Cast, Helston

Manon de boer and
Ane Hjort Guttu in conversation

Saturday 22 September, 7pm

Free admission, all welcome
CAST Café supper from 6pm. Something hot and something sweet from £7 – café reservations not required.

Manon de Boer and Ane Hjort Guttu will visit Cornwall, from their homes in Brussels and Oslo respectively, for a special ‘in conversation’ event ahead of an exhibition of their work at  CAST, opening on Tuesday 25 September.

Quite independently of each other, both artists became fascinated by their children’s approach to construction and making, leading each artist to speculate on the ways in which young children express themselves in their home environments. An exhibition of their short films will present Guttu’s How to Become a Non-Artist (2007), looking at small arrangements of everyday objects made by her four-year-old son, and de Boer’s The Untroubled Mind (2016), a collection of images of her son’s constructions filmed over a period of three years.

This event will be the first time they have met and their first opportunity to talk about questions with which both are preoccupied – about relationships between play and life and creativity. Following the discussion there will be a screening of Ane Hjort Guttu’s film Freedom Requires Free People (2011, 33 minutes), which questions the conditions of critical thinking within educational institutions and, in a broader sense, within society, and of Manon de Boer’s film commissioned for Groundwork, Bella, Maia and Nick (From nothing to something to something else, part 1) (2018, 25 minutes) for which Manon worked with music students from Helston Community College.

This talk, and the presentation of Ane Hjort Guttu’s work for Groundwork, is supported by the Norwegian Embassy.