Matter On Its Dance Through Time + l’Ancre

Ursula is an Antwerp film collective by female artists working with moving images as its medium. On 6 March, Ursula curates a film evening with screenings of Jana Coorevits’s MATTER ON ITS DANCE THROUGH TIME and Jen Debauche’s L’ANCRE. The evening will be introduced by Ursula’s Kathy Vanhout and Alex Schuurbiers.

Jana Coorevits builds poetic spaces, forging paths to alternative modes of communication. Seeking to make room for complex emotions and experiences, she looks for new narratives to define relationships and events. In pursuit of the exact right nuance to reveal what’s going on within and around the body, she employs unhurried and intimate renditions. Silence supports the sensitivity of the rhythm. New realms of meaning emerge from the flowing analogy between landscapes and people. Shapes and ideas resonate, taking center stage in a lyricism that engages multiple senses. Intuition is never far away.

Coorevits’ film MATTER ON ITS DANCE THROUGH TIME (2025) unfolds from an ongoing conversation between the artist and the landscape of Death Valley, California. Within the dialogue between image, word, and sound, a sensory narrative takes shape, lending significance to the fragility and intricacies of the vast scenery. In collaboration with writer Charlotte Van den Broeck, Coorevits researched the relationship between landscape and the human body. From this metaphorical space, the film talks about hurt and the impact of violence. Inner wounds find their equal in the gradual shifts of the landscape’s matter, so subtle we almost miss it. Coorevits captures the nuanced movements and (colour) changes in the environment. She barely manipulates, allowing the surroundings to shape the cinematic image. The moon trembles, storms brew, and we are momentarily blinded by the rising sun – or perhaps the pixels are just overly saturated. Words break through the silence of the images: “(…) hurt is in the smallest of particles (…)”. A hand carefully stacks stones.

In dialogue with MATTER ON ITS DANCE THROUGH TIME, we screen the film L’ANCRE (2024) by Jen Debauche. Jen Debauche is film/radio director, researcher, teacher and founding member of LABO BxL, a shared film workshop focusing on photochemical practices. Besides film, her work also consists of installations, performances and radio creations.

L’ANCRE is a journey through the Arctic and the intimate stories of people who lived through a psychosis. A psychotherapist (Charlotte Rampling) listens to archival testimonies, recorded during her sessions. Ailyn, Bruno and Gilles describe their psychoses. The words and stories mix with the images about a journey over and under the sea of the stretched North Pole on board of a big sailing ship. Inbetween the other stories, the therapist tells about her own journey through a psychosis.

L’ANCRE is a dive in the abyss of the human mind by means of a cinematic odyssey: a combination of archival testimonies and a polar expedition. The project is the result of years of artistic research and combines theory, practice and personal stories, and shows us an introspective vision on psychosis. In the icy embrace of the Arctic landscapes, intimate testimonies of mental tortures are transformed in metaphors that illustrate the decay of the climate; focusing on the vulnerability of our psychological and ecological balance.

Jana Coorevits’s work is exhibited from 21/2/2026 to 25/4/2026 at the gallery FRED & FREDDY.