Imagine a place, where you can recycle everything you’ve ever discarded, erased or forgotten. Objects, thoughts and relations, things that you’ve already rid yourself of and forgotten. Milk cartons, old versions of text documents, spam mail. All these items have at some point has some kind of value. When does garbage become garbage?

Prepare to meet Oblivion – Vanhee’s new piece dealing with the concept of garbage, rest material and digital debris. Oblivion is a solo performance about everything that Sara Vanhee would have a discarded during the course of a year in her life, but which she instead has saved. From November 2014 and a year onward she collected and archived things that would normally end up in the trash bin: worn out underwear, bad ideas, old soda cans. The resulting performance is a slow paced and thought provoking celebration of garbage, and what garbage really is.

The background to the piece is Sara Vanhee’s realisation that there was a time when people, especially housewives, rarely threw anything away. These things were instead remoulded into something new, revalued and given a new function. Today waste management is a million dollar industry, one of the biggest export industries in the USA. This raises questions about ecology and philosophy – how do we really relate to things?

Sarah Vanhee is a performance artist from Belgium. Her works are known for radically erasing the boundaries between reality and fiction, and for questioning social and artistic norms. Among her works are performance pieces with inmates (I screamed and I screamed and I screamed, 2013) and the international, on-going project Untitled where ordinary citizens show artworks and paintings from their homes to a complete stranger, while telling the stories on how each piece came into their possession.

Vanhee visited the festival for the first time in 2014 with the celebrated work A Lecture for Everyone that took place in 11 different places in Gothenburg. We are delighted to once again invite Vanhee with her new project.

Concept & on stage: Sarah Vanhee
Sound: Alma Söderberg & Hendrik Willekens
Artistic support: Mette Edvardsen & Berno Odo Polzer
Voice: Jakob Ampe
Production assistant: Linda Sepp
Co-production: CAMPO (Gent); HAU (Berlin); Göteborgs dans- och teaterfestival, Noorderzon (Groningen) & Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels) within the context of NXTSTP with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union
Executive producer: CAMPO (Gent)
Support from: the Flemish Authorities
Thanks to: Manyone, Kunstenwerkplaats De Pianofabriek & Kaaitheater