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Another Day in Treaty Town is a contemporary European western. A saloon, a covered wagon, a campfire, a couple turkeys and a wooden grandstand appear in a sun-drenched Flemish landscape. The grandstand is filled with "cowboys and indians". Dignitaries from both sides are smoking the peace pipe. They are flanked by men cleaning their guns or sharpening their knifes. In front of the saloon, a couple of women wait for clients. The ceremony continues while night falls ...

 

Another Day in Treaty Town is part of an ongoing series by Koen Theys that takes a critical look at the phenomenon of the uniform as an expression of cultural identity.

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Koen Theys (°1963) belongs to the first generation of Belgian visual artists exploring and appropriating video as an artistic medium as early as the 1980s. In his photographic, videographic and sculptural work, he deconstructs Western cultural icons by manipulating them via displacement, doubling and/or morphing until hey become reversals of themselves. In Another Day in Treaty Town, he comments on contemporary mores by strategically playing with time and anachronisms.

A western adept himself, Theys had been planning his own style of western for many years. In his opinion, a good western offers a condensed view of the position of the "free" individual in modern society. As westerns are known for their action, how to make a western in the internet era, despite its action games, cheap plane tickets and mass migrations an era of immobilisation and powerlessnes?

Just like Fanfare, Calme & Volupté (2007), Patria (2008), Death Fucking Metal (2014) and Serial Drummer Girls (2016), Another Day in Treaty Town is also inspired by the tableau vivant, a genre almost without action. But maybe that is just an illusion?