One person

The exhibition De l'assemblée à l'imprimante is conceived as a semi-clandestine infiltration into the programming of the ISELP art center in Brussels, in the fall of 2016. An initial exhibition opens in September 2016 (Table of content, group show), and a monographic exhibition by Catharina Van Eetvelde follows in December 2016. In the meantime, an exhibition is created, mixing my work with that of the artists in the September and November strands. As if it were a solo show disguised as a group show, or the opposite. The visitor’s booklet, produced by ISELP for the exhibition Table
of content (opposite in yellow) is reprinted as is, but on orange paper, with disruptive typographical signs and a long conversation, transcribed word for word, between myself and the two curators of the exhibition. The result is a visitor’s guide that is both unreadable and at the same time offers an overabundance of reading.

A notebook of games/drawings was also created at the request of the curator Pauline Hatzigeorgiou, in charge of the mediation of the ISELP for children. Presented in the form of a folded A3 sheet, printed on 5 different colored papers, the edition proposes to the children to draw a series of subjects, or to circle a detail of the composition made of drawings mixed on the back, which would represent this subject. Among these subjects to draw or to locate, we find: A boat in the port of Palermo / Two
airports / A fifteenth century fresco / A getaway / The Brussels ring / The smog of Bogota / A room in Venice / Thirty cargo ships loaded with radioactive waste sunk at sea by the mafia / A lime tree...

Semaines magazine occasionally entrusts its writing to artists. In 2012, Thomas Bernardet was invited to design an issue. At his invitation, I joined him with a text that narrates the existence of a Brussels artist in the 21st century, named Basile, walking the streets of the Belgian capital and evoking political decisions of the moment. This text is disturbed by handwritten inscriptions by Bernardet, while his photographs are arranged opposite the text.

Excerpt from the text:

"Other evenings find him discouraged from the aftermath of fruitless attempts. He wonders if it is not a delusion to pursue this work with such obstinacy. If, around him, things and years would not come to pass, to slip through his fingers. And for whom, for what? He is struck by the buzzing activity he finds as soon as he leaves the confines of his workshop to go to the supermarket at lunchtime, for example. Trucks drive in all directions. New apartments are being built on the site of a ruined house that was torn down last week. A mother tries to park her car in a narrow space not far from the school where her children are waiting."

The issue number 10 of the Flemish journal for literature NY is dedicated to the theme of "the nineties". Invited to create the visual part of that issue, the proposal is to insert, in front of the different contributions, a series of drawings made in the nineties, according to different techniques and fancies. As if the goal was to summon "witnesses of that period", represented by these drawings, expressing various aesthetics and skills or clumsiness. While a past epoch, considered retrospectively, often seems tender and innocent, beyond what it used to be really...

The exhibition Chipka, conceived by Bram Van Damme, focuses on the city of Aalst, and draws a documentary, political, sociological, and dreamlike,metaphorical portrait of it.

In the book accompanying the project, a photograph is published showing one of the factory’s towers, which welcomes visitors from the Aalst train station by day and night with thick wisps of smoke. Further on, there is a text telling the story of half real and half imaginary wanderings in Aalst and its suburbs, written in the first person. Where we meet various characters, telling the present and the past of Aalst. Where we wander through the urban fabric, gleaning here and there observations and anecdotes, while the so-called daily life takes place around.

Exctract from the text : 

«The minutes pass and we stand there, both of us, contemplating the rain that falls in gusts on the road in front of us. He suddenly asks me in Flemish where I come from; I tell him I come from Brussels and return his question. He tells me that he comes from Kuwait (I understand Kiewit at first, which I associate with Hasselt) and that he has been living and working in Aalst, at the post office depot, for twenty years. He tells me that he left his country because he didn’t feel good there. I ask him if he left for political reasons. He nods: he says that he now has a Belgian passport, that he can go wherever he wants, all over the world, which he accompanies with a large hand gesture.»

Récit d’un voyage au Luxembourg is created in response to the demand of a public, external work in the framing of an arts festival organised in the south of Luxembourg. It is a photographic book (not a fixed, external work), gathering images taken in villages of the south of Luxembourg (Dudelange, Esch-sur-Alzette, Schifflange...), but also images from Antwerp, De Panne and Brussels in Belgium, and Bogotà in Colombia. The all forms a tacit story, sailing smoothly from one place to another. Images often underline rainy atmospheres, in nuances of grey, and one sees continuums between natural zones and urbanized areas. Some implicit questions are brought in the images about the idea of belonging to a place, both on a personal, existential level, and on a sociological  one (Luxembourg being an historical place of migration, related to the steel and coal industries).

The sea is calm today is a book gathering analog coloured photographs taken during a 6 weeks journey to Colombia in 2008. Walks through the gigantic cities of Bogotà, Cali and Cartagena de Indias are at the origin of the photographs. We could identify two types of photographs along the book: those  showing details, with blurred backgrounds, suggesting inner emotions, and those showing wider cityscapes or scenes of daily life in the city streets, opening up to alterity, the astonishment of alterity.