Oblivion

What does your waste tell you about the past year of your life ?

Imagine keeping all your waste for a year instead of throwing it away : what would these remnants say about your life ? Sara Vanhee put it to the test in Oblivion. During this 2,5 hours' performance she takes all her nonorganic waste from boxes and displays things like milk cartons and meal packings on stage. But also erased e-mails, bad ideas and other immaterial pollution feature in this very witty performance. Thus Oblivion unfolds as a social reflection on our consumer society and a personal investigation into the value we attach to objects.

Vanhee, in an interview with De Standaard : “Keeping everything, it really became a sort of addiction. Since then I really miss the moment of consciously keeping something : that you don't have to decide what is valuable and what not, that you give everything a chance as it is. I even had a serious talk with a little yoghurt pot. Very touching how many memories then come up. Now it feels as if I throw away whole relationships again and again. If you postpone the moment of throwing away, you notice how everything is connected with everything. We think our waste is gone when we throw it into the bin in the same way as we simplify everything by making it invisible. But somewhere in India it lands on a mountain in which people rummage. I hope that the audience will feel pleasantly satiated after Oblivion, like that old-fashioned experience of having eaten too long and too much but then on an intellectual ánd sensual level. My greatest surprise may well be the pure beauty of the trash landscape I deploy on stage. All that waste is really beautiful.”

Sarah Vanhee makes very divergent projects in diverse formats often (re)created in situ. Her work has been shown all over Europe at important festivals, museums and theatres, whether or not on location in living rooms, during meetings, in a prison, on a bench in the park... Sarah Vanhee was nominated for the Ton Lutz Prize (2007), Prix Jardin d'Europe (2010) and for the VSCD Mimeprijs (2012). At the Ghent Arts Centre Campo she made a.o. Untitled, in which spectators paid visits to private houses and the occupants told them which works of art they had, and Lecture For Every One, a series of unannounced artistic interventions in places where people gather.