A cho­rus of moto­ri­sed instru­ments, inspi­red by the ​“hum­ming spin­ning top”, buz­zes through the dila­pi­da­ted class­rooms of a vacant school.

An old hum­ming top that Mariska de Groot found at a flea mar­ket spar­ked the idea for a sound instal­la­ti­on. The artist from the Hague was imme­di­a­te­ly fas­ci­na­ted by this colour­ful children’s toy, which makes hum­ming har­mo­nies with three chords through a sys­tem of air pas­sing though soun­ding reeds. De Groot del­ved into the his­to­ry and mecha­nics of the­se inge­nious spin­ning tops, which inspi­red her to build her own moto­ri­sed instru­ments. Because of their wooden shell, the inter­nal mecha­nism of the­se sus­pen­ded sculp­tu­res remains a mys­tery. But the har­mo­ni­um-like har­mo­nies and emer­ging acous­tic phe­no­me­na, such as inter­fe­ren­ces and beats, enve­lop the lis­te­ner in a hyp­no­tic sound bath.

The Saint Agnes buil­ding, which has loo­ked aban­do­ned for a long time, rose in the 1920s to a design by city archi­tect Eugène Frische. It was an exten­si­on of the city girls’ school that Frische’s pre­de­ces­sor Edouard Lavergne had built on Kapucijnenvoer in 1874 – 1875. Originally, on the site of the girls’ school was Leuven’s first bota­ni­cal gar­den, inten­ded for tea­ching medi­cal stu­dents. In the 1820s, a new herb gar­den was built across the Kapucijnenvoer. The uni­ver­si­ty took pos­ses­si­on of the school buil­dings in the second half of the 1950s and made them avai­la­ble to the St Elisabeth Institute of Nursing and — later — to the Nursing and Midwifery Department of the Leuven Catholic University College. Since 2008, the St Agnes buil­ding has been lar­ge­ly emp­ty, alt­hough events have still taken pla­ce the­re from time to time, in 2016, for example, the Leuven stu­dents’ art para­de Ithaka. 

Text: Liesbet Nys (KU Leuven)