‘After the Midst’ is ostensibly a reportage of sorts about a yearly arts festival in Ghent, Belgium. Yet it is also much more than that. The interdependent artistic work centre and cultural platform Gouvernement asked around 20 artists to be masters of ceremony for the festival. Their commissioned task was to immerse the audience in ideas of jubilation, transcendence, and related rituals. Daily actions ignited from a visual, theatrical, or musical spark, drawing on well-founded ceremonial heritage. This publication presents a layered document of the festival’s aftermath, the physical traces left behind. With graphic design by Jelle Martens and text by Raimundas Malašauskas. — Idea Books
Across 120 color pages, variations on an initial sentence mutate into lengthy dream, rave, and hallucinogenic sequences, interspaced by radiographic, grayscale, and color photos. As the photographs play with grain and light, the language slips between narrative vignettes and word salad, alternatingly humorous, wistful, and nonsensical. Offset-printed, with perfect binding.
