THRILLER...

Events and their contexts

Diederik Peeters’ phantasmagoria Thriller… plays with the solidity of the way we look at things. Peeters marvels at the delicacy of our attempts to knit together our impressions, and at how absurd it is that we manage to perform one act after the other without losing a basic sense of coherence.

Thriller… is a wordless and slightly sinister type of sitcom that just doesn’t seem to get going. Maybe nothing ever happens in this piece. We witness a character in a given interior – a room. He seems involved in the beginnings of a story, but quickly gets entangled in the splinters and echoes of his own actions. Clues and bits of possible plot are thrown about, left to loop and spiral on each other, searching for some connection within the bigger picture. Meanwhile the interior begins to dissipate, losing any safety or familiarity it once held. Mysteriously dimming wall lamps, money on a mantelpiece and the obligatory murder weapon pop up in a mash of mystery and abstraction. In this scattered reality, where events seem reluctant to keep their correct position, time is merely a device that prevents everything from happening at once. But amidst all this, the inhabitant maintains his relentless endeavors to grasp a thread of logic…