The announced performance Actor # 1 is cancelled due to copyright problems. The inheritor of Samuel Beckett did not allow the use of the text Lessness. During the NEXT festival Kris Verdonck presents two installations: MASS (world premiere!) and DANCER # 2.

MASS is one of the three installations that (will) form the installation parcours Actor #1.

MASS shows a strange poetic landscape: a kind of moving milk-white snow carpet or a dance of thick smoke clouds blocking the light. It could be the ‘state’ of the beginning of time, but there is no divine creator around. This matter moves autonomously, determines its own energy. We are witnessing the physical and chemical processes in which changes are taking place organically, by chance and continuously. A landscape of sculpted, constantly moving nebulae.

In DANCER # 2 Kris Verdonck shows a combustion engine in its naked reality. That engine, or its use, is one of the main guilty parties in the climate crisis. DANCER # 2 seeks out the confrontation between the ethical and the aesthetic.

Together, these two installations counterbalance each other and bring the viewer stillness and overexposure.

As a prelude to his new creation Actor#1, Kris Verdonck exhibits on 13, 14, 20, 21, and 28 November, somewhere in the centre of Kortrijk, Dancer#2, a stripped-bare and fully exposed combustion engine. This engine is one of the main culprits in the present climate crisis. Verdonck aims for a confrontation between ethics and aesthetics.