INFERNO

BELLE-ÎLE – Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Steven Fillet – MACS Le Grand-Hornu (BE) – 06.09.26 > 01.11.26.

Au début de l’année, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker et Steven Fillet ont présenté pour la première fois à la galerie Xavier Hufkens à Bruxelles des œuvres nées de leur collaboration artistique. Cet automne, un nouveau chapitre s’ouvre au MACS avec Belle-Île, une série de sept peintures monumentales qui seront exposées dans la longue salle-pont du Musée.

Belle-Île a vu le jour à l’automne 2024 à Belle-Île-en-Mer, au large de la Bretagne. Pour ce projet, les artistes ont choisi de quitter l’atelier et de travailler en plein air, dans un environnement indomptable, naturellement ouvert, en constante évolution, se dérobant à lui-même à tout instant.

Ils ont tendu une immense toile de cinq mètres sur vingt en équilibre sur une falaise au-dessus de l’océan. Une étendue d’un blanc saisissant, dont l’abstraction et la pureté contrastent avec l’environnement dominé par la démesure des éléments : l’eau, le vent, la lumière… Ces cent mètres carrés immaculés – à la fois toile et tapis de danse – ne sont pas remplis, mais lentement investis par le mouvement et le dessin qui, dès le départ, sont indissociables. Il en résulte une accumulation, une lente sédimentation de gestes et de temps qui se déposent couche après couche, rendant finalement visible une présence : un lieu, deux corps, un moment.

Amnesia, performance live en collaboration avec Alain Franco

En dialogue avec les œuvres sur toile, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker présente également un nouveau solo, Amnesia. Inspirée de l’ultime sonate pour piano de Beethoven (la sonate n° 32 en ut mineur, Op. 111), la performance se déploie telle une ligne horizontale sur toute la longueur de la salle-pont. Cet espace évoque l’immensité de l’océan, l’horizon de Belle-Île-en-Mer, où le projet a vu le jour. À l’inverse, le solo apparaît comme une empreinte fragile et éphémère dans le temps et l’espace, à la croisée du souvenir et de l’oubli. Tout comme le dessin se compose de différentes strates temporelles, Alain Franco développe une « dramaturgie musicale ». Dans ce qu’il appelle un « contrepoint de champs », danse, musique et image se juxtaposent sans pour autant se fondre en un tout.

Live performance : 13.09, 04.10, 25.10, 01.11

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BELLE-ÎLE – Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Steven Fillet – MACS Le Grand-Hornu (BE) – 06.09.26 > 01.11.26.

Earlier this year Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Steven Fillet presented work from their artistic collaboration for the first time at galerie Xavier Hufkens in Brussels. This autumn a new chapter follows at MACS Grand-Hornu with Belle-Île: a series of seven monumental paintings to be shown in the Salle Pont.

Belle-Île came into being in the autumn of 2024 on Belle-Île-en-Mer, an island off the coast of Brittany. The project took the artists out of their familiar studio and into the open air, in a landscape that eludes control : open in character, in constant flux, and perpetually eluding itself.

At the edge of the ocean a canvas five by twenty metres was laid out. A striking white field, abstract and pure, contrasting with the surrounding space where the excess of reality holds sway: water, wind, light… Those hundred square metres of white space – canvas and dance floor at once – are not filled in but slowly occupied through movement and drawing that are, from the outset, inseparable. What emerges is an accumulation, a slow sedimentation of gestures and time that settles layer upon layer, ultimately making presence visible: a place, two bodies, a moment.

Amnesia, live performance in collaboration with Alain Franco

In dialogue with the works on canvas, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker also presents a new solo: Amnesia. Inspired by Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Opus 111 (Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111), the performance extends as a single horizontal line across the full length of the Salle Pont. The space evokes the openness of the ocean, the horizon of Belle-Île where the project began. The solo, by contrast, stands as a fragile, temporary inscription in time and space, caught in the tension between remembering and forgetting. As the drawing is built up from distinct layers of time, Alain Franco develops a ‘musical dramaturgy’. In what he calls a ‘counterpoint of fields’, dance, music and image are placed alongside one another without being fused into a single whole.

Live performance : 13.09, 04.10, 25.10, 01.11

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Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (b.1960) began her career in 1980 after studying at Maurice Béjart’s Mudra School in Brussels and nyu Tisch School of the Arts. She created her first choreographic work, Asch, and later premiered Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich in 1982. In 1983, she founded the dance company Rosas in Brussels, creating the landmark work Rosas danst Rosas. De Keersmaeker’s choreography is known for its rigorous exploration of the relationship between dance and music, drawing from geometry, numerical patterns, the natural world, and social structures. Her work spans various musical eras, from early music to contemporary and popular idioms.

From 1992 to 2007, Rosas was in residence at the Brussels opera house La Monnaie/De Munt, where De Keersmaeker directed several operas and large ensemble pieces. Iconic works from this period include Drumming (1998) and Rain (2001), both created with the Ictus contemporary music ensemble. In 1995, she founded the school P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) in Brussels. In 2020, she created together with Ivo van Hove a new choreography for West Side Story on Broadway. Since her groundbreaking project Work/Travail/Arbeid, first presented at WIELS in Brussels in 2015, she has also continued to explore the possibilities of dance within the white cube, presenting projects at Tate Modern, London, MoMA, New York, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, the Louvre, Paris and Hangar Bicocca, Milan, among others. De Keersmaeker’s extensive contributions to dance are documented in A Choreographer’s Score, a three-volume monograph offering insights into her creative process. In 2019, at the invitation of Collège de France, she set out to distill her artistic journey and guiding principles into a concise treatise, later published as Incarner une abstraction.

For over forty years, Steven Fillet (b.1966) has worked in the quiet margins of the institutional art world— a deliberate choice to safeguard his artistic autonomy. His oeuvre moves fluidly between figuration and abstraction, between the intimate and the monumental, never yielding to the disciplining logic of style or medium. The material contingency of his work—his preference for provisional, modest materials such as roofing felt—is not a matter of aesthetic caprice, but reflects a nomadic logic: an open, ever-shifting attitude toward form and meaning. Like nature itself, which in his work serves not as a motif but as a model, Fillet grounds his practice in a steadfast refusal of fixation.

Alain Franco (b.1964) graduated in piano and music theory in Belgium and Israel and obtained a post-master degree in xxth century Musicology at the Ircam-Ehess institute of Paris. His genuine interest for contemporary music and art, both as pianist and conductor, resulted in collaborations with leading ensembles and musicians like Ensemble Modern (Frankfurt), Ictus ensemble (Brussels), the Liege Philharmonic Orchestra, the Lyon Opera Orchestra, the Chamber Music Ensemble of La Monnaie (Brussels) and the Oh Ton ensemble (Oldenburg). In addition to that—and as an aesthetic and artistic extension to his practice—he progressively developed an original and overall reflection on representation and performance. This led to artistic collaborations with performers, choreographers and theater directors such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Meg Stuart, Thomas Plischke, Kattrin Deufert, Jan Lauwers, Romeo Castellucci, Isabelle Schad, Benjamin Vandewalle, Arkadi Zaides, Daniel Linehan and Karim Bel Kacem.

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Images: 1,2,3- « Belle-île », video-stills, MACS Grand-Hornu, 2026 – 4,5- Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker performe « Amnesia », en dialogue avec les toiles réalisées par elle et Steven Fillet – 5- 7 monumental canvas at MACS – Copyright the artists – Courtesy Grand-Hornu, Xavier Hufkens Brussels – Photo © Herman Sorgeloos