“You certainly shouldn’t put me in front of an audience and then have me give a speech of thanks,” he also said on Friday. “I’m afraid I’ll be exposed.” After the award ceremony, he skillfully avoids that moment. “I didn’t prepare anything, I thought: you’ll pull me through,” he says to festival director Jan Doense, after which the two start talking.
Thiry regularly has the audience laughing during the conversation. He answers Doense’s questions in a light-hearted manner, while he sits somewhat slumped in the armchair on the stage. It is clear that he himself does not take his work and what he has already achieved very seriously. “I am someone who does not look back quickly, I am very inclined to look ahead,” he says after the conversation. “I always try to brush it off a bit, like: ‘Oh, that does not mean that much.'”
The word imposter syndrome is also mentioned more than once. “I always have the idea that everyone can do what I can. That it doesn’t really mean that much.” Does such an oeuvre award help with that? “I think I can’t ignore it anymore,” laughs Thiry. He compares it to a hernia operation. “Then this statue is the picture that the surgeon puts on the damaged spot. And then says: ‘Now you don’t have to whine about your hernia anymore. I fixed it.’ This statue is actually that for my brain disorder.”
