03 april 2026, Indra Devriendt
Thomas Verstraeten: Urban Life on a Pedestal
With An Invisible City, Thomas Verstraeten brings the dynamics of the streets onto the walls of De Warande. In his first institutional exhibition, he explores the tension between playing and being. By placing everyday life on a pedestal, he confronts us with the fundamental question of whether public space is perhaps one vast theatre in which we are constantly performing the best version of ourselves. Thomas Verstraeten is represented by FRED&FERRY.
"I'm not presenting an overview of my work with this exhibition," Verstraeten explains. "But a selection of work that is about making the invisible visible. When are we in reality, in fiction or somewhere in between?" For his visual work, Verstraeten starts from a specific location—often in Antwerp—where he observes daily actions and routines: street football, a religious sermon or the crowd around a food stall. He then reconstructs this reality, often at full scale and with meticulous attention to detail. For Family Street (2022), he created a cardboard replica on a 1:1 scale. For Urbi et Orbi (2023), he built a hyper-realistic perspective of Koningin Astridplein. His sets serve as a pedestal for everyday surroundings, prompting us to look at them differently. He invites people from those real environments to perform their daily routines within these constructed settings, making the tension between being and acting palpable. In other words, people are performing their own lives. Verstraeten captures these re-enactments on video. By isolating actions and framing them, he reveals the essence of movement and makes relationships tangible. The camera isolates the beauty of the everyday, something often lost in the busyness of real life.
Thomas Verstraeten, An Invisible City, De Warande, Turnhout.
At De Warande, Verstraeten presents these video works within a well-thought-out scenography. At the start of the exhibition is a giant model of a city. The scaffolding immediately frames the city as a set or façade within which actions unfold. From here, visitors can choose between two routes: from the microcosm of a street to the broad perspective of a city or the other way around. The interplay of frontstage and backstage is repeated throughout the exhibition. Painted theatre backdrops, performance props and scale models stage reality. As a visitor, you walk through a physical reconstruction of his artistic process, entering an installation where the boundary between the real and the staged is blurred. Whereas in traditional theatre, the viewer accepts the illusion and becomes absorbed in the story, Verstraeten deliberately exposes the construction. He explains, "I consider my video recordings to be autonomous works. By placing them in an installation with set pieces, I create a thought-provoking tension. In theatre, sets are designed to disappear into, but in this exhibition, I constantly pull the viewer out of that created world."
A central theme is the tension between the roles we adopt and our authentic identity. Identity becomes a chain of roles that we switch between effortlessly. Verstraeten removes this automatism from its context. In the video installation 21st Century Portrait (2024), we see a football match without a ball, with focus shifting to the facial expressions and gestures of young players from Seefhoek. They assume the poses of professional athletes, ready for the camera and fame. "Are they playing the role of professional footballers or have they internalised it so deeply that they have become the football players in that very moment?" Verstraeten asks. He shows that being yourself in public space is itself a form of performance. The boys are not playing someone else, but are performing the most heroic version of themselves. "What role do we play in public space?" Verstraeten asks. "Everyone tries to fulfil that role as well and as sincerely as possible. In my projects, this is magnified."
Thomas Verstraeten, An Invisible City, De Warande, Turnhout.
Verstraeten does not ask people to play roles that are unfamiliar to them. "I see myself more as a traffic controller than a director who controls everything. I create a framework that offers structure, but remains open enough for coincidence. I'm looking for the moment when life breaks through the construction." In his video work Symphony for One Hundred Citizens and a Traffic Light (2025), we also see moments in which people consciously perform. It is fascinating to observe how people sometimes do not realise they are being filmed or signal to one another whether or not to act. Together with composer Heleen Van Haegenborgh and 100 Antwerp residents, Verstraeten has compiled everyday city sounds into a classical symphonic structure. At De Warande, alongside a three-part video installation of this performance, are also set pieces and the score, in which the tension between improvisation and composition becomes visible. Every sound is given equal value and attention. "Some people take part in several projects," he says. "I find it touching to create a community in that way. The participants are the heart of the exhibition." He creates a temporary, non-hierarchical community of people who might otherwise pass each other on the street without so much as a glance.
His work is a tribute to Seefhoek in Antwerp, a neighbourhood with a complex reputation. "It's a place of arrival," Verstraeten notes. "This creates a dynamic that translates into a unique, poetic and moving street life. The global reveals itself in the local. You can sense the state of the world through the cultures found here."
Thomas Verstraeten, An Invisible City, De Warande, Turnhout.
Seefhoek is perhaps the most honest version of what a city in 2026 is: a place where, despite all differences, we must learn to live together. Verstraeten sees the city as a living archive of human actions and a mental construct. By placing the banal within an artistic framework, the city unfolds in ways never before seen. He shows that everyone plays a role—and that within this lies our greatest humanity: the desire for recognition, the need to belong and the ability to transform the ordinary into something sacred. Verstraeten strives for generosity. "For me, art is about communication," he says. If participants recognise themselves and feel valued in this reflection of their lives, then I have succeeded in my mission. The city is a set, the street is a stage and we perform ourselves—as sincerely as possible—until the lights go out.
On 21 June, the exhibition will conclude with a large street party in Turnhout, bringing together the neighbourhood and its residents. Everyone is invited to attend.
