Imagine that all of your life could be lived on one small island not even a kilometre long. There you could be born into the maternity hospital, go to kindergarten, school get a job through the job centre or work at the art centre, cinema, or bar, be looked after in old age at the old people’s home and even die in a hospice next to the place where you were born.

There is such a place – Buda Island, in the middle of Kortrijk, Belgium, has an extraordinary array of diverse buildings, institutions and age groups. However as it is an island in a the river like the Fischer Insel in Berlin and the Île de la Cité in Paris, it is a place that many people enter and leave without even thinking about it, some not even noticing they are on an island.

Together with the sound artist Els Viaene we have made an audio visual guide that leads you round the island at night. This cyclical journey mirrors both the sense of the experiencing a life lived on the island and light of a day changing:a day in a life of an island. Concentrating on the people whose job it is to guide people through life one hears interviews with midwives, teachers, nuns, harbour master, and hospice carers.

Photos and video clips accompany the journey, which takes place at night alone – there in quieter, emptier and darker side of the evening one can mix this rich auditory world with one’s own imagination. The documentary material bleeds out to narrative, speculative suggestions that take one on another journey.

We would like to thank Joost Fonteyne, Els Viaene, Barbara Raes, Franky Devos, and all at Buda, Hewlett Packard Bristol and all the mscape team, Hans Vermandere from Indiegroup Media, Koen Moerman, Johan Vandermaelen atAevox, Jackie Rogers Albert Belasco, Elaine New and the people of the Buda Island in Kortrijk.

During the fresh festival the project is available from sundown 21.00 – 0.00. Please note the project has many interviews that are in Flemish.