Lydia Debeer

Lydia Debeer, Antwerp,  1992

Residency period: February 2016

Lydia Debeer is an Antwerp based video and sound artist. She is currently a resident at the 2 year postgraduate program of HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts) in Ghent.

The works of Lydia often deal with transitions and transition spaces. In a place or a mind that is somewhere ’in between’, everything and nothing seems possible, it’s a condition that is very fluid and static at the same time. The characters that appear in the films are not crossing this places, they are lingering or moving through it without aiming for the exit. They are not the protagonists of the work but take the role of a guide. Like Virgilius in Dante’s inferno.

“An architectural point of view seems to reign in the films of Lydia Debeer. These do not reveal only a symbolic way of understanding architecture, but rather a non–anthropomorphic way of understanding cinema and life itself. Debeer shows other views on what we believe is strictly human, since in this case are the buildings and landscapes emotionally charged earning a point of view on the scene and the characters who pass”. Oriol Fontdevilla

For Lydia, the music and soundscapes she composes are a translation of the physical and internal experience related to certain situations. They are not meant to document acoustic elements of a place or an action. She combines recordings of the site specific and of random objects with recordings of various instruments (mostly played by herself) and digitally generated sounds. She aims for her videos to create an understanding of concept, story and emotion in the same way music does.