WALL TO WALL °

More than half the people on our planet live in cities. What does living in a city do to a person? Cities are often known as places where jobs are available, where luxuries can be bought, and comfort is within reach. But cities also often produce a precarious class of homeless, refugees, unemployment, ... Concerned with their image, city councils try to keep these groups out of sight. Neighborhoods are changing, cities are increasingly conceived in terms of gentrification, tourism and profit. 

The smart city creates dropouts rather than inclusion.

In DEMO, a lone figure in a mascot suit films himself performing tricks and dances — gestures that echo the endless pursuit of visibility on TikTok and other social media. Yet, despite the performance, there is no audience. The “demo” remains unfinished, the posts never published.

DEMO is Kris Verdonck’s debut short film. The starting point for this film project is the performance by Marc Iglesias, UNTITLED. A production by Kris Verdonck / A Two Dogs Company, which premiered at Kaaitheater in 2014.

That same performer, Marc Iglesias, appears again in NOT TOMORROW, where he embodies a man on the street, he could be standing at the entrance of a club — compelled to dance, caught between imagination and reality. He remains anonymous, and always a tick off beat. He becomes both participant and outsider, moving to a rhythm that belongs only to him. 

Across both works, the performers inhabit an urban landscape steeped in pop and entertainment culture: mascots, viral dances, cinematic clichés, all relics of trends already fading. These figures are both visible and unseen, masked and absorbed into the city’s fabric.

In this dialogue between film and dance, WALL TO WALL sketches a portrait of the human as performer — and of the artist searching for a place in a city shaped by hyper-connectivity and digital spectacle. Both characters seek meaning and connection in a world that keeps slipping away. Their quest seems destined to fail, yet they continue — to move, to perform, to persist.

American philosopher Lauren Berlant calls this persistence “cruel optimism”: when the very thing we desire becomes an obstacle to our happiness. In their fantasies, the characters of WALL TO WALL imagine the city as a stage promising work, community, and belonging. In reality, they merely “dogpaddle” as Berlant puts it — struggling to stay afloat.

Still, their effort becomes a quiet act of defiance. WALL TO WALL offers two portraits of the dogpaddling artist — funny and alluring, yet wry and dark. They are not victims, but survivors: an ode to the artist’s irresistible urge to create, and to the human drive to keep going. As Beckett wrote, “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”.