As part of the festival Performing Proximties, Jeanne and Igor spoke publicly about 'Almost You' — an experiment in creating spaces of hospitality between artist and funder. Jeanne and Igor were invited to talk about their experience of swapping working places by festival curator Bettina Knaup.
In the intimate space of a provisional public kitchen (installed especially for the festival), Jeanne and Igor spoke ad-hoc and upfront about the unusual circumstances that are emerging out of swapping their professional positions and contexts. Jeanne and Igor's dialogue was an impromptu performance; they put their experiences of the last 10 Wednesdays on the table, and considered how the very act of hosting and guesting each other, the physical act of being in each others work environments, opens up more delicate evaluation beyond the predictable binary oppositions between host<>guest and funder<>funded. The experiment of Almost You is opening up new possibilities and unforeseen angles for funder and artist alike to learn from one another.
The Almost You performance took place in an interim kitchen in the foyer of the Beurs theatre at 20h on 31 January 2008. Looking like a soap-opera stage set of the '70s, this festival kitchen was put together by artist Meggie Schneider from furnituture and essential kitchen objects she found and collected in charity shops and on flea markets all over Brussels. Throughout the Performing Proximities festival, the kitchen provides each night gallons of soup to a hungry audience and performers, and a welcoming space for conversations before in a setting filled with domestic artefacts that conjure familiarity, domestic strangeness and sentimentality.
