Happiness

In his work Happiness theater maker and visual artist Dries Verhoeven explores the world of artificial happiness that is increasingly available to us in the form of drugs, painkillers and antidepressants. A small concrete building is situated in the public space. It looks like a cross between a public toilet and a pharmacy. This illicit store is manned by a humanoid, a human-looking robot. She talks to us about different drugs, painkillers and antidepressants we can use to tweak our emotional reality by re-jigging the serotonin and dopamine levels in our brain. In the combination of robotics and drugs, the work explores the zone where the human and the artificial merge; where, aided by synthetic substances we can rehumanize or become more than human. Or escape our human state entirely, for a while.