Questions Collective

A mixed media art installation in which a pile of bricks is daydreaming about its future. Some day it wants to be as big as Mount Fuji. The pile is painfully aware of its current state, but it still hopes it will reach its dream, brick by brick. This struggle is a methaphor for the human longing to compete with epic nature.
The installation consists of a pile of bricks made from soft foam: a comfortable bed in which spectators can lie down and enjoy a video about the pile’s dream. The video, played on an old TV-screen, shows images of the awe inspiring Mount Fuji, narrated by the inner voice of the pile of bricks.

A contemplative piece about the striving of human beings to attain goals that are far out of reach, and about the beauty of failing and being small after all.

Exhibited at de Brakke Grond at Museumnacht Amsterdam 2022, curated by BOG Collectie
and at Kadmium Delft in 2016, Curated by Zoe Reddy for the Refuge Academy exhibition

Photos by Annelies Verhelst & Nick Chesnaye

Category: Installation, Mixed Media.

A multidisciplinary performative installation about the cosmetic role of the artist in the process of gentrification. Using larger-than-life beauty tools we made a performance to draw metaphorical connections between the “beautification”
of womens’ bodies using cosmetics and neighbourhood gentrification. This work addresses the role of artists, often cited by real estate speculators as “tastemakers” and “early-adopters”, in the transformation of cities into economically exclusive playgrounds for the bourgeoisie.

Category: Performance, Design, Art Installation.

Invited by Art in Odd Places Festival, we performed the piece on the streets of a highly gentrified area in Manhattan, New York. The art objects were on display for a month at Westbeth Gallery, NYC and we are looking to perform Foundation in more cities around the world.

Curated by Katya Grokhovsky for Art in Odd Places (AiOP) 2018 Festival Exhibition BODY: Unseen/Reclaimed at Westbeth Gallery, NYC.

‘The Dutch group Questions Collective (...) use larger-than-life beauty tools to draw metaphorical connections between the “beautification” of womens’ bodies using cosmetics and neighborhood gentrification. The collective addresses the role of artists, often cited by real estate speculators as “tastemakers” and “early-adopters”, in the transformation of cities into economically exclusive playgrounds for the bourgeoisie.’

*Questions Collective also performed Foundation in Amsterdam Noord , October 2019. More info here.

The Super Tessel Battleship is dedicated to visualise the invisible struggle for equality. All visitors are recruited and will prepare for battle. Battles for gender equality, racial equality or anything else that divides us. The exhibition consisted of a large installation of inflatables, costumes and other battle gear. There are also life performances and workshops where we enabling tackling our problems of inequality in a physical way. In the Penis Envy Workshop for example you are invited to make your own genitals out of glitter, plastic and other crazy materials. Exploring genital diversity and giving participants the freedom to personally design and construct their own perception of sexual organs, the workshop is a body positive celebration of gender diversity.

Self-initiated solo exhibition, hosted by NEVERNEVERLAND, De Punt Amsterdam, 2018

Category: Exhibition, Art, Installation, Performance.

Currently on view in Amsterdam at Melkweg Expo during the exhibition ‘Bad Feminist’, for more information:
https://www.melkweg.nl/nl/agenda/bad-feminist-09-02-2020

Questions Collective’s interactive installation The Auction of Venice is a piece proposing the end of the accounting paradigm. Ever since the invention of balanced bookkeeping, life and the world have been categorized as divisions of credit and debit moving towards equilibrium. But you cannot balance an ocean with a dolphin orphanage. And now, Venice—the birthplace of balanced bookkeeping—is sinking as a result of climate change. By symbolically putting the city up for sale, we want to put an end to a system at the core of our harmful behaviour.

We were proudly selected by our mentor, designer Jerszy Seymour, to develop and present this project at the Forecast Forum 2019 in Berlin. We created a performative immersive installation in which we, as the newly founded company Liquid Futures, presented our plan to sell Venice.

In this initial ceremony, the audience was offered an opportunity to invest in a future beyond debit and credit and pay off humanity’s debts at the same time. This happy occasion was Liquid Future’s Initial Coin Offering: the day on which our first cryptocoin was mined. But, unlike with all other cryptocurrencies, our cryptocoin isn’t mined by computers, but by human bodies.

“We at Liquid Futures believe in bodily values, that is why we will process this blockchain by moving our bodies. Because we are not only looking for financial stakeholders but also in people with skin in the game.”

Photos on this page: Camille Blake, ©Forecast Forum, Radialsystem, 2019.

In the basement of an abandoned building we created a factory that transformed ideas and dreams into a tangible form. Here the realization of visions was made as concrete as paving a street. Because a dream is like a road– it consists of building bricks that you can grab, lay down, turn around and connect. Instead of dreaming of far away goals, the mission of the factory was to connect small dreams into the large infrastructure of a street. In this way vulnerable dreams became essential of the infrastructure of reality.

During the Winter Karavaan festival the audience experienced the colourful, rhythmic production process of the dream factory. Theatre, image and music went together in a well-oiled machine that invited the spectators to start concretise their own wishes and visions

Made at the invitation of Winterkaravaan, 2016

Category: Performance, Music, Poetry, Interactive Theatre.

Internet the Musical was a spectacle that was rehearsed online and performed in the analogue, offline world. The crew of 30 people met for the first time in real life at the performance itself. The characters were personifications of elements that comprise the phenomenon internet, such as key players The Server, The Bugs and Norton Antivirus. Through music, theatre and dance they told a hyperlinked story in which the internet was sick from being polluted with an overload of cats and porn and was trying to communicate to the audience that it is time to end the violence inflicted upon The Internet, so it can reach its full potential.

Self initiated, Performed in the Dokzaal Amsterdam, 2016 Category: Performance, Dance, Music, Design & Costume

The end is near for the machine that transformed the world. In ‘Ode aan de Verbrandingsmotor’ you (and your car) are invited to participate in the farewell of the combustion engine and the era in which the gas powered car triumphed. An era that was led by our dreams of freedom and individuality. Time has come to stop and see where the internal combustion engine has taken us. We will applaud the machine for the last time and brace ourselves for the world to come. The form of this Ode is a road trip along the fringes of the city, junkyards and openfields where the future-city will be build. The voice of a car-salesman that reflects upon our time is broadcasted through the carradio’s, and he guides the participants through the landscape.

Photo by Sander van Wettum

For Full cast, press, and Jury-report see https://celinetalens.com

2018

Category: Theatrical Road Trip, Experience Theatre.

The Breunion Boys is the European Boy band on a mission to win Britain back. When the Brexit vote happened we felt a profound sense of loss.

The break-up of the boyband Take That quickly became a metaphor for this world changing geopolitical event. Not only because the feeling of heartbreak and powerlessness was so similar, also because the members of Take That came from “leave country” Northwest England. So what better than to use the voice of the best thing Britain ever gave us, the boy band to try and win them back? We use the vehicle of the boy band as a way of trans media storytelling. To spread a message of unity, bring some light into a discussion that has been extremely divisive. With this unexpected approach we created dialogue and touched the hearts of millions of hard to reach people. We produced two songs

in response to actual political events, and more singles are on their way. The band is now a real phenomenon, performing at events throughout Europe and the UK.

The story unfolds on multiple platforms:

Website

You Tube

Instagram

2018

Category: Video, Music, Dance, Performance, Political Strategy.

Questions Collective was invited to create an interactive experience in an abandoned telephone factory. The factory was in a transition state: no one was working there anymore and it was about to be torn down to make place for a new apartment complex. In this transition state we gave the building temporary, imaginary inhabitants that told stories about the building’s past, present and future. Stories that were connected through a common theme: communication. Our temporary inhabitants took form as two dimensional shadows on the walls, huge inflatable creatures, dancing robots, or sometimes you could only hear their voices. They would guide the audience through the ten differently themed, enormous halls of the factory, where they could do different activities, to prepare the place and the people for a new beginning.

Made at the invitation of Karavaan, 2017
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Category: Performance, Music, Poetry, Installation art, Interactive theater.

All of us is a short science fiction film set in a future where dreams are restricted by law. Society in 2095 has changed dramatically: due to the extinction of the bees, the world’s population is reduced to only a million people. Because
of that, everyone will have to work very hard, to keep our standards up. There is no time for sleeping, we invented medication to prevent us from it. Productivity is as high as possible and rising. But man is fallible, and our brains trick us into wake-dreaming. A very dangerous activity. Synthetic Reality solved this inconvenience for us. So all of us can build a better world together. Johanna is an interviewer trying to find out what happened to Toon. A dreamer. Will she be able to bring him back to reality? Or are his dreams the real thing?

Premiere Amsterdam 2014 Category: Film, Fiction, Self initiated