Belgium

With IT NEVER SSST, Miet Warlop transforms the Belgian pavilion into a charged arena where language, music and collective disorientation collide. Plaster words circulate through the space: carried, passed along, dragged and broken. Musical characters sing and search for meaning within these unhinged fragments, which together form the lyrics and emotional score of this exhibition-performance. A group of musicians and dancers move through a turbulent atmosphere marked by a growing sense of doom. Through a series of absurd and physical rituals, they keep going, resisting resignation and stillness.

This vision of the world mirrors our own, wavering between despair and the urge to transcend it into something meaningful and more beautiful. Warlop’s high-performing, energetic and creative characters grapple with the threat of overload, at times revealing their breaking points. They navigate a spiralling world in which words themselves lose stability and sing towards that vulnerable threshold in a language that is felt rather than understood. The pavilion is never fully silent, even when the performance ends. The words left behind resonate as a poetry of chaos. Scattered across tribunes that climb the walls, they stand frozen in time. Like remnants of a prayer wall or a karaoke machine from a vanished civilisation, they await new voices in pursuit of human connection.