Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Hendrik Verwoerd in an experiment he carried out in the 1930’s named ‘A Method for the Experimental Production of Emotions’ uses various combinations of colours and symbols to elicit in his test subjects various emotions. Verwoerd studied as a psychologist before ever entering into politics, even achieving a doctorate magna cum laude. His highly mediatic experiment goes on to succeed in its ambitions in creating: “compassion, shame, embarrassment, malicious joy, anger and vexation.” Flatland emerges from research into this experiment and how its outcomes could be overlaid onto the propaganda and media manipulation during the apartheid regime. Flatland takes the audience through a performance-lecture that traverses the research into the psychological experiments while overlaying juxtaposing them onto South Africa’s past and present. Simultaneously it makes a case for how language and emotion is used by politics today to control the masses.

Eduardo Cachucho is an artist and architect based in Brussels and Johannesburg. He is interested in how national, and trans-national, infrastructural developments can have long lasting rippling effects from their implementation. Delving into detailed historical research into specific topics, he collects references of historical events, documents, catalytic events, archival materials. These elements often find themselves in critical events that over time lose their importance, or blur their meanings and effects, or even change in their meaning of significance over the decades. His works act as interventions that reinforce or put into question these elements. Simultaneously his interest in performance and video work allow another entry-point into said research material and works, often being condensed into a performative action symbolising core elements of the research, presented as performance and video pieces within an installation.