Thomas Verstraeten
Wanderlust Warenhaus (2024)
Performance
Photo: Thomas Verstraeten
Thomas Verstraeten creates an immersive experience in Graz’s largest fashion store, inviting the audience to embark on an excursion and contemplate the paradoxes of modern consumerism and its appropriation of nature.
Drawing upon the store’s design elements, Verstraeten transforms it into a fictitious mountain landscape. Visitors navigate the mazelike structure surrounded by a soundscape of natural sounds recorded in and around Graz. In this artificial wilderness, birdsong accompanies browsing for shoes, a babbling brook echoes through the perfume department, while reaching the top floor becomes a hike to a summit.
After the store has closed, a group of performers spreads all over it and inhabits the wilderness, enacting scenes reminiscent of everyday hikes and playfully engaging with the actual space as well as with the fictitious landscape. Along this parcours, the boundaries between reality and illusion, nature and commerce are blurred, while the performance challenges the romanticized nostalgia for nature and its role in national identity–building.
Thomas Verstraeten (1986, Antwerp, Belgium) is a theater-maker, actor, and visual artist. As a member of the theater company FC Bergman, he is a regular guest at the most renowned international theater festivals. Verstraeten also works independently on an art practice that straddles the performing and visual arts. He spins narratives out of the movements of the city and its inhabitants, out of their visible and hidden stories and lives. In his videos, installations, and often participatory performances, the ordinary is theatricalized into the extraordinary. He lives in Antwerp.
Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst ’24
In cooperation with Kastner & Öhler
With the kind support of the Government of Flanders
12.10., 19:00 and 21:00
Kastner & Öhler
Sackstraße 7–1
8010 Graz
18/14 euros
For ages 14 and up
Duration: ca. 75 min.
Concept, direction: Thomas Verstraeten
Sound design: Senjan Jansen
Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst ’24
In cooperation with Kastner & Öhler
With the kind support of the Government of Flanders
