Amulet & Photon: Join us for the screening and performance event

Stills from 'Amulet'

Het HEM and The Couch will present a new commissioned video work, ‘Amulet,’ by Molly Palmer, on July 6th. The film will be shown in Het HEM’s screening room, preceded by a new performance, ‘Photon,’ by artist Sancha Meca Castro. The performance revisits the gestures, objects and texts developed during the filming process of ‘Amulet’.

In ‘Amulet’, participants look for signs within the ordinary. The group shares contradictory – sometimes overwhelming or unsettling, and yet intriguing – experiences of finding beauty in the signals they receive. Instead of tuning them out, as they have been taught to, they decide to move towards them, to wilfully rediscover and connect to rhythms of looking and listening. As in all of Palmer’s work, Amulet is layered and complex yet visceral and intuitive; a work that expands its circle of protection to all who need it.

Join us at the screening and performance surrounding Amulet.

 
 

“We tend to think that our perception is linear, but in fact it is radically fragmented. We blink, we turn our heads, we travel at extraordinary speed. Our vision is interrupted and held inside devices that open endless tunnels to other locations, images, maps and information.” – Molly Palmer

The bar is open at 18:00 for drinks and bites. The performance begins at 19:00. As the performance ends, the audience will be guided to Het HEM’s screening room to watch 'Amulet'. You’re welcome to come even earlier for a walk around the building and a visit of the Open Studio Expo #4.

Stills from 'Amulet'

On the occasion of the release of Molly Palmer’s film ‘Amulet’, commissioned for The Couch, Het HEM invites artist Sancha Meca Castro to create a performance that continues the investigation started during the filming process. Sancha is one of the participants in ‘Amulet’, in which you follow four people playfully exploring Het HEM and the Bossche School convent at Buitenplaats Doorburgh in Maarssen.

An amulet is an object that is ritually made to protect and give strength to someone. Something they carry with them and is made from materials that have a symbolic or physical resonance. The conversations and friendships that grew in Palmer’s film are a kind of amulet-making. Now, after the film has been made, Sancha’s performance acts as an amplification and reinforcement of the amulet.

In an act of rescaling the exploration off-screen, and referencing Palmer’s quote about Amulet’s “endless tunnels that lead to other locations”, this performance unfolds within Het HEM like a place being visited for the last time. In collaboration with sound designer Inês Malheiro and performer Rose Bouvet, Sancha revisits the gestures, objects and texts developed by Molly whilst also amplifying the site’s own moods and manifestations.

Photon emerges as an exploration of unarticulations. Unarticulated thoughts, unacknowledged tones, unrecorded memories, unexpected silences. In this process, the hierarchies of our sensorial systems are reorganised. Using skin-located amulets as a means to generate scores for the body, Photon poses the question that if our thoughts are not linear, how do we piece together and give meaning to narratives and the objects within them?

The length of the performance is 30 minutes, with a 30-minute prologue. The prologue starts at 19:00, inviting the audience to enter the space as it gradually becomes activated. As the performance comes to a close, the audience will be guided into Het HEM’s screening room to view Amulet, allowing them to revisit the spaces and movements they just experienced, now portrayed on screen.

Biographies

Sancha Meca Castro, Pt, b.1997
Sancha is an artist and performer, working with bodies, textures and images through speculative practices and delicate investigations on the nature of objects and archives and on how their uses determine variation. Chance, secret scores and ‘spending time with’ are structures that drive her moods, zones and processes. Sancha is a graduate of the Fine Arts, University of Porto, and is currently studying Choreography at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam.

Inês Malheiro, Pt, b.1997
Inês Malheiro creates sound narratives using the voice as raw material, whether improvised or premeditated - recycling, broken voices and dismembered songs. In 2022, Inês released her debut album “Deusa Náusea” via Lovers and Lollypops and between 2018 and 2020 created “The endless chaos has an end”, a music series based on emotional and cheesy moments.

Rose Bouvet Zieleskiewicz, FR, b.2002
Rose Bouvet Zieleskiewicz is a performer and choreographer whose works function with fictionalising meanings to create impossible architectures and poetics as an escape from language. As a performer, they worked with choreographers like Adrienn Hòd, Jenna Jalonen and Csaba Molnar. They are now studying in SNDO the bachelor of choreography in the class of 2022-2026.

Molly Palmer, UK, b.1984
Molly Palmer works between film, installation, sculpture, choreography and music to explore the strangeness within ordinary things and the technologies of belief that transform our experience of them. Her research and long term collaborations value shifts of perception that alter our relation to reality, and examine the psychedelic dimensions of experiences such as grief, complex trauma and diagnosed difference.