'The crowd is untruth': Mixed media 2026 Eddy De Buf

"There is a view of life which conceives that where the crowd is, there also is the truth, and that in truth itself there is need of having the crowd on its side. There is another view of life which conceives that wherever there is a crowd there is untruth, so that (to consider for a moment the extreme case), even if every individual, each for himself in private, were to be in possession of the truth, yet in case they were all to get together in a crowd -- a crowd to which any sort of decisive significance is attributed, a voting, noisy, audible crowd -- untruth would at once be in evidence...

This famous passage is from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, found in his essay "That Individual" 1859.

In this quote, Kierkegaard contrasts two ways of viewing truth and society, expressing a foundational theme of existentialism.

"The choice of a colored card as the central object of this project is deliberate. Cards are widely recognized cultural symbols that carry authority and immediate meaning without words - think of the red and yellow cards in football, warning of misconduct or expulsion; voting cards, used to register a collective decision; or color-coded systems like traffic lights, that instantly communicate a state of alert or permission.

By appropriating this familiar visual language, the project taps into an existing shared understanding of color as a coded signal - while stripping it of its original institutional context (sport, elections, safety regulation). This displacement invites the viewer to question: who has the authority to "show a card," and what happens when the authority is claimed by an artist or anyone, and what does it mean when a judgment, warning, or verdict is issued outside its conventional framework?

The simplicity of the gesture — a single card, a single color - is intentional. It mirrors the directness of the systems it borrows from, while opening space for an ambiguity those systems normally suppress: exclusion, consensus, or protest, held in a single, wordless sign."

2026 'The choice of a colors' is a performance during a roadtrip in the US.

"As Time Goes By" can be read almost as a philosophical consolation: not "this too shall pass" in a dismissive sense, but a genuine claim about reality - that fixity is an illusion, and the fact that nothing stays the same is precisely what makes growth, healing, and reinterpretation possible at all.

Philosophically, "as time goes by" points to one of the oldest puzzles humans have wrestled with: the nature of change and impermanence.

Heraclitus captured it over 2,500 years ago: "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." Time going by isn't just a backdrop - it's the process that continually remakes both the world and the person observing it. Nothing holds still long enough to be grasped twice in the same way.

Impermanence (anicca) in Buddhist thought treats this same fact - that everything arises and passes - as the root of both suffering and freedom. Suffering comes from clinging to things as if they were fixed. Peace comes from accepting that change is the nature of things, not a flaw in them.

Existentialist thinkers like Heidegger saw time not as something that happens to us, but as the very structure of human existence - we are always oriented toward a future we don't yet have and a past we can't get back, which is what gives urgency and meaning to the present.

There's also a quieter, more personal philosophical thread: that meaning itself is time-dependent. A wound that feels unbearable today may become a scar you can speak of calmly in ten years - not because the event changed, but because you did, simply by continuing to exist inside time. This is different from ignoring truth or forgetting; it's the way perspective naturally widens as more of life accumulates around any single moment.

So "as time goes by" can be read almost as a philosophical consolation: not "this too shall pass" in a dismissive sense, but a genuine claim about reality - that fixity is an illusion, and the fact that nothing stays the same is precisely what makes growth, healing, and reinterpretation possible at all.

2026 'As Time Goes By' is a performance by Eddy De Buf 20 photo prints 40X50cm