02.04 - 04.06.23

@ z33

change of address: cornershop of daydreams

16-bar mythical city

12/22_corner-slice blueprint

12/22_16-bar mythical city

Scenography for a collective daydream. Open for inhabitation, these disobedient devices derive from an uncanny fantastical Kortrijk as it has been imagined, forgotten, replicated, introspected. Or inspected, as in the music of local rap artists who stir up a shared desire to exit the struggle and start collectivizing the speculative energy of our daydreams.

The Cornershop of Daydreams welcomes you to their interactive exhibition 16 BAR MYTHICAL CITY, free to visit on the ground floor of Leiestraat 24 between the 2nd and 5th of December. From the 6th of December, you will find one unruly scenography adrift in the Bibliotheek a few doors down at Leiestraat 30. Featuring tracks from olsan, Rijmtekkie Spansman, and Siga & Tokalah.

11/22_de stad en de stroate

The Cornershop are moving their daydreaming devices to the medium of music. An upcoming collaboration with De Stroate that combines local hip-hop with strange scenographies of teenage mayhem and rebellion, as well as the weird lost architectures of Kortrijk.

11/22_daydream cooking debrief

31/10/22_daydream cooking

10/22_wonder

10/22_PIPE DREAMS

In 1880 the Leie breaks its banks and the city is sliced at the ankles by a sheet of polished grey. The river spreads its wet skin around the Budafabriek and through the streets of Kortrijk again in 1894, and again in 1925, in 1952, in 1965.

In Pipe Dreams, you are part of the building going through the motions, part of its cognizant infrastructure. Its body in a state of rest or repetition, the building lets a daydream take hold. The daydream arrives like a flood, an energy surged through hallways and streets, displacing intimate memories, grievances and fantasies from their normal stations, scattering them across the cognitive landscape.

The Cornershop of Daydreams have been undertaking site-specific work at the toilets of this building. Here, the daydream is overheard through strange conversation. In one room, poetry of infrastructure is interwoven with newspaper items detailing historic flood events in the city of Kortrijk. In the adjacent room, scientific languages of chain reaction find curious overlaps with personal narratives of labour and daily life on Buda island and beyond. Between these dialogues, sentiments intrude: lost love, unsated frustration, grief, naive ambition. All the unresolved disquiet of the Budafabriek.

Formerly known as Textielfabriek Desmet-Dejaeghere, this building was once a factory where linen was bleached and finished. For a building whose lifeblood is water, human graft, and a desire for hygienic brightness, the toilets are the building’s interchange, its heart. Toilets are understood primarily as transactional spaces of need. But when these sites are shared, they challenge users to exercise trust, mutual respect and nurture. Could they also be a site to push beyond delimited interior privacies, and share in dreaming?

The work begins with listening. Does the water running through the pipe have any knowledge? What can it remember? What does it dream? With these questions arrive a rush of stories and fantasies. Tales of the island on which the building sits, of the city beyond, of meadows, mattresses, strikes and sand under the paving stones. Pipe Dreams vocalises the building’s existential connection to the Leie, evoking movements, interactions and dynamics of water around the site. Among them, the sprinkling of long sheets of pale cloth bleaching in the sun, the vast meadows below being canalised and saturated, the textiles being wound and washed in vats, then wrung, the steam rolling off the hot containers before being expelled over the streets, dissipating softly into the city.

Saidiya Hartman describes daydreaming, ‘‘by seizing hold of the past, one illuminates the broken promises and violated contracts of the present.’’ The daydream is an immersed corporeal experience, manifesting as both a resistance to biopower, but also the algorithmic and ergonomic regulation of cognition that we experience on a daily basis. No doubt these external apparatus influence the daydream, and in this way we hope to access the kernel of reverie which is a radical longing, a hope, an unruly playfulness.