IN VOID II

The element of performance in the objects and machines that Kris Verdonck brings to the stage is as strong as that of actors or dancers. The work of this artist, who is affiliated with the Paris-Sorbonne University, lies in the transit zone between visual arts and theatre, between installation and action, between dance and architecture. As a director, performer and visual artist he has a wide variety of projects to his credit, which he has presented, for example, at the Avignon Festival, the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels and Rome’s White Night.   "Perhaps the objects around us derive their immobility only from our certainty that they are what they are and not anything else; they gain their immobility from the inflexibility of the thinking with which we respond to them” (Robert Musil)   In 2016, the same year that a symposium on Verdonck’s artistic practices was held at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (City University of New York), he presented IN VOID, wherein objects, machines and projections occupied the stage of the Kaaistudio in Brussels in a critical reflection on the relationship between man and technology.
  “Man has become something superfluous due to his cultivation of growth, process, knowledge and control and to the technology he himself developed. According to some philosophers (Kojève, Agamben, Fukuyama and Baudrillard, among others), we are already in a sort of post-history of satiety, stagnancy, resignation and slow extinction. In Western society objects are more and more alive. We still cling to the division between living people and dead objects, while hybrids can be found right in our pockets”, says Verdonck, for whom theatre is the perfect venue for reflecting on human absence.
In IN VOID II he returns to this same constant obsession that has marked his career. He will create new installations in collaboration with artisans in the city of Madrid. With these new creations he will fashion a theatre setting in which the human artist will disappear and a haunted house where objects come alive will be born.   Photo (c) D.R.