Turnhout (Belgium). There are cities in which we live or that we pass through and those which inhabit us. In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino recounts the dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublaï Khan where, day after day, the explorer describes to the Mongol emperor imaginary cities which he says he remembers. Cities between dream and fiction which, in the end, are one.
The city that Thomas Verstraeten tells about at the De Warande cultural center in Turnhout is very real. It’s Antwerp, the city where he lives. He creates fiction through decor and reconstruction. A decor made of cardboard facades and life-size accessories that the visitor discovers by finding their way through a succession of rooms in the basement. A member of the Antwerp theater collective FC Bergman, Verstraeten knows the expressive power of decor and he plays with it. An invisible city deploys installations, sets and videos in an artistic practice at the meeting of visual arts and performing arts, where the city becomes at the same time working field, material and partner.
In Familiestraat (see ill.), he stages the small events that he observed throughout 2020 in his street and which he reconstituted with actors-extras during a performance and in a video with precise choreography, from the Bengal lights of January 1 to the gatherings for the New Year’s Eve on December 30. To accentuate the mise en abyme, the video is projected on a large screen in a small room made up of the same sets where it was filmed. The strength of these images is to create a hypnotizing choreography from movements and small daily gestures to make a symphony of the street. The contrast between the slight strangeness of the setting, of which we sometimes see the reverse side, and the realism of the scenes and their protagonists generates an interesting distortion where the familiar and the singular merge. It is not the anecdote of individual actions that is significant, but the movements and reciprocal interactions of residents who shape the life of a street, of a city at a given moment.
An urban symphony
In the other major room, A Symphony for one hundred citizens and a traffic lighta new video work produced for the exhibition, it is with sounds that he draws the portrait of an ephemeral city anchored in reality. For this work, designed with the musician Heleen Van Haegenborgh, Thomas Verstraeten invited one hundred Antwerp residents to reproduce, in a room, the noises and sounds that arise from their professional activities in the city. In the installation where the images respond to each other on three screens, a conductor directs the city-dwelling musicians and their basketballs which bounce on a sidewalk, their cutlery which clinks at the table of a café or the percussion of their jackhammer which stamps on the asphalt. Between chaos and harmony lives, in the time of four movements, a city where everyone has their place.
