The Thief’s Journal: Songs of Decreation
A composer working at the intersection of music, performance, and installation, Bultheel’s compositions traverse diverse genres, melding new music, noise, electronics, and metal with influences from Medieval and Renaissance polyphonic traditions. Exploring architectural space as a musical instrument, The Thief’s Journal: Songs of Decreation is written for nine musicians, crossing live and electronic music with a site-specific performance and scenography within the Brutalist architecture of De Thomas church.
Bultheel’s The Thief’s Journal: Songs of Decreation takes its name from the semi-fictional autobiography of Jean Genet, the French novelist, playwright, poet, and activist. In this work, Genet deploys religious and Christian language to poetically depict the lives of societal outcasts, including convicts, thieves, and beggars. Paying homage to the writer’s contrasts of high and low culture, the musical language of The Thief’s Journal: Songs of Decreation fuses the religious with the cathartic, the sacral with the industrial, and the communal with the ritualistic. The scenographic framework, too, invites musicians and the audience to navigate a dynamic experience in which music becomes spatial, tangible, and visual—an extraordinary exploration where sound intersects with architecture and movement.
Time Crystals performance program
Join us for Billy Bultheel’s captivating performance The Thief’s Journal: Songs of Decreation, which is part of the Time Crystals performance program — a year-long international initiative curated by Suzanne Wallinga in collaboration with Peter van den Hoogen. Through a curated series of performances, the artists in the Time Crystals program highlight various aspects of sovereignty and focus on subjectivity and freedom of choice, the boundaries of the self and the constant development of individual identity within spiritual, social and political frameworks.
With The Thief’s Journal: Songs of Decreation, Bultheel continues his collaborations with scenographer and architect Andrea Belosi and curator Marie-Therese Bruglacher, with whom he pursues ongoing research into spatial and social choreographies.
The Thief’s Journal: Songs of Decreation is performed by Blaise Cardon Mienville (saxhorn), Alexander Iezzi (percussion), Steve Katona (countertenor), Rebecca Lane (flute), Fanny Meteier (tuba), Sara Neidorf (percussion), Thomas Pfaffinger (tuba), Amélie Ratle (euphonium), Adam Sinclaire (flute).
The Thief’s Journal: Songs of Decreation is co-curated by Marie-Therese Bruglacher and Suzanne Wallinga, in conversation with Peter van den Hoogen. Scenography by Andrea Belosi. The Thief’s Journal: Songs of Decreation is co-produced by Surreal Projects and de Brakke Grond, the Flemish Art Centre in Amsterdam, with support from the Mondriaan Fund, Amsterdam Art Fund and Flanders State of the Art.
