Living Apartment Together
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How long can a grieving partner carry on imagined conversations? Can artificial intelligence reunite a widower and his beloved wife, physically, here and now? What does technology do with our most intimate experiences?
The visual artist Kaat Pype lost her mother unexpectedly. Her bond with her father and their shared grief led to a photography project. She photographed him in the houses of single women of his generation – interiors where someone else’s absence is felt – as if he had lived there for twenty years. Director Yves Degryse filmed these encounters and created a ‘making of’ documentary.
Kaat, her father and Yves share the stage with musician Berlinde Deman in Sonder, an innovative collaboration with technology start-ups and Wintercircus Ghent. Every evening, the father talks to his late wife. Every evening he does the same, but differently.
In Sonder, the divide between life and death is temporarily elided by artificial intelligence. Whereas Orpheus goes down into the underworld to retrieve his beloved Eurydice in the Greek myth, Sonder uses technology to evoke the voice, presence and even the physical appearance of a woman who has died. In this way, the play proposes a contemporary variant of an ancient motif: the attempt to keep the dead close.
The technology in Sonder is not a miracle cure but an opening. An opening that allows love to breathe for a moment longer before silence catches up with it again.
This production is also hitting the road. Can’t come at NTGent? Find the full list of tour dates below.
Fri 19.03.27 — 20u00
20u00
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Sat 20.03.27 — 20u00
20u00
deSingel
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NL Various languages