Anouk de Clercq (°1971) studied notation and piano at the musicschool in Ghent and film at the Sint-Lukas Art Academy in Brussels.
Besides mixing different artforms in her videowork – combining images, text, music, animation and architecture in video-installations – she also regularly collaborates with artists working in different fields: musicians, choreographers, writers, architects, fashion and graphic designers.
Anouk de Clercq lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
http://www.portapak.be

Shafts of light and the camera are moving through the dark as in a glissando. Flat, sharply cut forms appear in black-and-white and high definition. They feel their way along expanses of wall, opening up storeys, windows and doors, and break down on floors, stairs and columns. In this way, according to a controlled choreography upheld by the music of Antoni Aeki, a truly architectural experience is created on the screen. Like a constructivist audiovisual mobile, the building reveals itself and is being documented as in an architect’s dream. In other words: as a spatial and atmospheric starting point for users to start leaving their marks on it.
'Building' is inspired by the new concert hall in Bruges and thereby also pays homage to the work of Robbrecht and Daem, the Belgian architects’ collective which is well known for such exploits as the new Boymans van Beuningen Museum building in Rotterdam and the AUE pavilions in Almere.

Kernwasser Wunderland opens up a deserted landscape in a pregnant environment, a biotope subject to specific laws and its own ecology filled according to the intuitive logic of the unconscious and the imaginary. The basis for the content is the great nuclear disaster in chernobyl in april 1986. As a consequence of the great danger of radiation the whole area was declared inaccessible and was closed off with fencing and checkpoints. The radiation cannot be smelt or tasted, only a geigercounter can confirm its presence. This abandonment and brooding emptiness inspired us to reflect on nature and technology, in a fusion of sensual sound and image of both digital and natural worlds.

Portal unfolds a space where you can drop your guard: a rhythmical, geometrical landscape, a soothing place made from sloping shapes and whispering sounds.
anouk de clercq depicts an 'interior landscape', a mental space built of cool shades of grey and fathomless horizons, rotating, tilting and caressing. An exploration of the limits of the utopian and the inner nature, in a longing for a place of enlightenment: 'here never alone'. The video was made on the occasion of secret gardens, a concept of centre for the arts limelight and cultural manifestation anno'02, for which several artists had been assigned to design a secret garden at various locations in the city of Kortrijk.

A high electronic tone demands our attention and sparks off a journey through a computer-drawn space. We land up in a minimalist landscape dominated by the suggestion that something is out there in the distance. The horizon allows us a first glimpse of rectangles which, when we come closer, define buildings as in a city, or walls as in an indoor space. Rhythmically and temporized to the music by Ryoji Ikeda, we are being steered through the representation, after which the next image is already twinkling seductively in the distance. This contemplative and absorbing work was made for a presentation by the belgian fashion designer Bruno Pieters at the Petit Palais in paris. The combination of music, visual art, fashion, choreography and architecture is typical of the work of anouk de clercq, and of a generation of eclectic artists and designers from flanders who, since the 1990s, have been successful in finding an international podium.

A lightning conductor appears as a musical conductor for the cloud cover. At the core of an increasingly threatening blaze of fire and a whistling wind, a minuscule light has final call, until the violence of heaven discharges abruptly and the lightning conductor throws it all off-screen. This video was made in the framework of title safe II, a project by Walter Verdin in which he invites artists to make a short video with 125bpm as a rhythmic rule.

A love story in minimal motion graphics with sound design by Anton Aeki and text written and whispered by Anouk de Clercq (for f.p.)