photos by joey schrauwen
The Real Things Tablet is a site- and context-specific performance installation by artist Toine Klaassen (also known as the Dutch Bushman). During Conflux 2025, he will transform one of the large floor spaces of the Katoenhuis into what he calls The Real Things Tablet.
You are invited to wander through a kind of circuit board, a vast, floor-spanning composition. Toine Klaassen constructs this landscape from industrial debris and discarded materials: used food packaging, egg cartons, broken car mirrors, worn-out garden chair cushions, cracked reflectors, rusty nails, abandoned sleeping bags left by the homeless on the city’s fringes, tanned leather from old couches, and outdated mobile phones.
These are blended with elements from nature: herbs, seeds, branches, charcoal, coal, bones, rabbit droppings, hair, nails, and small animal bodies preserved in reused glass food jars.
The Real Things Tablet serves as fertile ground for ritual performances that emerge from within it. Through the practice of imaginative ritual, the installation invites the embodiment of hybrid beings, metamorphoses into ‘Dutch Bushman avatars’.
A local-nature-native vision from ‘the bush’, now rooted in Rotterdam and placed within a global context. The idea: if the brain is given enough real nourishment to catalyse the imagination, no drugs, nor help from AI, are needed to reinvent our minds; only healthy influences and deep presence.
Toine Klaassen, also known as the Dutch Bushman, presents his work in a wide variety of locations, both in the Netherlands and abroad, reaching diverse audiences depending on the context. In addition to If Paradise Is Half As Nice, for example, he has performed in public spaces in and around the centre of Eindhoven during the project We Are The Market at Onomatopee. He has also worked in institutions that attract a more traditional art audience, such as museums, as well as at festivals and in more ‘hybrid’ presentation spaces like WORM, Showroom MAMA, and TENT. He frequently engages with students at academies, secondary schools, and universities. His practice offers rich opportunities for shared discovery, experimentation, and exploration. https://www.confluxfestival.nl/