Winner of the Godecharle prize for Sculpture 2017

At the beginning of March, I received an email that I was selected as one of 4 sculptors as candidates for the Godecharle prize.

Organised for the first time in 1881 by Napoléon Godecharle in honour of his late father, renowned sculptor Gilles-Lambert Godecharle, the prize aims to promote the education of young Belgian artists - sculptors, painters and architects. Over the last 128 years, many famous painters, sculptors and architects have accepted to be members of the prize jury. Amongst them Emile Claus, Paul Delvaux, Fernand Knopff, Constant Permeke, Jean Brusselmans and Pierre Alechinsky. Some of the winners of the prize became very successful afterwards, further increasing the prestige of the award. These include Victor Horta, Egide Rombaux, Victor Rousseau and Guillaume Van Strydonck.

To take part in the contest proceedings, I was invited on Wednesday 22th of March to a remote farm near Wavre. Together with the other selected candidates (4 for each discipline - sculpting, painting, architecture) we received an overarching theme. The theme for the whole group this year was Palimpsest. We had until Sunday 26th to present a finished work in line with this theme.

Without knowing the theme in advance, we had been asked to bring whatever we needed to produce a work. I had loaned my father's pick-up truck and brought with me 500 bricks, two pieces of paper, ink and a couple of thin brushes.

The following days we each worked hard and got to know each other over copious meals and late-night discussions. It was very interesting to see how my collegues tackled the theme and how we used each other to streamline our thoughts and ideas.

I started out with the bricks I brought and decided to embed one in the soil of the farm. From thereon things evolved through numerous in-situ installations rather than through theorizing. Over the following days, the installations became less and less about the bricks and more about the incisions they left in the soil - the rewriting of a place, a site, a landscape.

I wrote down the decision and installations I made throughout the days and also combined this in a drawing. On Sunday, instead of handing over a sculpture, I handed in the drawing and 1 signed brick. The final work was a site-specific installation with wooden beams and incisions in the grass, but the evolution to get to this work is just as important here. A couple of weeks later, I had to defend the site-specific installations I made for a jury. Shortly after this, we knew who won the prize in each category, this was followed by the opening of the Godecharle group exhibition in the Academy of fine Arts in Brussels.

Demolition of the Gerald the Devil Castle

A sign has been put down at the Gerald the Devil castle - an important historical building from the 13th century in the centre of Ghent - announcing that certain historical elements would be demolished. Stones were seen lying on the inner courtyard.

The Gothic building, one of the first stone houses in Ghent and former State Archives, has seen numerous renovations since the Middle Ages. Today it has become difficult to even recognize its original structure. Precisely these renovations were beiing "revoked" according to the announcement, removing the "Disneyfied" non-original elements to reveal the core of the original structure.

Curious passers-by
Passers-by and tourists needn't to worry. The announcement looked very similar to a building permit announcement, but was actually part of my latest art project. The stones thrown down from the rooftop were not coming from castle's structure.

Criticism on urban planning
The symbolic demolition was the result of an investigation I've done regarding the history of the Devil's castle. It has seen many forms and functions but also has been made more attractive for tourists to look at over the years. This is exemplary for a wider Disneyfication of the historical city of Ghent. There is for example an ever-ongoing "restoration" of the Counts Castle (after 20 years of restoration it is more fiction than fact), ubiquitous facade architecture where the actual buildings are being demolished but the facades are left alone, and the ongoing redevelopment of the city as an open-air pedestrian shopping mall.

1.6 tons of bricks
Between 16/01 and 15/02 I carried 1000 bricks (1.6 tonnes) to the roof and threw them down in the - private and enclosed - courtyard. Every week I'd put up a new announcement board, each with a new reason for the symbolic demolition, threatening to remove the embattlements, rebuild the Castle in a contemporary style, or to convert it into an artist's asylum.

This action aimed to dispers disinformation, which today has become increasingly difficult to distinguish from actual information. The pile of stones in the garden formed a temporary sculpture. The one-month performance was titled "Deconstruction I".

In July 2017 an exhibition about this and 5 other performances at the castle will take place in it's medieval basements.

More information on the project and its organisation: Yart

Compostition I

I've started on a new series in concrete, using the same wooden building blocks I use for the Construction series as a basis. Not for constructions this time, but for compositions.

When I got my first building blocks, I was just a very young child. The blocks were transported in a wooden crate on wheels, with a lid that slid off.
When the lid came off, the blocks formed a neat surface of perfectly arranged blocks. To me, this was a magical moment of possibility, I could make anything I wanted. Starting from a neat and almost 2D surface, 3D objects emerged. And then later, when playtime was over, the blocks needed to be fitted back into their container, always in a new order, as long as they fitted.

This moment, this joy and sense of possibility and new beginnings, of playtime, is what I started from. The compositions of wooden building blocks were translated into fixed concrete casts, scale 1:1. Once framed, their surface almost becomes 2D, but it is actually a bas relief.

This fist cast will be executed five times, in five different colors of integrally colored concrete. I'm already working on the second cast, which has the same scale but uses three times more blocks.