Reading & Screening: Michael Van den Abeele, Jeans & Pasta

KIN’s second 1 Day Project will present a new live reading & video screening by Michael Van den Abeele, Pasta, alongside a selection of works from the ongoing Jeans/Denim series.

Pasta – currently a working title -is a religious comedy. I’m writing it as a monologue in which the ‘Who will come’, and the ‘What’s for’ dinner can get confused, and the topics on the table are Payment in Psychoanalysis, Inflation of Soul, closet-Calvinism and Cupids, among other issues.

At moments it reads like a crowded-conversation-inside-a-monologue, which remind me of what Friedrich Engels mentions in his Origin of family, state and private property (1884), that ‘if strict monogamy is the height of all virtue, then the palm must go to the tapeworm, which has a complete set of male and female sexual organs in each of its 50 to 200 proglottides or sections, and spends its whole life copulating in all its sections with itself.’

Similar themes of topology, rhythm and multiplicity return in the Jeans/Denim works. You know, people will never grow a third or a fourth leg. So Jeans, being the sturdiest pair of trousers around, always had to re-invent its narrative in order to grow marketwise, over and over, steadily emancipating, from technical innovation to ornament & seduction. From material to mythology.

Michael Van den Abeele, 1974, lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Past presentations and exhibitions took place at Stadtgalerie Bern, CH; MuHKA, Antwerp, BE; gallery Gaudel de Stampa; Paris, FR, la Maison de Rendez-Vous, Brussels, BE; la Salle de Bains, Lyon, FR; CAC, Vilnius, LT; Museum Leuven, and WIELS Brussels, BE.