Urban Refuge

For Urban Refuge, cellist Nina Vanhoenacker brings together various contemporary works for cello, voice and electronics. The new, electro-acoustic work I don’t know I know; I don’t know I don’t know by the Chinese composer Anqi Liu is central to this project. This composition explores the Buddhist concept of “shunyata”, which refers to interdependence, or how everything is causally connected.  

 Nina selected additional compositions by, among others, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti and David Fennessy, for their repetitive structures. The music interweaves to form a continuous flow of sounds and thus the soundtrack for a contemporary meditative ritual. Vanhoenacker is building on Terry Riley and La Monte Young’s happenings and sound installations, two American pioneers of minimalist music whose work had a spiritual effect on the public. 

 Urban Refuge is not a traditional classical concert: it varies with every performance. Nina Vanhoenacker invites the audience to experience it in their own way: lying down, seated or moving around. The location in the Wijngaard is the perfect environment for the performances. Vanhoenacker is thus hoping to provoke an almost spiritual or transcendental experience, a sort of escape from reality.  

Theme

While browsing through Bruges’ history, Nina Vanhoenacker came across the Bruges Redemptorists. This monastic order focuses strongly on salvation and retreats for spiritual self-examination. Vanhoenacker saw a link with the work of La Monte Young and Terry Riley, important pioneers of minimalist music. La Monte Young’s Dream House, a sound and light installation that forms a meditative space filled with repetitive soundwaves, took audiences to higher spheres. 

 Vanhoenacker’s Urban Refuge is a contemporary interpretation of her inspirational source’s spiritual exercises and meditative nature. Removed from the religious context, it is a new breed of ritual, a musical retreat underpinned by deceptively sober music. She hopes to provide a quasi-spiritual experience. The meditative music allows the public to let go of the usual worries of daily life.