The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
(Samuel Beckett, Murphy)

In the installation DETAIL, a large and massive boulder hangs on the ceiling. It is hanging on a steel cable, on a ball bearing, allowing it to fully turn around its axis. The ball bearing is put in motion by a steel wheel rotated by a motor which takes its energy from solar panels. The whole chain leads to a relatively simple situation: whenever the sun shines, the boulder turns around its axis. Once the sun shines, and therefore the stone starts to revolve, the mechanism is simultaneously unrelenting: the fatalism of a world that has to and will turn. A mobile with sunlight. A surreal image with an undertone of danger and yet fascinating at the same time. 
The whole (complicated) technical construction has no other goal than to have the “poetry” of a heavy colossus float and turn around. DETAIL is in this sense a pointless use of knowledge and material which makes it even all the more alienating. The question can also be put forward as to whether many other developments that we call ‘technical progress’ really do help the world. The destructive potential of ever greater, faster, more efficient and automatic algorithms, processors, motors and fire power assert their influence on a daily basis in wars and in the depletion of our planet. Where is technological knowledge taking us and does it make us able to handle the problems of our age for the most part caused by ‘technological progress’? DETAIL is then also a stationary situation: frozen, hanging in the air, turning in circles in a vacuum.

The TENDENCIES exhibition focuses on works that question scientific and technological innovations as much as they incorporate them. For this fourth edition, it looks at our relationship with possible futures, be they dystopian or utopian. 
Opening 26 April 2019 at 19:00
Exhibition until 9 June 2019

TENDENCIES '19
Kris Verdonck

Programme
17:00  Welcome by Marleen Wynants (Crosstalks)
17:05  Stelarc (Performance arts)
17:25  Mireille Hildebrandt (Law & Philosophy, VUB) 
17:45  Break
18:00  Raphaël Stevens (writer, curator Tendencies ‘19)
18:10  Kris Verdonck (Visual arts, theatre, architecture)
18:20  Jerry Galle (Digital arts)
18:30  Open discussion 

The Speculative Futures Salon kicks off the expo Tendencies '19.The Overview Effect at BOZAR, organised in the frame of the I Love Science Festival 2019. At 19:30, participants of the salon are invited to the opening of this expo in BOZAR, Rotonde Bertouille & BOZAR LAB.

Free entrance
Registration

What is the place of the human in a world in which ecological catastrophe and technology are fundamentally challenging this position? The new performance by Kris Verdonck explores the physical and mental state of being in the face of an impending extinction.
The combination of a merciless desire for profit and growth with technological developments, has reduced the human to a disposable object. Making the landscape in which we live inhabitable is the next step. What remains after social, economic and ecological elimination? The dancers wandering around in SOMETHING, are oftentimes not more than silhouettes or shadows. They are the ghosts that are the consequence of the destructive dynamics between humanity and the landscape, which in the performance is evoked by large inflatable sculptures, noise cello player Leila Bordreuil and a robot drum. Parallel to the performance, one or more installations are presented in a museum context. Performative objects will create a similar environment in the white cube as they do in the black box. Theatre flows over into the museum and back.

Production A Two Dogs Company / ICK Amsterdam

22 May 2019 KFDA19, Kaaitheater, Brussels (B)
23 May 2019 KFDA19, Kaaitheater, Brussels (B)
24 May 2019 Spring Festival, Stadsschouwburg, Utrecht (NL)
25 May 2019 Spring Festival, Stadsschouwburg, Utrecht (NL) 
1 June 2019 De Meervaart, Amsterdam (NL)
8 February 2020 Westrand, Dilbeek (B)

Kris Verdonck / A Two Dogs Company
Kunstenfestivaldesarts
SPRING Utrecht

Is what we see really what it seems? The series BOGUS I-II-III consists of three variation on the same principle: they are each time enormous inflatable sculptures, made out of the black fabric characteristic of the theatre. These automated inflatable sculptures appear and disappear again into their respective boxes. Together, the three installations form a landscape of performative objects. They suggest a post-apocalyptic environment, after the end of humanity, when machines have continued without us and have taken proportions we couldn’t have imagined up until now. At the same time, they are sculptures an image of the alienation, the violence and the spectrality of a society in which everything has been turned into a commodified disposable. The size and ambiguous material of these sculptures turn the BOGUS series into a series of uncanny entities. Or as the Viennese philosopher Günther Anders would formulate it: we are so clueless and breathless when confronted with our own products, as if they were objects delivered to our homes, unsolicited, by inhabitants of a strange planet. 

BOGUS I-II-III
Kris Verdonck - A Two Dogs Company
10 - 23 May 2019
Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2019, Kanal - Centre Pompidou, Brussels (B)

Beckett’s Stories and Texts for Nothing (1946-1952) are the basis for this evening. This collection of short stories and texts each time deals with an older man on an impossible search for his place in the outside world, as well as in his inner world. Since his death, technology, which interested Beckett deeply, has led to the steep expansion of a part of society he was profoundly invested in, namely that of the eliminated, the marginalized. What place remains for us, in a world in which we are not only increasingly replaced by machines, but which is also moving towards inhabitability, caused by our own doing?

Production Kris Verdonck / A Two Dogs Company & Het Zuidelijk Toneel