START POINT PRIZE – Prize for emerging artists

It does not happen every day that the actual act of graduation becomes the subject of a thesis. Nevertheless, Jurian Vermoolen played with the situation perfectly in his pseudo documentary. With an amused smile on our face we watch an indecisive student who, three days prior to the opening, is still completely unprepared, with nothing to exhibit, and with no idea what the art work should be. The stereotypical lazy student gradually transforms into a hard worker, yet we only see him really working during the final credits when he is editing his film on a computer. Soon it becomes apparent that the border between fiction and reality is blurry and that the actual starting point of the film has most likely been pre-arranged. The artist helps his schoolmates to install their works and in the end they help him with a completely unclear film. In this way Vermoolen slyly refers to contemporary themes, such as alternative economic models (based on the exchange of services), solidarity (cooperation within one’s own social network) and the taboo of failure (for a long time, quickly hammered wooden stairs to be the only result of the sympathetic fumbled attempts by the artist). (rv)