This is the home of AIR Antwerpen, which every year stages the Open Air Festival here to showcase the results of its residency programme for artists from abroad. Through the efforts of an external inter-disciplinary curator, the house becomes a free port for contemporary art.

With musical centipede Mauro Pawlowski, art critic Marc Ruyters and radio manager Chantal Pattyn as lock-keepers, Open Air has established a tradition of scheduling fairly daring performances.

Carte blanche this year has been given to OHNO Cooperation, a splinter group of the Brussels-based performance group Needcompany, made up of Needcompany’s founder Jan Lauwers and its composer Maarten Seghers. OHNO is bringing in eight international artists, with the same pile of guts and doubt that’s been incorporated in Needcompany’s DNA for 25 years.

Though most visitors will not be familiar with the work of Michael Fliri (Italy), Pontogor (Brazil), Nicolas Field (Switzerland) and Idan Hayosh (Israel), among others, Lauwers and Seghers are sure the collision between these people will create artistic fireworks.

“All the artists have different cultural backgrounds,” says Seghers. “They come to Antwerp to live together in the same house and to work on their own projects. They’re not even working towards a result. But their mutual confrontation creates a certain energy that will rise to the occasion on August 27.”

At first sight, the performance art of Pontogor, who lives on a hill in Rio de Janeiro, may differ from installations by Idan Hayosh, an Israeli installation artist who used to be a soldier in Lebanon. But confronted, it's obvious they come from the same planet. “It’s really moving to see what happens when their worlds collide,” says Lauwers. “We should bear in mind that what they are asked to do is pointless. Maybe their performance will only take a few seconds. Take the Italian artist Roberta Gigante. She will turn the Scheldt River red – but for only a fraction of time.”

Lauwers, avant-garde to the core, is very fond of the concept of Open Air. “We told the artists to ‘just be here and play, and you even get paid a little bit’. And then the miracle happens. It’s precisely that attitude we need in Europe nowadays. Look at what’s happening in London and Norway, and what will happen in Brussels in two or three years’ time….The heads of our governments are saying that our multi-cultural society has failed. One of the consequences seems to be the liquidation of art. But at a time when we have to rethink everything – our notion of democracy, our financial markets, even our art – it would be a far better idea to pay people to think pointlessly.”

It all sounds a bit crazy until Lauwers reminds us of an obvious example: Google, which famously asks their employees to devote about 20% of their working hours to personal projects of their own choosing. It has been hugely successful in developing new applications. “That’s exactly the reason why I believe in these kind of open art houses.”

27 August, 19.00

Air Antwerpen
Oosterweelsteenweg 3
www.needcompany.org