RUBIROCK III: Three Projects, One Festival
RUBIROCK III Festival | 29 - 30 Aug. '26 | INFO | LINE-UP | TICKETS
A 2-day festival with live music, performance, visual art, installations & dj’s at the Voetvolk Atelier in rural Rubigny, France.
- WALL TO WALL | Performance + Short Film
Saturday 29 Aug. '26 | 20:00 (?)
- WOODPECKERS | Installation
Saturday 29 Aug. '26 - Sunday 30 Aug. '26 | Permanent
- ISOS | Installation
Saturday 29 Aug. '26 - Sunday 30 Aug. '26 | Permanent
WALL TO WALL
WALL TO WALL turns its gaze to the shadow lives of the modern metropolis — the invisible flipside of the 21st-century city. To explore this, A Two Dogs Company brought together two projects: DEMO, a short film by Belgian visual artist and theatre maker Kris Verdonck, and NOT TOMORROW, a dance performance by Brussels-based Catalan dancer and choreographer Marc Iglesias Figueras.
More than half the people on our planet live in cities. What does living in a city do to a person? Cities are often known as places where jobs are available, where luxuries can be bought, and comfort is within reach. But cities also often produce a precarious class of homeless, refugees, unemployment, ... Concerned with their image, city councils try to keep these groups out of sight. Neighborhoods are changing, cities are increasingly conceived in terms of gentrification, tourism and profit.
The smart city creates dropouts rather than inclusion.
ISOS
“Civilized life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly.The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.” — J.G. Ballard
Named after the Greek word for “equal” ISOS reflects a fully standardized world: containers, grids, bodies, and behaviors. Relationships defined by mutual abuses of power. The aggression hidden beneath the normalization, order, and safety of suburbia -and, by extension, the Western world- is one of the most important elements of Ballard’s work for ISOS. His obsession with the middle class reappears in a different form in contemporary politics.
All scenes are filmed from an omniscient, godlike perspective. This viewpoint suggests an objective vision of reality. Seen from above through peepholes, tiny human figures are trapped inside containers. Humans appear little more than insects. The situation recalls the experiments of Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904): a scientific approach in which all drama is absent. There is only the recording of a “real” situation. Muybridge’s technique is present in ISOS through the grid of white lines within which the scenes are placed, as if in a laboratory environment.
Architecture often plays an important role in the video work of Kris Verdonck. The frame of the film image and the walls of the viewing boxes merge into one. The characters are aware of their confinement within a claustrophobic space. The living sculptures become the inhabitants of a virtual reality. The whole work reads like a short film whose editing takes place in the imagination of the viewer.
The suburbs dream violence. - J.G. Ballard, Kingdom come
The Garden of the Future: WOODPECKERS
The Garden of the Future imagines an ecosystem where self-sustaining robots, powered by renewable energy sources like solar and wind, perform ecological roles in harmony with natural cycles. Free from batteries or power grids, these robots adapt to energy fluctuations, challenging conventional consumption.
The roboticized woodpeckers are the latest art installation by Kris Verdonck. When installed, one can discover the mechanized birds, by listening carefully, and one might discover a real one! The installation proposes a poetic integration of robotics into ecosystems, encouraging dialogue on sustainable technology and its potential to address environmental challenges.
The woodpeckers are a perfect way to open the discussion about climate change, the beauty of nature or what a futuristic garden could look like.
The core research explores the feasibility, design, and control of low-tech motors that operate solely on the irregular availability of sunlight and wind. This challenges the prevalent model of continuous, stable energy supply, advocating for systems attuned to ecological cycles. Each bird has a duty cycle according to the availability of energy from its own solar panel.
A Two Dogs Company / Kris Verdonck collaborated with Ohme Lab on key technical developments, including the design and creation of a robotic woodpecker fulfilling ecological functions inspired by its natural counterpart. The team also explored low-tech motors powered by fluctuating energy sources and contributed to biomimetic designs that align with natural ecosystem rhythms.
