TINEKE DE MEYER

This performance is part of three-day festival BUITENKANT VOET 2024, curated by dance collective Voetvolk / Lisbeth Gruwez and Maarten Van Cauwenberghe.

Inland Island (15+) finds itself between a guided meditation, where attention becomes an act of imagination, and a séance, unfolding the dichotomies through which we tend to look at the world around us: fiction/reality, near/far, I/other. With a central part and fascination for the hands of the listener. In this a performative installation / poetic audiopiece, you take a seat at a table with a small group of participants. Through headphones, you are addressed by a voice without a body, that speaks about things happening at and far beyond that table. This being is looking for connection, both with the listener as between the listeners. Like a sort of science fiction, Inland Island opens up a broader, more tender view of the present and the individual in it. 

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes” (Agnes Varda)

As a creator/writer, Tineke De Meyer is interested in the intimacy and proximity of spoken word in audio. This leads to hybrid projects in which the analogue meets the digital, more often with an invitation for the listener to experience something in their own body than with an unambiguous, linear narrative. Her texts are associative and sit between poetry, mémoire and short stories. They are committed to mystery and misunderstanding, and questions about how we read (the world, the other), about experience and subjectivity, about how we know things.