Miet Warlop Cast Her Vocabulary in Plaster for the Belgian Pavilion

Art · Venice

Reading time: 14 min

There is a slab of plaster on the floor of the Belgian Pavilion with the word SSST cast into it and a crack through the middle, and the breakage is the design. Miet Warlop cast her entire vocabulary in a material that cannot be handed between people without chipping, then built a work whose only action is handing things between people. In the same room, a sculptor is carving what happened.

---

There is a slab of plaster lying on the floor of Miet Warlop‘s Belgian Pavilion with the word SSST cast into it in raised capitals, and a crack running clean through the middle. It got there by falling. Above it, a timber stand rises most of the height of the room, loaded row upon row with more of the same: GO, ORA, CURA, PIANO, IT, NEVER, YOU, STOP, DAI. Several are broken. A trail of white fragments runs down the face of the stand like a scree slope and spills onto the deck at the bottom.

This is IT NEVER SSST, Belgium’s contribution to the 61st Venice Biennale, and the breakage is the design. Warlop cast her entire vocabulary in a material that cannot be passed from hand to hand without chipping, and then built a work whose only action is passing things from hand to hand. What happens next is the part worth travelling for: somebody is in the room making replacements, and making a permanent record of the performance that destroyed the originals.

A football stand inside a 1907 Art Nouveau pavilion

The Belgian Pavilion is the oldest foreign building in the Giardini. Léon Sneyers designed it in 1907, in an Art Nouveau carrying the influence of Josef Hoffmann and the Viennese, and it was the first national pavilion any country other than Italy built on the site. A. de Bosschère added rooms to either side of the main hall in 1929 and 1930. Virgilio Vallot gave the façade its concave sweep and rosettes in 1948. In 1997 Georges Baines took the interior back to a white cube.

Into that white cube Warlop has put a structure that reads, immediately and deliberately, as the terracing at a football ground. Raked timber, open framing, plank treads wide enough to stand on, a broad plywood deck running along the front like the touchline. It is closer to a slatted storage rack than to stadium concrete, and that double reading is the point, because it is doing both jobs at once. Each tread carries a row of plaster words laid face out, so the stand is simultaneously a terrace to be climbed and a shelf to be stocked.

Drums are bolted directly to the frame at intervals, snare and floor tom, with a cymbal stand planted in the middle of one of the side rooms. The walls carry a rail of towels, which take the ring out of the room and catch the resonance when the drumming and the singing start. Nine performers work the structure, climbing it, chanting from it and playing it. Warlop describes wanting to show a world in which you can literally move something together, in which you have to carry something together even if it is heavy, and a terrace is the one piece of architecture designed entirely around that.

Miet Warlop cast the words in plaster because plaster fails

Plaster is a soft, chalky, porous material with no tensile strength worth the name. Cast a letter in relief on a thin slab, lift the slab, hand it to somebody standing above you on a raked timber stand, and the corners go first. Then a hairline opens across the face. Then the slab arrives in two pieces.

Warlop is explicit that the words crack and break apart as the performance goes on, and the floor records it. Fragments collect under the stand. Larger pieces are leaned against the frame, so you can still read CURA, IT and PIANO on three broken boards propped side by side like a sentence that has been dropped. The white dust works into the plywood and takes the sheen off it.

This is a material decision rather than an accident of staging, and it is the one that makes the piece hold together. A vocabulary carved in stone would make a monument. A vocabulary printed on card would make a protest. Cast in plaster, the words have exactly the lifespan of the act of handing them to somebody, which is also how long a spoken word lasts. Warlop has worked in plaster before, most directly in Dragging the Bone in 2014, and this is the same instinct taken to the scale of a building.

Dai, die, cura, piano: a vocabulary built on double meanings

Read along the treads and the languages change every few slabs. ORA, DAI, CURA, CIAO, SCUSA, FORTE, PIANO and SI are Italian. GO, STOP, UP, YOU, IT, NEVER, BE, HEY and IF are English. OUI, SALUT and SANS are French. DOE, NU and the SSST of the title are Dutch. Belgium brings its own two languages, Italy supplies the third as the host, and English arrives as the language the Biennale actually runs in.

Warlop has said that most of the words carry a double meaning, and the clearest is the pair that sounds identical across two of those languages: the English die and the Italian dai, which means come on, keep going. One word, two readings, opposite directions. The greetings do the same trick in a gentler register, because CIAO and SALUT both mean hello and goodbye depending on which way you are walking. Cura is care in Italian and is also the root of cure.

Then there is the pair that gives the whole room away. PIANO and FORTE are both up there on the treads, several slabs apart. They are ordinary Italian words, softly and loudly, and they are also the two dynamic markings a composer writes in a score, and set end to end they spell the instrument. Warlop has cast the vocabulary of volume in plaster and screwed drums to the shelf it sits on.

The sentences the performers assemble on the treads do not resolve, which is the intention. OK OK OK STOP occupies four tiles on one wall of a side room. Opposite it, SI HA CURA SI SI CURA runs across six, an Italian phrase about taking care that folds back on itself. The opening of the performance has a dancer spinning and chanting cadi, Italian for you fall, a figure Warlop took from a painting of the fall of the rebel angels.

A sculptor is at work in the room for seven months

Along the back wall, behind a low rope, the pavilion becomes a workshop. Timber trestles carry clay panels a metre and a half high. Shelves hold stacks of blank plaster boards waiting to be cast, a drift of white plaster hands and fists, black rubber moulds standing on edge, jugs, a sieve, a mound of raw clay, and a plaster leg in a white trainer resting over the end of a bench.

Eleven sculptors are credited, working with students from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, and at least one of them is in the room whenever the pavilion is open. They do two things. They cast new plaster words to replace the ones that broke. And they model high reliefs, in altorilievo, which get finished, cast and hung on the walls as the months go on.

The subject of those reliefs is the thing that makes this pavilion unlike anything else in the Giardini.

The pavilion is building a record of itself

Pinned to the trestle beside the clay panel is a large black and white photograph. It shows performers on the stand: one astride the top row with her arms out, one climbing, one upside down in mid fall, others reaching. The relief the sculptor is modelling, wet clay, grey, worked with a wooden tool, is that photograph. Same figures, same positions, same fall. Behind them in the clay, the treads of the stand are rendered as rows of blocks with words legible on them. DAI is cut into a panel one of the figures is holding. CURA runs along a tread near the top.

So the sequence is this. The performers climb the stand and the plaster words break. A photograph is taken while it happens. A sculptor models that photograph in clay as a high relief. The relief is cast in plaster and hung on the wall. Over seven months the room fills, slowly, with carved scenes of its own past performances, made from the same material as the words those performances destroyed.

It is an unusually complete idea. The pavilion consumes its vocabulary and produces its own frieze, and both processes are visible in the same room on the same afternoon: the scree of fragments at the foot of the stand, and the finished relief standing on a pallet against the wall waiting to go up. A closed loop, running at the speed of plaster. Belgium has sent the Biennale an artist whose work is a sculpture that performs, and whose performances turn back into sculpture, which is the same traffic between stage and gallery that lets a rotating library fill a Milanese courtyard or an opera be staged as something you walk into mid rehearsal.

What the 1907 room gives the work

Baines’s white cube turns out to be exactly the right container. The walls are flat and bright, the skylights drop even daylight down the face of the stand, and raking light across the treads picks out every cast letter in relief and every crack. A timber dado rail runs round the side rooms at waist height, a survivor of the earlier interiors, and the finished reliefs hang above it like pictures in a nineteenth century hang.

That matters for the detail, because this is a pavilion made almost entirely of surface incident. A plaster fist punches out of a blank wall in one room, with a single severed finger mounted beside it, and the whole drama of the piece is in the shadow those two objects throw. The cymbal on its stand is a pale disc, the broken slabs on the floor are white on white, and the only colour in any of it is the warm raw timber of the stand and the grey of the clay at the back.

The casting of the hands is worth a second look. Dozens of them, open palms and closed fists, stacked on a shelf like stock. Casting the trace of a gesture is a line of work with real history in Belgium, which is how a sculptor who studied ballet for twenty years ended up making bronze legs rather than figures.

Two pavilions in the Giardini, and a question about angels

Ten minutes north, the Nordic Pavilion is running its own live making, where Benjamin Orlow has improvised a colossus in raw clay and is letting it dry and crack across the same six months. The two pavilions are doing opposite things with the same material and the same amount of time: one lets clay come apart in public, the other turns clay into a permanent frieze in public.

They also share a subject nobody has pointed out. The Nordic exhibition is called How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?, the medieval question about how many things can occupy one space. Warlop opens her performance with a dancer spinning and falling, drawn from a painting of the rebel angels being thrown out of heaven. Two national pavilions, a few minutes apart, both built on angels, and both of them more interested in the falling than the dancing.

The wider Biennale is titled In Minor Keys, conceived by Koyo Kouoh and realised by the curatorial team she chose. A room where the instruments are bolted to the furniture and the words break when you pick them up sits inside that title comfortably.

How to see the Belgian Pavilion

IT NEVER SSST runs from 9 May to 22 November 2026 in the Giardini, on the standard Biennale ticket. Warlop is showing it as a work that stands on its own when nobody is performing, and the full cast activates it on about sixty dates across the seven months, generally Tuesday to Wednesday and Friday to Saturday, with performances running through the day. Check the schedule before you go.

Go on a performance day if you can, because the piece is built to be heard. Go on a quiet day if what interests you is the making, because that is when you can stand at the rope and watch a relief being modelled. Either way, look at the floor at the foot of the stand first and the finished reliefs last, in that order, and the logic of the room assembles itself. Afterwards the whole thing moves to Kanal-Centre Pompidou in Brussels in March 2027, reliefs included, which will be the first time anyone sees the record without the room that made it. The same appetite for seeing work in the condition it was made in runs through the sculpture filling the Giardini della Marinaressa at the other end of the waterfront. The main exhibition in the rebuilt Central Pavilion is five minutes away and worth the same half day.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The decision that carries this pavilion is the choice of plaster, and it is the kind of decision that only looks obvious afterwards. Warlop needed a vocabulary that could be handed between people, stacked, chanted over and dropped, and she needed it to end up on the floor. Almost any other material would have survived the handling and turned the piece into a display. Plaster records every exchange and then fails, which is what a spoken word does.

What raises it above a good material idea is the second half of the loop. Having built something that destroys itself at every performance, Warlop installed the means of production in the same room: eleven sculptors, a student workshop from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, trestles, moulds, a shelf of blank boards and a mound of clay. New words go back on the stand. Photographs of the performance become high reliefs, and the reliefs go on the wall.

That makes the Belgian Pavilion the only room in the Giardini this year that is visibly manufacturing its own history. Everything in it is either about to break or being carved from something that already did, and both operations are going on in front of you, ten feet apart, with a rope between them.

It also means the piece has a direction of travel. In May the stand was full and the walls were close to bare. By October the fragments had built up at the foot of the terrace and the reliefs had started to arrive. When it reaches Brussels in March 2027 the reliefs will travel and the room will not, and the record will have outlasted the thing it recorded. That is a long way to get from a slab of plaster with SSST on it.