A show-box that fits into a wooden case

a different musician every evening

words that glide past coloured areas

strings, elastic bands

curtains that open and close

a mobile miniature show for twenty people that lasts 14 minutes

suitable for sitting-rooms, parish halls, festival cafés and dark forests

inspired by a sentence from Cesare Pavese’s novel Il diavolo sulle colline (The Devil in th Hills)
Benjamin Verdonck is a theatre-maker, writer and visual artist, he lives and works in Antwerp. In 2009, he was awarded the Flemish Culture Prize for Performing Arts. Verdonck performs in both the regular theatre auditorium and in the public space.
His theatre productions have included Kalender | Zwart  (2010), Disisit (2011), Song#2 (2012, with Abke Haring), notallwhowanderarelost (2014) and its little brother One More Thing (2014), and We Don’t Speak To Be Understood (2015, with Pieter Ampe), and Wat ik graag zou zijn als ik niet was wat ik ben (What I would like to be if I wasn’t what I am) (2017) with Willy Thomas. Interventions in the public space include Hirondelle / Dooi vogeltje / The Great Swallow (a man-size bird’s nest against a glass building 32 metres above the ground), KALENDER 09 (365 days of “actions” in Antwerp), Vogelenzangpark 17bis and BOO T (BO AT, a 10-day project on a block of flats in Szczecin in Poland). His visual work has been shown at (among other places) Wiels, M HKA and Smak.

Under the title Even I must understand, Benjamin Verdonck bundles a series of installations, actions, miniature shows and activities in which he tries to address the absence of a public debate on the inevitable changes gradually taking place in our ecosystem. De finale (The Finale, 2015) and nest (2015) were installations in this series. 1000
bomen en granaten (1,000 trees and grenades, 2015), Terug naar huis (Back Home, 2015-2016), Het Geheime Experimentele Observatorium voor Wereldaangelegenheden (The Secret Experimental Observatory for Global Matters, with Maria Lucia Cruz Correia, 2016) and friedmans potlood (The Pencil of Friedman, 2016)
were actions in this cycle. Gille leert lezen (Gille Learns to Read, 2016) is the second miniature show in a series that started with One More Thing. The other part of this series is Nocturama, which he made in 2016 with Thomas Verstraeten (FC Bergman).