Performance artist Miet Warlop reconfigures the Belgian pavilion as a charged arena where language and music collide. Words cast in plaster circulate through the space: carried, passed along, dragged, and broken. Musicians interpret these lyrical fragments, coalescing into the emotional score of IT NEVER SSST.
This is a spiralling world in which words themselves lose stability. Scattered across stands that line the walls, they appear abandoned and lost to time—like remnants of an ancient karaoke machine, lifelessly awaiting the breath of a new arrangement. The performance echoes this poetics of chaos and collective disorientation.
Through a series of rituals bordering on the soulful and the absurd, the performers waver between despair and the urge to transcend into something meaningful and more beautiful. Expressive and energetic, they grapple with the threat of overload, at times revealing their breaking points.
Over its seven-month duration, a series of wall reliefs are added to the exhibition, produced on site by a local sculptor trained in traditional alto technique. The sculptor’s live presence persists throughout, carving out performative moments through a classical revisitation. The reliefs carry the stilled afterimage of IT NEVER SSST’s performativity, where performance and visual art merge.
For Miet Warlop, no work truly ends—one artistic wave flows into the next. This new creation synthesizes two decades of deeply multidisciplinary practice into an unruly choral constellation, interweaving music, dance, and sculpture with theatrical language. IT NEVER SSST traces a perpetual circular movement, a rhythmic recurrence that is never quite the same, with an ear turned toward a future that remains out of sight.
(Caroline Dumalin)
