The Ship Of Fools (Kling Floep Klang Gloep Sloep)

The Ship of Fools – Floep Gloup Sloep sails through a number of visual motifs from deep down in the European archives of imagination. Characters like Everyman, Nobody, Jesters, the Ship of Fools, the Praise of Folly, and Utopia take their place aboard, and settle in the Mess Deck. The artwork that Joris Van de Moortel created for Paradise 2021 builds on visual motifs that have already played a major role in his oeuvre for quite some time. The work is about a transhistorical journey that forms a loop with the Northern European Renaissance of the early sixteenth century with writers, thinkers, and artists such as Erasmus, More, and Breugel. Through ritual actions the artist connects present and past. Or as Van de Moortel himself describes it: ‘A minimal ritual action is not out of the question, unless you jump overboard’. The core of this story is that of a pilgrimage, a place of arrival and departure, the loop, in which the stranded ship symbolises ‘the world upside down’, and thus makes visible on Earth the spiritual and liminal. 

Under the motto ‘everyone sails along on land’, the artist invites you to visit the ship. Would you like more information about the voyage of the ship and your own journey? You can contact the artist through self-designed tarot cards.