Galeria Zé dos Bois presents The Thief’s Journal: Songs of Decreation by Billy Bultheel, an ongoing investigation into the reciprocal compositional relationships between music, space, movement and the body or instrument. Written for nine bodies, the work brings together a group of classically trained musicians from various subcultural backgrounds.

Readapted specifically for the space, it is inspired by the work of the experimental poet Anne Carson, who wove together voices from antiquity to modernity, herself embodying an art of ‘decreation’ of various artistic languages. “To make something created pass into the uncreated”, decreation neither means destruction nor nothingness. In writing music as space and reading space as music, Bultheel follows this tensious path of creating and uncreating.

Coming from techniques and traditions of Medieval and Renaissance polyphonic composition his work moves into the genres of new ensemble music, noise, electronics, and metal. Throughout the epochs and their respective social contexts, these musics share a religious and/or cathartic component. Bultheel directs our gaze onto that cathartic moment—equally, yet distinguishably present in the act of devotion and the ecstatic act of losing one’s body in the industrial sounds of a warehouse rave. Between the sacral and the industrial, the cathedral and the warehouse, we encounter Jean Genet, the French playwright, poet, and activist. In his semi-fictional autobiography The Thief’s Journal (1949), he poetically depicted the lives of societal outcasts, convicts, thieves, and beggars by weaving together religious and pornographic language. Genet’s lifelong daring and yet tender storytelling and embodiment of the shadows of society becomes the choreographic and musical theme of The Thief’s Journal: Songs of Decreation.