The parade of men, women and those who look from a long way off like flies revolved around one event: the filming of a large-scale parade, in which a motley collection of some 1,000 Antwerp residents and visitors to the city took part. Using a fictitious classification system, I tried to bring order into the then chaos of the street, the city and by extension the increasingly complex, polarized world. By dividing the participants into fifty different categories, I set out to make The parade the place where the city presented itself. On the one hand, the parade was an ode to the street, a celebration of the rich and varied public space and its inhabitants, but on the other hand it rendered problematic our one-sided, ordering view of that same public space.
The parade was viewed from a large tiered seating bank, erected on the Frederik Van Eedenplein on Antwerp’s left bank. Several large stadium lights lit the street and seating bank in the darkness. In a single movement, De parade filed past the seating bank packed with spectators. It was filmed and transmitted direct by the local television channel ATV. A year on from that date, I set about collecting the video images ATV had filmed during the parade in a bid to expose new layers of meaning in a monumental montaged trilogy. The focus is on the relationship between the spectator on the seating bank and the participant on the street. Between the viewer and the viewed. Sound artist Senjan Jansen created a spellbinding sound set for the installation.