Ghost Tropic

What is there to find on deserted streets at night? The 16mm camera hovers over the asphalt like a lost driver in a dream. Bas Devos makes us feel how someone experiences the world: distant and surreal, dark and alienated, with occasional glimpses of beauty. These streets become the place of somebody not at home. Yet they also become the place of encounters for Khadija, a cleaning woman in Brussels who involuntarily embarks on a nocturnal odyssey after she falls asleep on the train home. Just like in Charles Dickens’ famous story “Night Walks” the end of daylight brings the woman into sympathetic relationships with the people of the night. Devos challenges the cliché of the headscarf-wearing woman as well as the cliché of how people react to her. An almost utopian togetherness becomes visible. It is as if all the people of the night, all those stray dogs inhabiting deserted streets, hold together. But Khadija faces an insurmountable sadness and otherness nonetheless, the loneliness of a foreign country. As Dickens wrote: “And then the yearning of the houseless mind would be for any sign of company, any lighted place, any movement, anything suggestive of anyone being up...”. (Patrick Holzapfel)