions have been performed in concert halls and art galleries, amongst which het Concertgebouw, het Muziekgebouw, W139, Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), La Fenice (Venice), Old Fruitmarket (Glasgow) and Theatre Spektakel (Zurich). Murphy was awarded an Honorary Membership of The Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in 2019.
Ed Liebrecht graduated with distinction from the Royal Academy of Music, where he was awarded the Fred Southall Prize for his final performance. He is committed to bringing ideological variety in his work that merges diverse influences. His upcoming projects include a jazz orchestra collaboration with Oxford University Orchestra, a return to the Haydn Chamber Orchestra for the Walton Violin Concerto.
Composer and conductor Ezequiel Menalled (Buoneos Aires, 1980) received his Bachelor and Master degrees in conducting from the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague. He works with various genres, with or without the use of electronics and other technological media, and ranging from solos to large ensembles. In 2003 he founded the Dutch Ensemble Modelo62, and has since served as its artistic director.
Libia Hernandez’ (Cuba, 1965) rejects the idea that classical music is predominantly for a small elite, and looks to cultivate new listeners and an ever-widening group of people to experience classical music as current, necessary and irreplaceable – an enduring force that bridges cultures and continents. In 2024 Hernandez will conduct a new opera written by Monique Krüs, Piratenkoningin at the Nederlandse Reisopera.
Basque conductor and violinist Mirari Etxeberria Guerrero (Andoain, 1998) is the founder, artistic director and principal conductor of Pamplona’s Youth Orchestra. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Violin and a Master’s degree in Musical Investigation, and is currently finishing her formal training at the Amsterdam Conservatory. As assistant conductor, she has previously worked with Juanjo Mena, Martin Sieghart and Ryan Bancroft.
Composer: Vanessa Lann Piece: 9×13 Orange Drummer Beat! Performed by: NeoFanfare 9×13 Composer: Tan Dun Piece: Circle with Four Trios, Conductor and Audience (1992) Performed by: Nieuwe Ensemble Composer: Beethoven Piece: Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 – “Choral”: 2. Molto vivace Performed by: Royal Concertgebouw Orkest Composer: Luciano Berio Piece: Sinfonia for 8 Voices and Orchestra: III. in Ruhig Fließender Bewegung Performed by: Electric Phoenix and Royal Concertgebouw Orkest
Photo: Bas de Brouwer
Ika Schwander and Fran Hayes present Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us. With references to the nymph Daphne and the poet Sappho, the work explores the transformation from human to tree and from life to death. It creates an environment where sensory stimuli are rare and the audience has room to breathe. In this space, questions surface that are normally lost. What might drive someone to trade human existence for something else?
Schwander (Luxembourg, 1999) graduated from the Toneelacademie Maastricht in 2023 with her work è vero, è vero, è vero; a co-production with VIA ZUID and Festival Cement. She makes visual performances and prefers to work in border areas where different mediums meet. Her work explores themes including trauma, care, religion, ecology and death.
Hayes (Dorchester, 1999) is a multimedia artist based in London whose practice explores the relationships that form in the spaces between the digital and the physical, Hayes’ practice mixes science-fiction influences with references to current issues such as ecological breakdown and the consequences of capitalism and to everyday occurrences. The works range from 3D modelling and animating to ceramics and writing.
In the weekend of September 4 and 5 of 2021, Marres launched performance festival Rooms. Rooms presents new work by young makers and established talents. In the homely chambers of Marres, exiting theatre, dreamy films, intimate dance pieces and extraordinary visual arts alternate. Behind the doors of the rooms, ten makers take you on a two-day expedition to unexplored worlds.
Kiem is a stream of thoughts, trying to catch up with itself in fits and starts. A failed reflection on scale, context, language and people.
Sa: 1.30 pm / Sun:1.30 & 4.30 pm (balzaal)
In GOT 2 4 GET, Koning tries to not divide herself and the world into one ‘I’ and millions ‘others’. She surrenders. In a ritual incantation with the audience on her side, she defies gravity and sings away thoughts with one goal: to be allowed to dissolve into a greater whole.
Sa: 12.45 & 3.45 pm / Sun:2.15 (schouwkamer)
Treat thy neighbour as thyself is a stream of consciousness exploring the discomfort of speaking your mind. A woman sits on a chair that for some reason has been put onto a platform. She has something to say and she will need to figure out how to do this. She might be addressing someone specifically. Sometimes the stage tries to highlight her words, other times it seems to contradict or even interrupt her.
Sa: 4.15 pm / Sun:12.00 pm (balzaal)
In this personal solo, in which Levi navigates in between dance and storytelling, memory and farewell are the central themes. She brings to life a multi-faceted and almost, but not quite, gossipy portrait of intimacy and distance within a family. She invites you to reflect on your own family history and the farewell of previous generations. The performance challenges you to open up to notions such as impermanence, memory and past.
Sun:12.00 & 3.00 pm (tuinkamer)
Two bodies in a perpetual embracement; skin to skin, bones entangle and muscles interweave each other in one persisting movement. Since the global pandemic outbreak in 2020, our approach to physical contact has changed radically. Embracing each other has become a scarce physical act, solely allowed in private. In presence of an embracement highlights the importance of the simple but vital act of an embracement.
Sa: every 15 minutes between 12.30 – 1.30 & 2.00 – 3.00 & 3.30 – 4.15 / Sun: every 15 minutes between 12.45 – 1.30 & 2.00 – 3.00 & 3.30 – 4.30 (filmkamer)
The photographic story Flipping The Bird takes you to the dunes; the starting point of a quest to make contact with flora and fauna. The film ends in an explosion; a plea to break free from your solid ground and to choose a new direction. Flipping The Bird is a beautiful and compact work of art, in which language and image constantly reinforce each other.
Sa: 2.15 / Sun:12.45 & 3.45 (schouwkamer)
In Ik ben gestolen, Schouten tries to share something about the subject she initially tried to avoid: the unconditional love of a child for his parent. This monologue is a letter to her father. She demands of him, longs for him, loves him and looks back on him. In a sober setting, her words and her presence on the floor, which she uses as an instrument, are central. By telling her personal story she hopes to touch the universal.
Sa: 1.30 & 4.30 pm / Sun: 12 pm (tuinkamer)
Ten of Swords is a slow pace exploration on the transitional moment from life to death. A space, scarcely decorated with sound, tools and creatures, invites you to inhabit and examine a last breath.
Sa + Sun: continuously 12 – 5 pm (voorkamer)
From his son in Lomé in Togo, Teeken (1944) received a photo depicting his son’s wife, mother-in-law, their two children and his family-in-law. The composition of the photo inspired him to create the motif for a painting: the tousled rhythm of their heads and limbs around the cluttered coffee table within the closed shape of the heavy sofa.
In these 24 gouaches, Teeken (1944) investigates the chaos and order of his kitchen table. Every day he sees this round table, often things piled on top of it. The visual poetry of circular objects, such as cups, plates and glasses. against other, almost shapeless, items like a transparent plastic bag: the complexity, disorder and at the same time a certain arrangement fascinate him.
Wilsons’s film is an inverted dream in which we disappear. She has been spinning around her own axis for too long and the earth, less and less solid, opens up. What happens at the ends of the circle? Wilsons’s work creates an open space for imagination and magic.
Sa + Sun: continuous 1.00 – 16.00 pm (garden)
Listen to stories about art works from all over the world with The Invisible Collection in the beautiful garden of Marres. Afterwards, together with your family and friends, you’ll learn how to imagine these beautiful stories in a workshop.
Táctica Sintáctica: Touching with your eyes, seeing with your hands
All of Maastricht will be under the spell of Museumnacht Maastricht on Friday 14 April 2023. During this extraordinary art night out, you can witness the city transform and the world of art come to life with a once-in-a-night-time programme. Enjoy with one single ticket extraordinary art exhibitions, breathtaking performances, exciting cross-overs, video-art, workshops, tours, live music, and more. It’s almost an art in itself to be able to take it all in.
The exhibition Táctica Sintáctica by artist Diego Bianchi and curator Mariano Mayer subverts museum rules in order to provide a prominent space to the body: Art works are scattered in the rooms, some partly hidden, others can only be viewed when visitors are willing to squat, climb or kneel down. A true playground for visitors with the works of David Hockney, Julia Spínola, Dan Flavin, Dora García, Jimmie Durham and Joachim Koester, and many others. During Museum Night, visitors will be presented with a playful training for the body. The radical question is: what does the body want?
Extended, the youth department of Marres and the Jan van Eyck Academy, takes visitors through their research on body experience, identity and ecology.
In the weekend of 10 and 11 June, the second edition of ROOMS Performance Festival took place.
In ROOMS young makers and established talents take you on an expedition to unexplored worlds with dazzling dance pieces, mysterious theater, experimental jazz and dreamy films.
Led by Amsterdam-based choreographer and performer Miri Lee (South Korea, 1975), Collectief Imprography is an independent artist platform focusing on advanced levels of impromptu performance forms. Since 2018, Lee has been organizing the Co-Session Series, fostering a close collaborative scheme among its professional dancers and musicians from various artistic backgrounds.
Judith Engelen (Belgium, 1995) makes physical and associative performances in which she combines fast technology with slow literature. In addition, her work always has a strong connection to psychoanalysis and biology. Abel Enklaar (the Netherlands, 1995) is an interdisciplinary artist who explores the intersection of technology, identity and environment through performances and installations. Their work explores the impact of technology on our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Enklaar has presented their work at festivals and venues around the world.
Nina Marte Wilson (1998, the Netherlands) graduated as a performer and visual artist from the Institute of Performing Arts, Maastricht in 2022. During her studies, Wilson started to replace the stage with other landscapes and herself with objects and elements. Starting from a theatrical background she moves towards other media, including film, photography, animation, installation and food. In a playful and inventive way, Wilson creates a ritual in which the spectator is offered the silence and space to become absorbed in the moment. Everything shown, is born out of situations or landscapes she puts herself in. Working intuitively, she grounds, get bogged down, collects and listens, overwhelming and sincere, with the softest touch.
With a signature of rooted groove in combination with well-tempered outbursts, drummer Sun-Mi Hong (South Korea, 1990) has placed herself strongly in the Dutch jazz scene. By approaching the moment in a meditative fashion, Hong achieves the ability to bring something entirely original to the band stand. Known for his distinct trumpet tone, out-of-the-box creativity and diversity of projects, Alistair Payne (Scotland, 1995) is a prominent name amongst the new wave of Dutch jazz.
The work of Arno Schuitemaker (the Netherlands, 1976) arises from existential questions and is an ongoing quest for the mystery of our bodies and ourselves. Hyperphysical and immersive, they receive praise for the depth created at the crossroads of the intimate and the universal. In his performances, sensory experience is prioritized over narrative. Schuitemaker has shown his work at renowned venues and contemporary performing arts festivals in over 25 countries.
Alesya Dobysh (Russia, 1989) and Marina Pravkina (Russia, 1986) met 15 years ago being a part of the Moscow urban dance scene. During that period they mastered footwork oriented club styles, such as House dance and UK Jazz Fusion, self-studied fundamentals of contemporary dance and actively participated in a “battle” dance scene. In developing their choreographic material, they draw inspiration from the abstraction and deconstruction of footwork patterns. To explore their interdependence, performers construct rules and play obscure games, finding new ways to complement each other’s physicality and its limitations.
Please save the date for the third edition of Rooms, scheduled for 27 and 28 January 2024, we hope to see you again then! Keep an eye on our website and social media.
