GOSSIP

“We are five friends, one day we came out of a house one after the other, first one came and placed himself beside the gate. (…) Finally we all stood in a row. (…) Since then we have been living together, it would be a peaceful life if it weren’t for a sixth one continually trying to interfere. He doesn’t do us any harm, but he annoys us. (…) We push him away with our elbows, but however much we push him away, back he comes.” From: ‘Fellowship (Franz Kafka)

GOSSIP is a projection that covers a whole wall. From that wall a large company of people belonging to ‘higher society’ gaze at the audience. The projected men and women stand in a line next to each other, and very close to each other. They are all equally tall. They incessantly whisper words in each others’ ears. From time to time their whispering and gossiping stops. At these times, they all laugh or are suddenly simultaneously silent. They make small movements, or just smile. They look the spectator in the eye impudently. They laugh at them. GOSSIP is like a peeking painting that is amused by the spectator and looks down on them.

The characters in GOSSIP are all typical Verdonck-personages: well-dressed people going about their lives against the background of a world in multiple crises. In GOSSIP they are a ‘community’. Uniform, civilised, empty but determined. They

display their pseudo-happy exterior. Men and women, young and old, all grown-ups. Deformed but equal to each other and extremely satisfied. Representatives of a society that stands at the edge of an abyss. They have suppressed their fear, confusion and sense of Unheimlichkeit. Children are absent in this society.

GOSSIP is also part of the ‘circuit performance’ K, a Society (2010), based on the work and world of Franz Kafka. The various installations in this piece showed aspects of a society that is very similar to ours: images in which trends that are found in our world are ‘translated’, blown up or brought to the surface.

Verdonck takes from Kafka’s writings the vision of a world and society as an oppressive system in which nothing is honest or true and where nothing can be proven. A society where the human is always in the dark about what is going to happen. A society that’s like a bad dream from which one doesn’t know when, how or whether one will ever wake up.