Matisklo (2018) was the first clo­se col­la­bo­ra­ti­on bet­ween Ezra Veldhuis and Bosse Provoost.

Central to the cre­a­ti­on was the poe­try of Paul Celan (1920−1970).
As a sur­vi­vor of the Holocaust, Celan goes to extre­mes, both moral­ly and lin­guis­ti­cally. His poe­try rea­ches out to what is ​‘beyond’ lan­gu­a­ge: a world long befo­re or far beyond huma­ni­ty, a spea­king from one’s own dead-being. In a Celan poem, each word is like a sto­ne that can be pick­ed up and vie­wed from mul­ti­ple directions.

By per­for­ming Celan’s poems, Matisklo explo­res the boun­da­ries of what is utter­able. Forced by the com­plexi­ty of lan­gu­a­ge, per­for­mers Joeri Happel and Benjamin Cools enter into unu­su­al modes of playing to make the poem tan­gi­ble. This wrest­ling with lan­gu­a­ge is an inte­gral part of the per­for­ma­ti­vi­ty of the pie­ce. Some of Celan’s poems do not seem addres­sed to ​‘us, the living’. This is wor­ked into Matisklo in moments such as Benjamin Cools address of a poem to a pipe, a pipe which appe­ars first as a chim­ney, and later as a tree. 

Matisklo inha­bits a kind of ​‘doub­ting sce­no­grap­hy’, whe­re the mea­ning of a figu­re or envi­ron­ment is unst­a­ble and shifts accor­ding to the con­stel­la­ti­on. While some poems were spo­ken, a mul­ti­tu­de were trans­la­ted into light, sound, set pie­ces, move­ments and cos­tu­mes. In addi­ti­on to the per­for­mers, the fluid envi­ron­ments of Matisklo were tra­ver­sed by lar­ge half- or non-human figu­res. Two of the­se figu­res were made by Max Pairon using raw mate­ri­als such as was­te wood and reed, and one was made by Ezra Veldhuis using AluShape.