M HKA Ensembles

Video, 00:26:00.

Collection: Courtesy the artists, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Galerie Micheline Szwajcer.

Language: Dutch, Subtitles: English

The opening scene in Ten Weyngaert is set within a typical location in de Gruyter & Thys’s videos: a starkly lit, bare, impersonal interior, where nine people stand silently in a row, waiting to be killed by gun fire.

The inspiration for Ten Weyngaert is the eponymous community center in Brussels, originally planned as a utopian space where citizens could participate in activities as a way to exercise their imagination and develop their creativity. Today it is mostly visited by tormented people and even has the effect of isolating people from public life. The actors do not speak but mutter and laugh as if possessed. The only voice herd is of the paternal narrator telling the story of a man who is aroused by the bites of his black ferret from Belarus. Everybody is nameless except for Tim & Tom, two guards that the residents harass. The scenes are interspersed with otherworldly scenes in a non-descript dark space where a strange game takes place.

Ten Weyngaert ends with a scene similar to the initial one, but the striking difference is that the characters have disappeared, perhaps after having escaped this environment.