Can You Make a Hurricane?

In recent years, artist Emmanuel Van der Auwera has investigated active shooter drills in the United States. Law enforcement reconstructs full-scale sets, and companies sell training programmes designed to teach people how to survive mass casualty events.

Every element flirts with the codes of theatre—the “reality-based” sets and scripts, the make-up of participants playing the wounded. For years, Van der Auwera conducted interviews with drill participants, trainers, and conspiracy theorists, many of whom claim that mass shootings never happened but were staged as part of an attempt to increase gun control. Through a skilfully minimalist composition, Can You Make a Hurricane? ventures into the construction of the conspiracist narrative, weaving real dialogues with live cinema and found footage. While playing golf, a character smirks and remarks: “In a way, we were visionary, we saw the first ripple in the water a decade before the storm.”

Van der Auwera recreates the microclimate of a world in which concepts such as reality and truth have ceased to matter. On the limit between fiction and reality, and anticipating a major exhibition at BPS22, he creates his second theatrical project: a surgical portrait of a dystopia closer than one might think, and a sharp reflection on the role of theatre in a post-truth era.