OMIRI - OUR MUSIC
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Sometimes you find beauty in the simplest gestures said Vasco Ribeiro Casais on Saturday evening, just before he walked on stage.
On Saturday, September 5, the Portuguese musician had the Nieuwe Kempen neighbourhood listening to itself for seventy minutes straight. With OMIRI Genk, Casais brought his singular method outside Portugal for the first time. For a full year, he had gathered the sounds and images of 150 people from Genk: knives being sharpened. Steel being welded. Tea being poured. Footballs being struck. Songs being sung. Pétanque balls clicking against one another.
Those recordings became his rhythm section. Over them, Casais played viola braguesa, cavaquinho, Portuguese bagpipes and sampler, electrofolk in which a tool becomes a beat and a voice from a kitchen becomes a chorus. Meanwhile, the filmed residents of Genk appeared on large video projections against a facade, right in the heart of the neighbourhood. On stage, Genk's own talent played alongside him: Nektaridoo, De Twins, Lara Koyuncu, and several choirs.
In diversity you discover talent — that's what communities give us. – Koen Vanmechelen
Koen Vanmechelen brought Casais to Genk out of a shared conviction in the power of diversity and community. Artist and community became part of one joint experiment. "And that is exactly where art needs to be: searching for what we don't yet know," says Vanmechelen. "The global exists only thanks to the generosity of the local — tonight, we set our wild gene free to make something new." Mayor Wim Dries picked up the thought: "That wild gene lives in Genk too. In our diversity, and in the way we keep finding our own path, again and again."
What Casais had recorded, he sent back to the audience that Saturday night, transformed and interwoven. Afterward, he stood visibly moved on stage: "I came here as an artist, but what I got back was a lesson in community. I'm taking Genk with me, to every place I still get to play."
"Diversity is our raw material," said Wim Dries, who opened and closed the performance. Three hundred people – from the very young to the very old, from Zwartberg and beyond – danced to their own kitchens, workshops and streets, sounding out through the speakers. "Until next time," one of them called out to Casais. "Where can we buy our music?"
In that one small word – our – lay the whole evening.