A Conversation Is a Risk to Lose Your Own Opinion

Feiko Beckers is a philosopher, and banality is his specialty. In his performances and films he zooms in on everyday phenomena and transplants them into a theatrical setting. His utterly unflappable style recalls the likes of Buster Keaton and Bill Murray, and he stretches out his subject matter until it vanishes into the absurd. Attempts to slip on a banana peel descend into a repetitive failure to have an accident; youthful recollections metamorphose into revenge against his parents; walking in circles and squares towards an old flame becomes a geometric treatment for heartbreak. His latest film sees him engaging in three dialogues with a protagonist. Again the subject matter is utterly trivial: a visit to a favorite restaurant, chairs that break, the fate of a discarded washing machine. But each of the repetitive and artificial-sounding conversations ends up in unbreakable deadlock. The speakers are dressed in Russian avant-garde costumes, relics of a time when faith in artistic and political revolution was still alive and kicking. But all that remains of starry-eyed idealism in Beckers’s work is a grotesque game of words, a big joke that shows just how inadequate language is when it comes to bridging our differences.