In 2006 Karl Van Welden established United Planets. The name indicates not only the connectivity between the arts, but also the collaborative artistic relationships that Karl Van Welden enters into. Within this structure he is working on a cycle, based on terrestrial or human presence in the universe.
 
After a number of small-scale research projects, such as HITLERMACHINE and CABINET OF CURIOSITIES he presented his first performance in the series MERCURY. It is a human mosaic in which the people have liberated themselves from their place. They are adrift. Disturbing and full of questions figures wander aimlessly through an age of exceeding loneliness. Just as on the planet Mercury, days last an eternity while the years fly by.
 
As an atmospheric backdrop, each planet represents another series of projects to Karl Van Welden. The same planet can take on different points of view and the research doesn’t come to a halt with its first public exposure. Every planet contains a series of projects within which the same theme and form are further explored in-depth. Instead of a fixed theatre script, concrete images form the point of departure. A specifically phrased question or a hypothesis becomes the basis for the creation process as meticulous laboratory research: How does a ‘little’ human being relate to the ‘enormity’ of the universe?
 
Karl Van Welden works with different disciplines and chooses a suitable form, location and team of co-workers depending on content. He always works in situ. Unusual locations can in that sense fulfil an important role as active partner and source of inspiration. MERCURY makes use of a large and desolate industrial space, while PLUTO plays out in a closed box in public space. In both projects the space, literally and figuratively, comes to be in proportion with the play, the performers, the spectator and the content, but so too with the real world. The performance style that Karl Van Welden develops with his performers is based on inertia. In general, people have become alienated from the world. A silencing of the action offers the possibility of bringing reflection back to the surface and, moreover, you experience the moment much more intensely.
 
On each occasion the audience occupies a central place within the story. It makes up part of the search for new forms of presentation as a function of the content.  The most apt example is the performance series PLUTO, which is only accessible to one spectator at a time. The performers, however, perform continuously; for them it is one act that continues for four hours. Communication with the audience is established through bodies, objects, gestures, movements, sound and image. As long as Karl Van Welden feels no necessity to say something with words he tries to remain faithful to the potency of the image. We are flooded with images at a furious rate and words have more-or-less lost their status. What he’s attempting is to reduce the image to its essence.