From Domo de Eŭropa Historio en Ekzilo to the museum of human-hunting: from scenography to scenographics in the work of Thomas Bellinck

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores how Belgian theatre maker Thomas Bellinck turns the scenography of an exhibition into a critical framework to examine the politics of memory and representation at play on the European continent. In his projects, Bellinck plays with conventional modes of displaying and exhibiting to challenge the current course of the European Union (as in Domo de Eŭropa Historio en Ekzilo) and question how the EU copes with migratory movements (as in his long-term and ongoing project Simple as ABC). By exhibiting fictive artefacts through conventional modes of displaying (pedestals, display cases), or bringing these modes of display to the stage, Bellinck highlights the agency and critical potential of these ‘mere’ instruments in an exhibition. Insisting on the performativity of the infrastructure of an exhibition becomes a scenographic strategy in Bellinck’s work to mark the role of scenography in the epistemological process that comes with visiting an exhibition and the discourses an exhibition tries to convey.