“I went to a couple of matches, and I started thinking that the football stadium was quite interesting, especially in a Belgian context,” recalls Hendrikse. “A club like Mechelen has a very strong and connected group of people around it; much stronger than the whole construct of Belgium. I thought it might be interesting to look at that common identity and how it functions.”

His research led him to the concept of the 12th man, which argues that support from the stands is so important to a football team’s performance that it can be like having an extra player on the pitch. This struck a chord with Hendrikse, whose previous work has involved individuals with opaque or ambiguous identities.

“I thought it was interesting to work from the reality of these fans, boil it down to a generic figure and see what its sphere of action is,” he says. Deciding which approach to use was relatively simple. “For me it quite quickly became performative, because the fan is voice and gesture.”

He returned to KV Mechelen and recorded the crowd. From the sound of the crowd, he selected elements that had unusual or intriguing developments and asked composer Rudi Fisherlehner to set them down in musical notation. In this way the chants, calls and other sounds were condensed down into a single line, some of it abstract but with fragments of language still present.

“From there, we started constructing a piece,” Hendrikse explains. “We tried different elements together. Some worked, some didn’t. It may not seem very composed, but in fact it is hyper-composed.” The next step was to perform the composition. “I wanted to bring this 12th man, which is a generic thing, back to one person.”

He toyed with the idea of performing it himself but instead decided to return to the source, recruiting three supporters – Else, Klaas and Guy – who could read music and agreed to interpret the score. They were put into a studio and filmed performing the sounds and gestures of the 12th man.

“They have a certain set of ideas on how you support your team,” says Hendrikse. “I told them: just perform it the first time how you think it should be done. Sometimes it was very technical, sometimes it was immediately very fan-like.”

From these starting points, Hendrikse asked for variations, but throughout the process he was struck by how much room there was for different interpretations of what was on the page. “I thought the margins would not be so big, but then it happens before your eyes, and you see that the margins are actually rather wide,” he says. “I only half foresaw that it would become all about performing: How do you put yourself on the spot and how do you then act in this situation. That becomes rather personal.”

The resulting video installation, “The Twelfth Man”, contains sequences of each performer standing before a music stand, following the score and performing the calls, whoops, whistles and claps that originally came from the KV Mechelen stands. Sometimes this sounds like an abstract, avant-garde vocal performance, but then something subtly changes, and you get the strongest sensation of a botched pass or a shot at goal somewhere outside the pool of light that isolates each performer.

Hendrikse splits his time between Berlin and Antwerp, where he teaches at the M HKA museum of modern art. He is currently working on a sound installation for a pedestrian tunnel in Antwerp, continuing a series of works that explore the identity of Cameroonian poet Louis-Marie Pouka-M’Bague. But he also has plans for a further piece based on his research at KV Mechelen, this time drawing on a catalogue of 120 gestures that he was able to identify in the stands. Isolated and taken out of context, they take on new performative qualities. “It becomes something between yoga and karate,” he says.

Contour 2013

Contour has changed, and not for the better. Previous editions of Mechelen’s biennial exhibition scattered images and installations throughout the city, sending visitors on a mystery tour of encounters with artists in sometimes quirky locations. This year it concentrates the artists in a dedicated exhibition space at the Hof van Busleyden, with only a few making a second appearance at other venues.

If you still want something of the old-style Contour, then head for the Church of Our-Lady-Acrossthe- Dyle, where 10 well-placed pieces make their own statements yet still interact with the large Gothic building.

“Lucas” by Pablo Pijnappel places a loudspeaker inside a confessional, so that the story of a tourist searching for a toilet in Buenos Aires murmurs through the grille to where the priest would sit. Meanwhile in a side chapel, readings from crime fiction echo off the stone, accompanied by projected fragments of literary theory in Alejandro Cesarco’s “The Reader”.

Then there is “Family Effects”, in which young relatives of the artist Edgardo Aragón Díaz are filmed acting out stories from the family’s history. Shown on a TV screen that stands among seats in the aisle, these often violent scenes feel like moving ex-votos, the sandy light of Mexico blending eerily with the stone of the church.

Contour’s other locations are much less successful. Mechelen prison is only accessible on selected Sundays in September, for a performance piece that requires prior booking. And at the KV Mechelen stadium the art has been confined to the car park rather than allowed through the door.

There are also problems with the central location. Some 25 works have been crammed into a dark, freezing cold, concrete vault that has been dug out under the Hof van Busleyden as a new exhibition space (Contour is the first to use it). You could argue that this allows a concentrated consideration of the exhibition themes of leisure, discipline and punishment, but the result is cacophony, with some of the louder pieces dominating the space. It is simply impossible to concentrate on the quieter work or follow those with extended narratives.

You won’t want to spend too much time in here, so cut to the chase. Highlights include Paul Hendrikse’s “The Twelfth Man” and Josef Dabernig’s “Wisla”, both of which deal with performance and football.

The best work inspired by the prison space is “Prison Score” by American artist Liz Magic Laser. She asked Flemish choreographer Lisbeth Gruwez to develop a piece that reprises iconic gestures from Hollywood prison movies. A video of Gruwez performing in Mechelen prison plays roughly in sync with the original movie fragments.

Until 3 November

Across Mechelen

www.contour2013.be