[ Cancelled ] We Are Before

We Are Before is a performance and lecture on the experience of sharing a space, a gesture that will be launching the News From Home festival. Over the last seven years, without being asked or invited, artist Sarah Vanhee has turned up to several meetings that were already underway and started talking about how we live together as human beings and the way in which society is everyone’s co-creation. By making her “guerrilla” speech, she turned each meeting into a political moment. She has surprised more than 8,000 people like this, disrupted their everyday lives with questions both big and small about life. This project was first presented at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in 2013 under the title Lecture For Every One. It then spread to a dozen countries, but remained largely invisible. Like a virus. She is now back in Brussels to share this story of words, love, violence and connection. About people, alone and together. It’s a story about what it means today to express oneself. About the possibility or impossibility of talking to everyone… And about the fact that we are still before. Before the war starts, before we embrace, before we really decide. How, even today, we are before.

This lecture-performance is being presented at the same time as the publication of We Are Before.
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Sarah Vanhee (°1980, Oostende, BE) is an artist, performer and author. Her interdisciplinary work travels in between civil space and institutional art field. She worked in open fields, prisons, private living rooms, theatres, on public canvases, in corporate meeting rooms, etc. Recent works include amongst others undercurrents (intervention), collected screams (lecture-performance), Unforetold (stage performance), The Making of Justice (film), Oblivion (stage performance), Untitled (meetings in private houses), Lecture For Every One (series of intrusions), The C-Project (artist novel and work in public space).
While strongly embedded locally, Vanhee’s work has been presented widely internationally in diverse contexts such as Wiener Festwochen (AT), Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), FTA (Montreal), Festival Actoral (Marseille), PuSh Festival (Vancouver), Jihlavava IDFF, Van Abbe Museum (Eindhoven), Centre Pompidou (Metz), Short Theatre (Rome), iDans (Istanbul), Printemps de Septembre (Toulouse), Forum Alpbach, Noorderzon (Groningen) etc. She co-published Untranslatables and wrote The Miraculous Life of Claire C and TT, as well as other texts. She regularly collaborates with CAMPO (Ghent) and is founding member of Manyone vzw. Sarah Vanhee is supported by Buda Art Centre for the period 2017- 2021, as well as by the APAP network (Creative Europe Programme of the European Union). From September 2018 on, she is a doctoral student at the Antwerp School of Arts, in collaboration with the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts. She was awarded a mandate for her research project “bodies of knowledge – the public space as a forum for the exchange of repressed or underexposed knowledge.”