VENEDIG MEER
Theater company

The Venedig Meer company received a production grant for its show L'Invisible n'est pas inexistant.

What is your artistic background?
We are three artists who trained in dramatic interpretation in Belgium. Since then, each of us has gone into diverse, yet complementary fields. We founded our company, Venedig Meer, in 2016 and we have benefited from the multi-annual subsidies of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation since 2019. Since 2022, we are also collaborating with several professionals:

Florence Minder, author, actress, director. Responsible for fictions, connections and collaborations
Manon Faure, administrative and financial manager, production strategies
Julien Jaillot, director, director, playwright. Creation coordinator

Venedig Meer, through a plurality of scenic formats and collaborations, defends fiction as a place of thought, innovation, and survival. We attempt to account for how the real happens and reproduces itself. We seek to identify the collective narratives that determine us. We believe in the use for each person in defining the territory of his or her thoughts, and to know how to distinguish between a desire, a necessity, a will, an addiction and a fight. We defend a regime of imagination (and action) that promotes care for the entire living community. We believe that humor and tragedy are complementary and that one cannot exist without the other. We look for solutions.

How do you view your profession today?
In a society where algorithms tend to fragment and individualize narratives, we defend live art as a space of possible relationships, inventions, and discussions.
Working on mutual recognition, rather than individual recognition, keeps us busy in terms of writing, representation and aesthetics, but also in our daily collaboration with our team and within our administrative functions. It also feeds our reflections for the future. There will be no "new narratives" without new modes of production. Furthermore, our collaborative network, which includes, among other things, mediation, knowledge sharing, teaching, artistic hospitality and public and professional meetings, aims to share and nourish our living and constantly evolving thoughts.

How do you see yourself in 5 years ? In 10 years ?
We hope that Venedig Meer and its members will be physically, mentally and financially healthy in a world that has already adopted a Solarpunk attitude.  That is, a vision that has deprogrammed apocalypse and collapse. A vision of theaters that have become ecosystems in which society is discussed collectively, where death and life are welcome. Where performance spaces are multiple, flexible and fluid. Where language barriers can become polyglot bridges. We imagine a world in which education, health and (agri)culture would be subsidized according to the needs of the living community. Even if extraterrestrial life is obvious (see Nathalie Cabrol), we see ourselves here on Earth and not colonizing Mars. Our upcoming project, L'invisible n'est pas inexistant, which implements the novel device of gravity lamps, reflects our desire to explore new theatrical techniques.  We hope to continue in the future to collaborate with other sectors (such as engineering and shamanic imagination techniques) that both enrich our stories and reveal our blind spots. We will continue to write stories. We will defend (with our pens) the protection of imaginative capacities. We will always be on the side of fiction.

Interview conducted in 2023
Photography credit: Morgane Delfosse