On 20 and 21 December, the musical theatre performance will be staged in DE SINGEL, after which it will take centre stage as a video installation in the exhibition Een onzichtbare stad (An invisible city) at De Warande in Turnhout.
The city consists of streets and squares, facades and trees, cars and lampposts. But above all, it consists of people, their movements and encounters, lives that intersect and stories that are told. Much of what defines a city remains hidden – structures, routines and traces of the past: the invisible fabric that gives meaning to space.
In the exhibition An Invisible City, Thomas Verstraeten explores the city as a stage, a choreography of everyday moments, full of stories. The title refers to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, in which explorer Marco Polo describes cities to the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan that are metaphors for human desires and memories. Although Calvino seems to show different cities each time, it becomes clear that they are all reflections of the same city.
Verstraeten's work also shows the city as a layered place where reality and fiction merge. The exhibition presents key works such as Familiestraat, Seefhoek Series, De parade van mannen, vrouwen en diegenen die vanuit de verte op vliegen lijken. Central to the exhibition is Symphony for one hundred citizens and a traffic light, which will premiere in December 2025 at DE SINGEL and can then be seen as a video installation at the Warande.
Together with composer Heleen Van Haegenborgh, Verstraeten creates an urban symphony in which a hundred Antwerp residents play the sounds of city life: motorbikes, dogs, wheeled suitcases, a jackhammer and traffic lights. This sculptural collage allows chaos and harmony to alternate continuously.
With Een onzichtbare stad, Verstraeten invites us to look at the city differently. He makes the everyday special, visible and tangible, and shows how memories and dreams are interwoven with the reality of bricks, traffic lights and footsteps.
EXPO An invisible city
Sun 8 Mar 26 - Sun 30 Aug 26 at De Warande, Turnhout
Open Wednesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
An invisible city
Exhibition by Thomas Verstraeten at De Warande
Thomas Verstraeten's work depicts the city as a layered place where reality and fiction merge. Think of Familiestraat, Seefhoek Series and De parade van mannen, vrouwen en diegenen die vanuit de verte op vliegen lijken (The parade of men, women and those who look like flies from a distance). Now, together with composer Heleen Van Haegenborgh, he is creating Symphony for one hundred citizens and a traffic light, a large-scale contemporary symphony of everyday urban sounds, a new metropolitan project involving a hundred city dwellers from all corners of Antwerp.
