"Against the Permeke library on the De Coninckplein

hangs the nest of a bird

my friend thinks it belongs to a wren

though they don’t usually build nests around this time of the year

in Requiem for a Species Clive Hamilton wrote

if you have your head in the oven and your feet in the freezer your average temperature may be unchanged but you are still pretty uncomfortable

I was reminded of this when looking at this trifling little nest."

- Benjamin Verdonck

nest is part of EVEN I MUST UNDERSTAND IT, a new action cycle in the public space.

"With my work I want to punch holes in the 'reality’ to which we seem to be subjected because we think it is fundamentally unchanged. I start from images or situations which I rebuild into an artwork, into a temporary monument or wry joke. I see my work as an instrument, a tool to engineer something, in this case a social sculpture: the fact that people come together, talk, have opinions and disagree, raises the question: what shall we do?".

Benjamin Verdonck (1972) lives and works in Antwerp. He is an actor, theatre-maker, writer and visual artist. He makes shows which are a cross between performance and theatre, both for the regular auditorium and for the urban public space. In 2009 he made Calendar, 365 days of actions in Antwerp: a dead sparrow, a pink ball on the head of a man on a horse, a paper castle for people without papers, an apple and an egg at the Museum of Fine Arts, white billboards, three pitiful kings, a big cake, and so on.