Nummer achttien
Artist Guido van der Werve explores how his inferiority complex and fear of death saved his life after a dramatic accident in Berlin.
Guido Van der Werve grew up playing classical piano but switched to visual arts later in life. He began his career as a performance artist, but soon became interested in film as a medium. Extreme sports, absurdism and self-composed music play the leading roles in his work.
Man has always been concerned with escaping death and eternal life. NUMMER ACHTTIEN shows Van der Werve’s development as a human being and an artist in the attempts to do so. At the basis of the film was a serious traffic accident in Berlin. After Van der Werve was hit by a city bus, he fought for his life for two months in a Berlin hospital. During his rehabilitation, the doctors and psychiatrists forced him to return to his youth. NUMMER ACHTTIEN is therefore a self-examination, filmed at his parental home in Papendrecht, his home in Finland and in the Berlin rehabilitation centre where he stayed for months. Van der Werve realized that his parents’ traumas (his mother spent a long time in a psychiatric hospital, his father fought dementia before dying from the disease) had left him with a deep-seated fear of death. His answer to this was sports. Running. Marathon. Triathlon. Until his accident.