The Then About As Until

The Then About As Until is a Video Sound Art project, curated by Laura Lamonea, presented within the twentieth edition of ArtVerona (October 10–12, 2025).

The exhibition explores the relationship between verbal expression and image, starting from the verbo-visual experiments of the 1960s, which led artists from around the world to explore new visual forms of linguistic production. Tracing the legacy of Futurist free-word compositions, Dadaist poetry, Lettrist and Surrealist collages, the verbo-visual artistic context has long been nourished by a multilingual and multidisciplinary dialogue.

The Then About As Until employs rewriting and linguistic experimentation—through its deconstruction and displacement. The works on display—installations, videos, performances—challenge the linguistic frameworks that shape our perception of reality. In this expansion, language becomes a space for collective invention, redefining the very conditions of what we can think and share as social and existential experience.

Featuring works by: Herman Asselberghs, Anouk De Clercq, Manon de Boer (Auguste Orts), David Claerbout, Helga Davis, Peter Downsbrough, Nicoletta Grillo.

^{Peter Downsbrough, THE OTHER, 2024}

Text can become architecture and a tool for constructing space and time, as in the work of Peter Downsbrough, who, in his video pieces, uses a plastic vocabulary characterized by an essential and rigorous use of words and lines. In his works, the placement of words in dialogue with architecture and urban spaces generates multiple readings, often laden with political implications.

In other cases, it is in the absence of words that language finds new forms. In The Pure Necessity, David Claerbout reclaims the characters and settings of Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book, stripping them of all forms of language and anthropomorphic reference in an act of subtracting human faculties. The animals, rather than speaking, singing, or dancing, return to being bears, panthers, and pythons—offering us a different methodology of listening, dialogue, and representation of the living. Similarly, in the work Oumi. From nothing to something to something else by Manon de Boer, the stillness and inaction of an adolescent activate a narrative suspension that resists the imperative of speech, restoring to silence and sound a semantic density equal to that of articulated language.

In Watching Words Becoming a Film by Herman Asselberghs, words repeated on screen like a visual mantra urge the viewer to fill the sonic void with their own imagination, as if an invisible echo were giving them voice. The word as a meditative space also emerges in the work of Anouk De Clercq, presented in the exhibition with Birdsong, a poetic reflection on a world devoid of our presence. In Oltremare by Nicoletta Grillo, language manifests as a practice of resonance: intimate conversations between images, words, places, and people open up reflections on the intersection between her personal history, human migrations, and the movements of water that have shaped the earth and its inhabitants.

The exploration of language finds a natural extension in the performative dimension, with two sound interventions from the project It sounds like another word, curated by Nicola Giuliani – founder of Campo Base Projects – and a performative intervention by artist Marilisa Cosello.