Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Steven Fillet

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.

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.