I have been touring with this installation since 2021. It had its world premiere at the site of ' Les Machines de l'Île' in Nantes (FR) , with the Great Mechanical Elephant as an admiring neighbor.
It is a beautiful 'rusty' tent structure with eleven separate boxes. Each box has a closed window. As a spectator, you receive a wooden token at the entrance. You choose one box (individually or in a group), and with that token, you can open the window (like at a peep show). Then you see a slowly rotating carousel full of automata pass by: 'purely mechanical storytelling machines' that you can bring to life yourself by turning a handle. A wondrous little world that ends when the window closes again... Ready for the next group of spectators.
Since its premiere in '21, this art installation has shone along impressive rivers and fjords, appeared inside a major museum, and graced city squares and festivals in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Hungary, Spain, Norway...
Are you an organizer interested in this installation? Please get in touch (and request info) via the contact form or email Sandra from Espectacle Spectacular (ES) (International bookings) directly via this envelope button.
From Madrid in the south to fjords in the north,
next to the Thames, on the Danube, in a Paris museum.
In the meantime, I have had the privilege of setting up the Automata Carrousel at around 25 different – and at times absolutely insane – locations throughout Europe. I have thrown open the 'doors' for far more than 125 days and welcomed a solid 100,000 visitors . As an artist, those numbers are both gratifying and dizzying.
And uh... we keep touring!
Accessible to playful people, explorers, and pleasure-seekers aged 2 to 122.
As a musical storyteller (in my mother tongue), I traveled—because of that mother tongue—for many years exclusively through Flanders and the Netherlands.
My automata, however, tell stories without spoken or written language. This allows me to tour internationally with them. And I admit: as an artist, it is gratifying to see that wherever you settle, whatever language people speak, whatever religion they practice or reject, whatever color they prefer, whatever the weather outside may be... everywhere these mechanical narratives conjure a smile on faces, make people beam and enjoy themselves. From (very) young to (very) old. That is wonderful. Really.
"I saw that cool people were sitting on a donkey."
Well, if it's on television, then it must be true...
Wherever it lands, the Automata Carrousel makes the news or (regional) television. Always nice to note.
These are, for example, reports from when we stood in the Antwerp City Park during the Summer of Antwerp city festival and – in my 'best French' – when we stood in the middle of the central Place Ducale during the international puppet theatre festival in Charleville-Mézières (FR).