Brussels, BE. 

Over 9 days, I walked a mapped route through Brussels on loop—from Overtoon, through the Marguerite Duras park to the former home of Chantal Akerman’s mother (where they lived together & where Chantal began My Mother laughs), to the residence of José Rizal (1890)— walking as score; collecting embodied memory through repetition, breath, and attention. This preparatory walk lasted 33 minutes and informed the performance a week later. The 60 min durational performance started at Overtoon and concluded at Grand Place. The work unfolded as a relational practice rather than a fixed composition.

mumulak moved through the city with a collective invited to lead with their voices; contributing through a shared microphone app using their voice, song,  breath, and kazoos. Sound was redistributed across bodies on 3 portable JBL speakers clipped directly onto audience members, binding listening to walking and placing sonic responsibility within the group - collective coordination without hierarchy. Three separate sound pieces circulated through these speakers as moving bodies alongside myself with basketball and pantyhose for the Grand Place. Throughout the walk, breath was continually reorganized by the cold, crowd density, and distraction, resisting the saturated affect of the Christmas market. Maternal memory—ruminating through Akerman’s Brussels—and Filipino ancestral memory, traced through Rizal’s presence in the city, coexisted as layered temporalities carried in the body. The performance concluded in Grand Place, a historic site of gathering and ritual, where mumulak further dressed the body; floated & danced until the square illuminated for Christmas as it does through a visual count down; releasing accumulated movement and revealing how environment, collaboration, and history inscribe themselves somatically over time.