Platform-Scenography proudly presents to you SELF, a performative installation of theatre maker and visual artist Julian Hetzel that will represent the Netherlands at the Countries and Regions Exhibition. SELF exploits the scenography of a concept story – light, slick and trendy – that seduces its visitors to buy an exclusive piece of soap, made of human fat. Each bar of soap sold helps to finance a water pump in Congo and contributes to better life conditions for the local community.  Before buying the soap the visitor is invited to wash its ‘guilt’ away. Human fat as metaphor for Western guilt, up-cycled in a commercial product. SELF was selected by a professional jury after an Open Call. The jury observed: “Hetzel uses scenography as a form of inquiry. The spatial design is not in service of a theatrical reality, it is the scenography of the shop itself that forces the spectator to engage with the questions the space produces.”

 

Furthermore, Platform-Scenography will present Paul Gallis’ innovative design for Count Your Blessings, an iconic performance in Dutch theatre history from 1992. His scale model for this design will be part of Fragments, an exposition that recognizes and celebrates designs where the essence of the environment and the socio-political era is preserved, craft is perfected, and the artist becomes a beacon of the profession for their life achievements. Count Your Blessings from theater maker-director Gerardjan Rijnders marked the beginning of a new genre in Dutch theatre – montage theatre – a postmodern mix of music, literary quotes, newly written texts and newspaper clippings and improvisations. With Count Your Blessings Gerardjan Rijnders created a powerful statement by making a montage of simultaneously presented dialogue, scenes, music and images, in a play without a plot, with fear of the stranger as its central theme. Scenographer Paul Gallis designed the perfect space for it by creating a two-story guest house with eight rooms. Through this multiplication of spaces and the simultaneity of actions within these spaces it was up to the spectator to create links and connections and make sense of the work, creating a whole new mode of audience address.