An arm protrudes over the edge of a building. The arm (a cast of the artist’s own) holds a megaphone from which Dylan Thomas’s poem Do not go gentle into that good night resounds. At times defiant, at times audibly exhausted, Verhoeven’s voice shifts between urgency, despair and quiet resignation.

This temporary public intervention, commissioned by debate centre De Balie, was presented in the context of the Forum on European Culture. The work is a troubled call for resistance in times of geopolitical and ecological uncertainty. Passers-by are interrupted in their daily routines by a disembodied voice echoing across the square, prompting reflections on artistic resistance and social despondency.

The work adopts the visual language of protest: raised fists, slogans, chanting crowds. Yet instead of a forceful demonstration, it presents ambiguous gestures: a vulnerable arm, a poem and a wavering voice. In doing so, the work balances between a sincere call to resistance and a monument to a cause that seems already lost.

Verhoeven: “As artists, can we do anything against dictatorial rulers, tech billionaires and genocidal warlords? Sometimes I feel discouraged, and the very suggestion strikes me as ludicrous. Taking a political stance in the arts today is not only urgently needed; it is also fashionable—and that carries its own dangers. It risks becoming gratuitous. After witnessing such positions, the contemporary art viewer may feel they have performed a good deed and leave the art institution morally purified. But do these positions genuinely confront tyranny, or do they mainly serve to reassure the cultural middle class about its own virtue? And—and this question concerns me most—what about ambiguity? Art thrives on ambiguity. If resistance is what we seek, is art, precisely because of its ambivalence, truly the right medium?”

Do not go gentle into that good night is both performance and object: a small yet inescapable intervention that probes the tension between activism and spectacle, protest and poetry, militancy and resignation.