An exhibition-performance by Miet Warlop
Miet Warlop transforms the Belgian pavilion into a charged arena where language, music, and collective disorientation collide. Plaster words circulate through the space: carried, passed along, dragged, and broken. Musical characters sing and search for meaning within these unhinged fragments, which together form the lyrics and emotional score of this exhibition-performance. These characters, a group of musicians and dancers, move through a turbulent atmosphere marked by a growing sense of doom. Through a series of absurd and physical rituals, they keep going, avoiding resignation and stillness at all costs.
This vision of the world mirrors our own, wavering between despair and the urge to transcend it into something meaningful and more beautiful. Warlop’s high-performing, energetic, and creative characters grapple with the threat of overload, at times revealing their breaking points. They navigate a spiralling world in which words themselves lose stability and sing toward that vulnerable threshold in a language that is felt rather than understood. By rhythmically switching between languages associated with the work’s presentation contexts in Belgium and Italy, their wordplay becomes an embodied musical experience.
The pavilion is never fully silent, even when the performance ends. The thousand words left behind keep resonating this poetry of chaos. Scattered across tribunes that climb the walls, they stand frozen in time. Like remnants of a prayer wall or a karaoke machine from a vanished civilization, they await new voices to once again dive into the pursuit of human connection. One live presence persists throughout: over the seven-month duration of the exhibition, a sculptor translates these performative moments into plaster bas-reliefs.
IT NEVER SSST reflects the artist’s twenty-year artistic trajectory and builds on her distinctive, unruly fusion of disciplines, interweaving music, dance and sculpture with theatrical language. In this new creation, key motifs from her earlier work resurface: the concert as ritual, the rhythm and discipline of sport, the plaster objects.—Within Warlop’s practice, everything interconnects in an unfinished, circular movement. It pulls the viewer into the performative world of images while simultaneously lifting a corner of the curtain to reveal the tension beneath, asking: do you feel this too?
