INSTITUTUM AT WATOU 2026

Choreographer Katja Heitmann will be showing this summer at the Kunstenfestival Watou in West Flanders. Kunstenfestival Watou is an international visual arts festival held annually in the Belgian villages of Poperinge. At Watou, Katja Heitmann will present an overview exhibition of her acclaimed multi-year art project Motus Mori, the archive of human movement. For two months, five days a week and eight hours a day, visitors can experience a theatrical route past various Motus Mori artworks, including one new performance piece. Castle ‘De Lovie’ in Poperinge becomes a place to wander, observe, listen, feel, move and be moved.

Katja Heitmann: “Since 2019, we have collected thousands of individual gestures from people. This archiving project has yielded so much embodied knowledge and insight on human movements, that it is time to take a next step. This international collaboration with KF Watou gives me the opportunity to turn all these small gestures into one big gesture and to set the viewer in motion.” 

What moves humanity?
In the Motus Mori movement archive, choreographer Katja Heitmann collects and preserves human movement. Since 2019, more than 2500 people of all ages, body types and backgrounds have contributed to this unique archive. Their everyday movements form the basis for various artworks, each offering a different, moving and recognizable insight into humanity.

As visitor, you follow an experiential route through various spaces, in each of which a different layer of the movement archive becomes visible, audible or tangible. In ongoing live performances, your own movements are also archived and embodied by dancers, the movement archivists. Finally, they will hand-over to you one of the most transient movements of the archive.
A visual choreography of giving and receiving, experiencing and passing on.

This living archive can only exist if the movements are continuously passed on from body to body. That is why, in this ‘institute’, you are not a spectator but a participant. You recognize the movements of others, adopt them in your own body, or perhaps share a gesture of your own. You literally move from space to space, from experience to experience, guided by music and poetry. From observing and recognizing, to performing and experiencing, from awareness to memory; this institute is an invitation to reflect on what shapes, moves and connects us – today, and for those who come after us.

Practical information:
Motus Mori INSTITUTUM will be open to visitors during KF Watou 2026.
Dates and times: from 15 July to 30 August, every Wednesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 18:00.
Location: Kasteel de Lovie
Click here for tickets and more information about the Festival 

Credits:
Concept, artistic creation: Katja Heitmann
Concept, music, creative producer: Sander van der Schaaf
Performance: the Motus Mori archive exists within the bodies of the dancers and the audience. Ornella, Anton, Eleni, Josy, Maria and Boris are all professional movement artists and have long been associated with the archive as ‘movement archivists’. They interview, archive and keep the movements of more than 2,500 people in motion through long-duration performances and audience interactions.
Production: Stichting This is not a show
Curators Watou: Danielle van Zuijlen, Bart Lodewijks, Michaël Vandebril
Poetry: Carmien Michels

Motus Mori INSTITUTUM is a co-production with Kunstenfestival Watou and DansBrabant, and is made possible by the Dutch Performing Arts Fund (FPK) and the Municipality of Tilburg.