During her residency in Heerlen, Carole Louis discovered the local carnival tradition, of which the carnival wagon named the ‘Blauw Sjuut’ is a striking part. As the Performing Landscapes festival in Liege will partly takes place on a boat she was touched by this ‘barge on dry land’, the ‘Blauw Sjuut’ she came up with the idea of her own boat on dry land, a ‘bicycle boat’. While regularly visiting the many thrift shops in Heerlen, the flags and the ubiquitous orange colour caught her eye every time. This led Louis to develop her “SuperHere” character going around while waving his ‘flag coat’, so proud of his local allegiance that it becomes clownish. In this way, she mixes various local, national and traditional carnival references.

Carnival is traditionally believed to function as a reversal of power. Citizens are given the keys to the city by the ‘notables’. Reflections on hierarchies, value systems and their representations run like a thread through her work.

Parallel to this she will get in the role of tourist guide on this boat in Liege, she writes a dystopian “Büttenrede” speech in which, among other things, property developers have managed to completely privatise public space. During the residency, she also studied “Andy Kaufman, wrestling with the american dream” by Florian Keller, which analyses radical literality, allowing Carole to better understand her approach.

During the opening of Louis’s studio, the collections of objects she has collected are shown and you can see how her work is constructed by arranging these different elements in a way so that they can give a picture of a bigger picture like puzzle pieces. »