Abstract
‘Mirrors of Public Space’ is a conversation between Dutch director Dries Verhoeven and theatre scholar Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink. Through intimate encounters or straightforwardly provocative events, Verhoeven invites passers-by to reflect on how we use public spaces, engaging audiences with diverse social and cultural backgrounds. During the interview, Groot Nibbelink and Verhoeven discuss how neoliberalism and digital culture profoundly impact public space, and how art might be able to critically mirror and question those developments. While discussing a number of recent works such as No Man’s Land, Ceci n’est pas, Wanna Play? (Love in Times of Grindr) and Phobiarama, they address the vital importance of diversity in public space, the increasing prudishness of public spaces, and the profound ways in which media changes the way we perceive one another. In many of these works, Verhoeven examines how media are used to stage reality and shape societal conditions, by re-using similar strategies in turn.
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Notes
- 1.
In Homo Desperatus (2014) visitors walk past forty-four display cases with true-to-life scale models of human suffering: Fukushima’s nuclear reactor, the parliament buildings in Kiev, a drug clinic in Germany, a collapsed clothing factory in Bangladesh. See Dries Verhoeven’s web site, accessed 10 September 2017, www.driesverhoeven.com/en. All references to Verhoeven’s performances discussed in this interview can be retrieved through this website.
- 2.
Life Streaming (2010) takes place in a bus, aka Internet café, in which each spectator communicates live with a performer in a region 8000 km away that has been previously affected by flooding. Through this personal contact with the performer, the performance addresses personal yet ambivalent relationships to disasters in the developing world in a media-saturated society that renders catastrophes omnipresent.
- 3.
In No Man’s Land (2008), individual spectators are taken out on walk through the city, guided by a migrant, a ‘foreigner’ they do not know. The spectator wears headphones through which a text is provided about what it means to live your life as a migrant.
- 4.
Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West (German: Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes), abbreviated PEGIDA or Pegida, is a German nationalist, anti-Islam, far-right political movement.
- 5.
In Ceci n’est pas (2013), a glass box of about 1 × 1 × 2 meters is placed in the middle of a city square. Each day, a person, scene or object is presented, with an ‘explanatory note’ on the side, which instead of explaining, actually questions what the passers-by think they see. By ‘displaying’ a transgender or an elderly naked woman, for instance, the work taps into social taboos or dispute, enquiring into the lack of diversity within (commercialised) public spaces.
- 6.
In Wanna Play ? (Love in the time of Grindr) (2014), Verhoeven investigates the phenomenon of ‘on demand’ love, facilitated by the rapidly growing practice of dating apps. From within a glass house in the city centre, he chats with Grindr users. During ten days, visible for everyone, he searches online for people who are willing to satisfy his non-sexual desires.
- 7.
NSA is the United States’ National Security Agency.
- 8.
Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B critically investigates the dark history of European colonialism. While silent black actors re-enact practices of ethnographic display, human zoos, slavery, and scientific racism, the installation also refers to present-day equivalents. Exhibit B was also presented in Paris in 2013; Dries Verhoeven addresses the protest that accompanied the 2014 event. See ‘Exhibit B,’ Third World Bunfight, accessed 10 September 2017, http://thirdworldbunfight.co.za/exhibit-b/
- 9.
Phobiarama (2017) uses the format of a haunted house to enquire into our contemporary culture of fear, exploring the tactics of terrorists, politicians, news-makers, and other marketers by restaging them. The installation addresses the wide-spread desire and fascination for phenomena that fuel feelings of anxiety, meanwhile scrutinising the tension between real danger and imaginary threats.
- 10.
Guilty Landscapes (2016) is an interactive video installation, in which a single spectator encounters a ‘protagonist from the news,’ who is sited in a location or environment that is often associated with poverty or despair. This protagonist responds to the presence of the visitor, creating an opportunity for viewers to examine their sense of responsibility or feelings of discomfort.
- 11.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis is the leader of the centre-right party New Democracy and the leader of the opposition since January 2016.
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Groot Nibbelink, L. (2018). Mirrors of Public Space: An Interview with Dries Verhoeven. In: Arfara, K., Mancewicz, A., Remshardt, R. (eds) Intermedial Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere. Avant-Gardes in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75343-0_4
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