Poor being poor W.C.
Early 2009, Jan Knops, artistic director of Initia vzw (an organisation which develops and carries out projects on contemporary visual arts and practical philosophy) put the finishing touches to a project about poverty in Antwerp, Belgium.
He wanted to approach the issue of poverty from an unconventional perspective; one of the key questions focused on the extent to which a change of context would affect human thinking and actions, specifically of people who live in poverty. During his search for artists, he visited a presentation by W.C. in Café Daringman in Brussels entitled 'Het huis van de Consumisten' and organised by Etablissement d'en face as part of 'De avonden in Daringman'.
This is where he decided to invite W.C. to participate in the project. The area between Central Station and Sint Jansplein in Antwerp is frequented by an exceptionally large number of homeless people and addicts. With the help of street workers of Free Clinic vzw and Activering vzw, contact was made with these people. A select group agreed to participate in the project.
This group of the Antwerp 'poor'/needy were invited to leave their own context and to travel to Saint-Claude in France. Le Montavoix is a wooded mountain side in the French Jura, near Saint-Claude where W.C. works as a forestier, which he interprets as someone who roams the woods/a wanderer, and is converting a small empty property into a refuge. He considers the refuge as the most public building and the woods surrounding the town as one of the most current public spaces.
W.C. feels that public space — as defined previously by him in among other, De Witte Raaf, issue 128, July - August 2007 - is of vital importance. Public space can be gauged using such indicators as needy and refuse. It fills him with sadness to see that this type of space is increasingly disappearing as he is convinced of the fact that we are all needy and that we are all in need of public space.
On 20 June 2010, the guests, four men and one woman and three dogs, arrived from Antwerp in Le Montavoix. There were no modern comforts at the refuge where they stayed, no running water and no electricity. They spent one week there together with W.C. W.C. and his guests agreed that they would work as a film crew, with the cameraman, lighting engineer, sound engineer, director(s), and actors all working together, and that the guests would be the actors playing their own parts. However, it was established in advance that no film would actually be made. What would be created, was unclear at the time. Together, they went on several walks through the rugged limestone landscape; refreshed themselves at waterfalls; cooked, ate and drunk at the large, wooden table; stared into the wood fire. After a week, the guests left Le Montavoix to go back home.
W.C. stayed behind and three months later, he began to write a story. He only used sentences which he had heard so often during the guests' stay at Montavoix or which had made such an impact on him that he found them hard to forget. The sentences were spoken by the guests in Antwerp dialect and this is how they resounded in his head. He wrote down the dialect, a dialect he does not speak himself, as best he could phonetically. Using these phrases which had been unintentionally recorded in his mind, this reduced language, he created POOR BEING POOR, a story that took on the form of a play.
| auteurs : | Wim Cuyvers (W.C.),Jan Knops (red.) |
| uitgeverij : | Initia vzw, 2011 |
| translated by : | Taal-Ad-Visie, Grote Moerstraat 94a, 8200 Bruges, Belgium |
| printed by : | Die Keure NV, Kleine Pathoekeweg 3, 8000 Bruges, Belgium |
| ISBN : | 9789077905005 |
