Tirol Inferno

One ski lift, forty unfortunate passengers, doomed to each other by failing technology. The ski lift they all stepped into gets stuck. The longer it goes on, the more the initially convivial atmosphere becomes charged with irritation and incomprehension. An old secret even causes things to come to blows.

‘Tirol Inferno’ is a hilarious collaboration by two star talents. Annelies Verbeke gives her imagination free rein in verse form and Klaas Verplancke reveals himself as a modern kindred spirit of Hieronymus Bosch. His illustrations are of surreal figures with strange proportions that give them a slightly malevolent edge. This is how Verbeke presents them too: they come across as marginal figures on the edge of society.

Verplancke and Verbeke seem to egg each other on in the imagination stakes. And at the end, another dimension is added to ‘Tirol inferno’. The humour is driven to a peak and, in an invisible speech bubble, Verbeke and Verplancke offer a parody of the sovereign power of the artist in modern society.

At a more abstract level, this story, taking place in the limited confines of a ski lift, is about an unsympathetic society that demands the artist to justify him- or herself. The result is a parable you will not easily forget.