ASAP
HEARTBREAK

The opening night of ASAP feels sharp, painful, with rough edges, anger and strength.

Bass player and sound sculptor Farida Amadou will open the evening with an intuitive raw bass set, she shapes spontaneous sonic worlds with power, precision, and emotional depth.

bela combines electronic music with pungmul and raw vocals influenced by extreme metal.

Leila Bordreuil embraces the cello as a primary medium for crafting an intense music that moves fluidly between noise, contemporary composition, improvisation, and drone

On 9 March, Julian will be screened, the feature-length debut of Belgian director Cato Kusters. The film opened the 52nd edition of Film Fest Gent and is based on the memoirs of writer, artist, and LGBTQIA+ activist Fleur Pierets.

Julian follows Fleur and Julian, two women who, after getting engaged, come up with the plan to get married in every country where same-sex marriage is legally permitted. This idea evolves into Project 22, a symbolic honeymoon that exposes the fragile boundary between personal love and political reality. After four ceremonies, their journey comes to an abrupt halt.

Through an intimate storytelling style, interwoven timelines, and a strong sensitivity to social issues, Kusters crafts a story that is both deeply personal and universal — a reflection on love, loss, and humanity in a world where LGBTQIA+ rights are increasingly under pressure.

Do you feel supported by our society? Or do you feel rejected, marginalised, or stifled? Many of us carry a broken heart due to the dehumanisation we witness daily, the deepening divides between generations and social groups, and the marginalisation of what truly matters: well-being over profit. Hyster-x invites some of its members and the public (yes, you) to share their experiences in a workshop and literary evening focusing on these pains. Can collective resistance transform grief into unifying activism? How do we find joy and love in difficult times? We will engage in conversation and search for hope in creative self-care and mutual care.

About the evening: Maatschappijn is an evening of literary performances in dialogue with the audience.  

Margot Delaet facilitates a lively conversation between the members of Hyster-x and the audience through artistic performances. Uschi Cop reads excerpts from her debut novel Dodeman, in which a fictional radical collective searches for solutions together. Ella Salvador shares a work in progress entitled De Pauw en het Water (The Peacock and the Water), about love for life. And Anna Borodikhina presents her poetry performance called Gesprek met wat zwijgt (Conversation with what is silent). In between, they talk about how their creative work came about and what the collective means to them.

The crowning glory of the regular programme is an open mic session, for which you can register at the beginning of the evening. This is an invitation to share what moves us about this theme; you and your words are very welcome!

Are you still searching for language? Earlier today, Emerald Liu guided you through a (free) workshop to explore your sensory experiences and put them into words. Registrations and info here.

When you have a broken heart, language not only serves a communicative function, but also has a healing effect. This workshop provides a link between body and mind. Using accessible writing prompts that build on each other, we will explore and articulate our sensory experiences of (social) pain. We will pause to reflect and then look at how we can use language as a bridge within ourselves and our environment. If desired, these texts can be shared in the evening programme during an open mic session.

Free, but registration a must!

17u30-19u00 at Bar Pilar
Followed by the literary evening 'Maatschappijn'. 

Concerts for curious ears Divagation stop off at our Heartbreak Hotel café for a night of sound-filled hazy tales and powerful emotions. 
Reminiscence of old stories, melodic nostalgia to noisy payback and forth, and who knows, a saxophone could come out of the smoke.

The shock of meeting with reality and the shattering of childhood fantasies

You are invited to participate in a screaming session where we scream & witness each other screaming together, guided by poet and artist neneh noï.

For this Heartbreak edition, you are invited to bring your rage, and furies to the space. Rage as in anger, but als something to do with force, strength, change, or something alive. rage ≠ a luxury is centred around collectively witnessing each other and ourselves in ugly (the abject) and foolish states. This work intends to create an expanded understanding of our own voice beyond harmony and the beautiful.

Built with a series of exercises informed by vocalists/performers, peer to peer knowledge exchange, the punk/metal scene sounds of growling, grunting and screaming, these sessions situate themselves on the edges of playful intervention, informal collective ‘noising’, and introduction to the rougher facets of our own voice-making. 

life is beautiful is an improvisation-based, experimental gesamtkunstwerk founded by aloisius, including an independent record label, a series of happenings, and a transdisciplinary collective of 7: Bianca Scout, NWAKKE, abi asisa, Jasper Maurice, THE NARRATOR, Isaiah Hull & aloisius. life is beautiful is a home for freedom in the exploration & expression of feeling, no matter how simple or abstract.

Alex Deforce’s  The Slow Must Go On brings slow dancing back to life. It is a kind of poetic prom night. A space where dancing is not content. Anti-TikTok. Anti-performance.
An anti-mosh pit. Where the mosh pit is chaos, aggression and centrifugal energy, the slow pit becomes
a vortex of tenderness — centripetal, with poetry / the poet at its centre:
a protest against the swipe,
an exercise in staying.
A marathon of closeness.
The mosh pit pushes you away.
The slow pit holds you tight.

 
The evolution of slow dancing tells the story of four generations with radically different views on intimacy. In the 1950s and 1960s, baby boomers danced at sock hops where chaperones stood on the dance floor to prevent ‘indecent’ behaviour. ‘Leave room for Jesus’ was the rule; a Bible-width distance between dance partners. A boy who asked for a slow dance suggested serious interest, while fast dances were "just friendly".

 
The 80s power ballad was the soundtrack to shuffling, but also to doom. While everyone held each other to the strains of ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ or "I Want to Know What Love Is," the shadow of the mushroom cloud hung over their heads. The Cold War produced its own unheimlichkeit: every embrace could be the last. 
The German word Weltschmerz took on a nuclear undertone in those decades. The pain of the world was no longer romantic-philosophical: the world could really come to an end. In that context, slow dancing became subversive. Bodies holding each other while Reagan and Gorbachev refused to shake hands. The party as a shelter. The parish centre as a bunker of tenderness.

 
Four decades later, that unheimlichkeit is returning. Again, the threat of war. Again, the images of missiles. But the party is gone — replaced by scrolling, swiping, and algorithmic isolation? Ballads have become ironic, TikTok clips.

That is precisely why the slow pit is needed now. Not as nostalgia for the 1980s, but as a return to what the power ballad intuitively understood — that in times of existential threat, holding another body is an act of resistance. Not against the bomb. But against indifference. Against the nihilism that says: it doesn't matter anyway. The slow pit revives the promise of the power ballad, stripped of its kitsch but not of its seriousness: that three minutes — or thirty, or three hours — of closeness do matter. That shuffling, just like in 1983, is a refusal to be alone at the end of the world.

 

“To dance is not to be going anywhere"
(Alan Watts)