20 Brussels events in 2020: #12. Mondo Cane

Mondo Cane was a scandalous Italian documentary movie of the early 1960s which consisted of totally unrelated segments ranging from pet cemeteries in California to ornamentally arranged monk’s bones in Rome to women in New Guinea nursing piglets.

Flemish artists Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys used the Mondo Cane concept as a basis for last year’s show in the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale commissioned by the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, where it won an award.

With curator Anne-Claire Schmitz they have come up with a sort of folklore museum in which automated dolls perform such traditional activities as cobbling, making music, cooking, sewing.

But lurking on the fringes, behind bars, are other dolls: zombies, the damned, the excluded, and there are a lot more of them than the “normal” ones.

And even the normal ones can be hiding secrets. For instance, the musician has the face of a notorious German murderer who burned a tourist couple alive in their camper in the Alps.

And there’s more. So if you couldn’t make is to Venice you can now see the installation at Bozar.

14 February-25 May, Bozar

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