The yolk’s on you
2025
Het Resort - Gronignen
‘A screen on the wall. Distraction for the waiting customer, entertainment for the staff, surveillance, or simply another layer of decoration? Figures and characters –– acted, drawn, or cut out –– move through the video in a loop: glimpses of customers, caught in an endless wait. Each character is inspired by an encounter between the artist and one of the snack bar’s customers.
He worked a day behind the counter and got to experience customers of the Koning: the grumpy old man with his coffee, the mother ordering a cheese sandwich because she’s trying to eat a bit healthier, the man with three frikandellen and a deep voice. Personifications, caricatures, mascots, fragments of encounters, captured in a matter of minutes. Or perhaps they aren’t so fixed after all, and vanish the moment the order is ready and the waiting ends.
Time takes center stage, both in the snack bar and in the video. The loop lasts just as long as you’d wait on average for an order. Waiting, speeding up, slowing down everything moves differently in the snack bar. Sometimes, time seems to stand still. Sometimes, it speeds forward. And sometimes, it just disappears.
Everything reflects the layered nature of Cafetaria Koning itself: a place where old tiled walls, nostalgic lightboxes, and new price stickers together evoke a tangled sense of time. The past is as tangible here as the present.’
Text by Elles Hesseling
Photography by Hanne van der Velde