Common Grounds City Lab
What needs does the city of Ghent, and foremost its inhabitants, have? And how can a city theatre provide an artistic response to them? In the Common Grounds City Lab, NTGent seeks common ground with as many residents of Ghent as possible, both in the city centre and on the outskirts.
Interview by Evelyne Coussens (2024)
So how’s the ‘Ghent’ in ‘NTGent’ doing? Wonderfully, it turns out. Along with the main artistic lines relating to technology and care, the city itself will have a key role in the coming seasons, as a stage, partner and inexhaustible source of inspiration. Matthias Velle, the city dramaturg, and Rojda Gülüzar Karakuş, artistic process coach, explain how and above all why NTGent has chosen to focus so explicitly on the city.
Do you remember the All Greeks Festival? In the first half of 2024, NTGent descended upon eight neighbourhoods in Ghent to present four Greek tragedies in each one, in partnership with mainly local partners. The entire festival was held in public space: it was free of charge and accessible to all Ghent residents. The exciting vibe lingered for a long time, both in the city and at NTGent.
The equal distribution of space and resources, knowledge and craft, had overturned the ‘normal’ production logic of a major theatre. In its place came an audience logic, according to which the audience did not come to the theatre, but the theatre mingled with the people –– in an inviting, non-intrusive way.
Karakuş, still an audience member at the time, saw what a significant impact that move had. As Karakuş points out, “All Greeks showed how you can expose the struggles of the city in situ, right where they happen. How that discourages moralism. And how powerful that experience is for the audiences. We realised we needed to hold onto those insights.”
TO RESIST
Hold onto them and develop them further –– that is also the explicit desire of NTGent’s artistic leaders. So you could encapsulate the third artistic line, the one most focused on the city, in the term ‘participative art practices’, Matthias Velle explains: “Participative art practices don’t start with a completely predefined form or content, but with places experiencing a certain need. Artists go to that place to consider what is already there and how they can offer an artistic response in partnership with the people around them. The way they involve their surroundings leads to a great potential for social criticism and emancipation.”
We need such practices today more than ever before, Velle and Karakuş both believe: “The neoliberal norm is becoming ever more coercive, forcing itself mercilessly onto the fight against poverty, onto culture, education, urban development, care, etc. The fabric of our society is weakening; we’re being split up into isolated individuals. Participative art practices can resist with their collective imagination and power to connect.”
Velle adds, “To achieve that as a city theatre, we have to step off the beaten paths. We need to embark on cross-sectoral partnerships with science, welfare, education and so on, because we don’t just want to be a theatre, but a countermovement as well.” This is a radical turn for a city theatre that is traditionally at the heart of bourgeois society.
The fabric of our society is weakening; we’re being split up into isolated individuals. Participative art practices can resist with their collective imagination and power to connect
So won’t there be any more plays to see at Sint-Baafsplein? “Of course there will!” Velle insists. “Internationally renowned productions, in fact, such as the one by the company BERLIN. It’s just that the ‘familiar’ form of theatre will be supported by other projects that generate just as much emotion, rapture and connection."
"Take Firestarter, the fire ritual by Barbara Raes and Alexandra Broeder, which will open our season: it has all the emotional and critical potential of a play. The difference is that the potential extends even further now, especially to people who wouldn’t normally come to the theatre.”
Velle pauses. “You know, we’re proud to include the city in our name. It obliges us to develop an artistic proposition that attempts to address as many Ghent residents as possible.” In Firestarter, NTGent ignites both the 25-26 season and its own brand-new vision. Although, Karakuş tells us, the fire ritual itself is merely the tip of the volcano.
NTGent invites artists, organisations and ‘ordinary’ citizens from inside and outside the cultural sector to consider the idea of ‘a new beginning’ –– with the fire as a symbol of purification and vitality. How exactly all these partners will define the meaning of this new beginning is something they will choose for themselves. On the day of the ritual, they will run like strings of festive bunting through the city, to a public place where the fire ritual will be enacted.
“It is the culmination of a far longer, invisible process,” Velle explains. “The greatest value lies in the many partnerships, the research we do beforehand, the conversations we learn from. There are artists and cultural centres in Ghent that I look up to in awe, with a rich tradition of participatory work. They can enrich us with their experience and expertise, customised methodologies and close-knit networks. As a big cultural centre, we can help to give their valuable work more visibility, to dream, think and do together on the scale of an entire city. And we can connect ourselves to other practices and audiences.”
To get to know these ‘others’ even better, NTGent also needs to step physically beyond its borders. Velle quotes the Ghent-based artist Elly Van Eeghem when he speaks of ‘shifting the core’: the heart of the theatre at Sint-Baafsplein is going wandering, moving from the centre to the edges of the city. So whereas the first edition of NTTent, at the beginning of the 24-25 season, was still held at Sint-Baafsplein, the bright red tent will be raised for the second edition, in the spring of the 26-27 season, somewhere on the outskirts. For the project Soft Landing — An Atlas of the Undefined City, NTGent already began mapping ‘urban voids’ in the closing session of the first NTTent. These are undefined, often nameless white spaces, frayed edges of the urban fabric. Places where people have no voice, places of unacknowledged loss, but also places that evade the compulsive logic of manageability, control and efficiency. That is precisely why they also hold utopian potential –– that of an alternative, radical imagination. And these are exactly the places where the NTTent will go wandering from now on.
Karakuş gives a few examples: the chopped-down Bloemekenswijk woods, the sorely missed bus stops that have been demolished in the outlying districts, and the somewhat bizarre semi-public space between Dr. Guislain Museum and the psychiatric centre. Karakuş: “These are apparently meaningless places with no function, but precisely because they offer resistance to neoliberal logic, they can provide breathing space to reimagine our city and society.”
The Turkish visual artist Servet Koçyiğit shows NTGent the way. His Soft Landing (2020) consists of imaginary maps inspired by the city of Istanbul. They depict ecological disasters rendered in silky-soft embroidery. Other maps refer to colonial pain and the uprooting that comes with migration. They are public, physical and mental landscapes, carefully and lovingly created in partnership with schools and local communities. The textiles symbolise the need to feel safe, the need for a home –– a desire that many textile workers in Ghent with a migrant background will also recognise. In the spring of 2027, this long-term investigation into the undefined places in Ghent will result in a city project, and Ghent will get its own ‘soft landing’. This distant horizon immediately raises a final question, which is not unimportant: how to handle time.
Participative art practices are slow, grounded processes based on gradually growing trust. They are at odds with a result-oriented logic of production in which immediate visibility is crucial. Velle and Karakuş realise that they need to brace themselves, not so much against their own cultural centre but against the zeitgeist that is also driving NTGent forward, and maybe their own impatience as well. Ultimately, they are not working towards that one big première –– their work for the coming seasons consists simply of trying to move a stone. Karakuş smiles: she knows her stuff.
“My expectations are modest,” Karakuş says, “but every time somebody meets somebody else in one of our projects, I feel rich.” “I know we won’t be able to change the city as quickly as that,” adds Velle, “but I get a lot of energy from what we managed to achieve at the beginning of last season with the NTTent, which is the perfect place to engage in conversation with communities. At the end of the first edition, students at Ligo (Centre for Basic Education, Ed.) invited the audience to come to cook and eat with them, and to tell their stories as part of their vegetable gardening project Tomat. Afterwards, someone e-mailed me to say: ‘Now, for the first time, I have the sense that absolutely everyone is welcome at NTGent.’ That was so wonderful to hear. I genuinely believe we can have an impact.”
