Route

Without is a route through a shopping street in the evening, when the shops are closed. The performance focuses on twelve vacant buildings. Each empty interior presents a different scenario created by a choreographed lighting plan. The audience is preceded by two performers who enter several buildings, using flashlights or, if possible, the buildings’ own lighting system to illuminate the landscape of emptiness. The audience remains outside, looking in through the window. They see the vestiges of what once filled the space, and the (architectural) presence that now exists.

A sound work is played on the city centre’s PA system that describes the features of the place where the audience is at that specific moment.

Context

“In the autumn of 2018 I was invited to create a piece in public space in the town where I grew up. A week before the residencyperiod began, my 20-year-old cousin died in a tragic accident in Sittard. I find her everywhere I go in this place that I left and where she will remain now forever.

Like many small and medium-size towns in the Netherlands, Sittard’s city centre has many abandoned shops and commercial premises. It is striking how attempts are made to disguise the emptiness; shop windows are filled with large posters, the lights in the premises are turned off and canvases are hung to make the spaces seem smaller, less deep, less empty. Without makes an attempt to see into the void.”

In collaboration with

Antwan Cornelissen, Hidde Aans-Verkade, Charles Pas, Ron Bernstein (Jan van Eyck), Hannah Loewenthal, Studio Noto, Gemeente Sittard-Geleen, SoAP Maastricht, VIA ZUID

Presented

2018  15 – 17 Dec  Sittard (NL)