A Familiy portrait

In 2014, after conducting research at Statistics Netherlands, the artist duo Sander Breure and Witte van Hulzen found a family as average as can be. With the family members’ permission, the artists eavesdropped on them in their home non-stop for a week.  

The makers used the audio transcripts to create a script which is faithfully reenacted by four actors. The resulting performance is an extremely artificial, alienating version of real conversations—including the garbled articulations of authentic speech—that contain the banality as well as the intimacy of our lives. In a time when our devices can potentially record all our conversations, these scenes also hold up a mirror to us: what consequences does this everyday surveillance have on our behavior?  

In 2024, Breure and Van Hulzen recorded the family again. Ten years later, the eldest daughter is about to leave the parental home, while the teenage son devotes most of his time to his game console. The two eras are performed for the audience in a double bill.