Tucked away in a little piece of woodland in the landscape garden of Soestdijk Palace [Netherlands] is a small wooden chalet. The little house was given to Princess Wilhelmina for her twelfth birthday in 1892. It was built in Swiss style and the little brook running past it was specially created to evoke an idealized picture of the Alpine landscape. The little rustic bridge and the cement tree stumps complete the illusion. The chalet contained a dolls’ house and children’s furniture and the princess could play with them to her hearts’ content. Next to the Wilhelmina chalet is a little cardboard house. It is the play house of artist Benjamin Verdonck’s youngest daughter. As part of the Palace in Wonderland exhibition, he did a play house swap: in his back garden in Antwerp there is now a copy of the chalet in which his daughter can play at being a princess. In the palace garden there is a playhouse in which a princess can simply be a child for a while.
EVEN I MUST UNDERSTAND IT is a cluster of installations, actions, activities and flyers which appear in the streets of (among other places) Antwerp, Brussels, Rotterdam and Ljubljana in which Verdonck addresses his concern about the absence of a public debate on the inevitable changes in our ecosystem
by
- Benjamin Verdonck
production
- Toneelhuis
- Toneelhuis
