[NL/EN below] “Spoorzoekers” ging op zoek naar de materiële restanten van wat de kolonisatie van Congo heeft betekend voor de gemeente Sint-Pieters-Woluwe. De belangrijkste factor daarin was de aanleg van de Tervurenlaan en de tram en treinsporen die voor de wereldtentoonstelling van 1897 werden aangelegd. Op die wereldexpo presenteerde Leopold II zijn kolonisatieproject aan de Belgische bevolking. Het gigantische bouwproject ontsloot het landelijke Sint-Pieters-Woluwe en Stokkel. Die verstedelijking zorgde in de daaropvolgende decennia voor een toeristische dynamiek en veranderde de landelijke gemeente in een prestigieus woongebied.
Om alle rijkdom uit Congo te verschepen naar België werd tussen Matadi en Leopoldville (Kinshasa) ook een spoorweg aangelegd, wat een grote dodentol zou eisen: 1931 doden waarvan 131 kolonialen. Om die te herdenken werd het idee gelanceerd om hun namen in te schrijven op een monument dat op de Tervurenlaan een plek moet vinden.
Voor het onderzoek dook Sam Vanoverschelde in die geschiedenis en in het kunstpatrimonium, om het verhaal van die koloniale connectie bloot te leggen en in zijn context te bestuderen. Deze ‘etat des lieux’ vormt de basis voor een verder onderzoek naar het immateriële erfgoed: het verzamelen van de verhalen van bewoners en andere betrokkenen. Het hele verhaal vind je uitgebreid terug in deze catalogus
“Spoorzoekers” (“Trackers”) went in search of the material remnants of what the colonisation of Congo meant for the municipality of Woluwe-Saint-Pierre. The main factor in this was the construction of the Avenue de Tervuren and the tram and train tracks built for the 1897 World’s Fair. At that world fair, Leopold II presented his colonisation project to the Belgian population. The gigantic construction project opened up rural Sint-Pieters-Woluwe and Stokkel. That urbanisation created a tourist boom in the following decades and turned the rural municipality into a prestigious residential area.
To ship all the wealth from Congo to Belgium, a railway was also built between Matadi and Leopoldville (Kinshasa), which would claim a large death toll: 1931 dead of whom 131 were colonials. To commemorate them, the idea was launched to inscribe their names on a monument to find a place on Avenue de Tervuren.
For the research, Sam Vanoverschelde delved into that history and into the art patrimony, to uncover the story of that colonial connection and study it in context. This ‘etat des lieux’ forms the basis for further research into the intangible heritage: collecting the stories of residents and other stakeholders.
The Field is a short film that retraces the steps of Frederick Walker on the night of october 8th to 9th 1918 when he suffered a gas attack in a field near Houplines. It left him visually impaired for the rest of his life. The film is currently ready for festival submissions so I cannot publish anything online yet, but feel free to ask for a private viewing or go check it out on filmfreeway shortly.
Some background information
Within the ‘Fictive Archive Investigations‘ group Philippe Black, Julian Walker and myself embarked on a common project, Borderlines and Frontlines, handing over the archival pieces and information to the others so each could work on a personal approach with other people’s materials.
My goal was to embark on a pilgrimage to the places where they had lived their ordeal, document that as precisely as possible and create new work from my personal perspective. I received a fragment of Frederick Walker’s war diary, some regiment information and two possible locations for the gas attack in Houplines as well as several addresses in Brussels and Eupen from the Beck family. The latter resulted in a series of pictures that accompanies Julians take on the material that Philippe handed him.
With the help of the Flanders Fields Museum, I got hold of more detailed information that could pinpoint the exact location of the gas attack. I spent a week in the area, figuring out the possible routes Frederick’s regiment must have followed and went on numerous nightly trips filming those spots. On the 9th of october 2022, exactly 104 years later, I was in the field where it all happened. Well, actually I documented the three locations: the two Julian had pointed me too and the one I discovered. I made ‘reconnaissance’ drawings of those places as they are now, just like my own great-grandfather Joe had done during his time when he was on the lookout with his friend Samuel. This resulted in an accordion fold sketchbook with three landscapes and with the nightly videofootage, I made a short film retracing the exact route I had finally discovered.
Back in the days when covid locked down our world, I answered a call from Claire Ducène who was looking for artists-researchers working in the field of history and archives, to start up a group project reflecting about the kind of work we did. After an extensive period of getting to know each other’s work through regular online presentations and conversations, we got an opportunity to create and present together at the Brussels institute for artistic research ISELP. With a group exhibition ahead of us, we started forging alliances within our group. In the summer of ’22 a residency at ISELP and La Métive brought most of us all physically together. The results of our individual and group efforts were presented at ISELP during a group exhibition that opened on January 25th 2023.
Here are some pictures of the exhibition, (read further underneath)
Pretty quickly in our presentation and research stage, I hooked up with Julian Walker and Philippe Beck connecting through our family histories that all had to do with the two world wars from last century. Julians grandfather Frederick was left with permanent damage to his eyesight due to a gas attack he suffered in a field in Houplines, near Armentière on 9 october 1918. Julian had previously investigated the matter, had documented the place and performed one of the songs of his grandfather. Philippe’s ancestors were situated in East Belgium, the German speaking part that was annexed to Belgium after WWI and reclaimed by Germany in WWII. His great-grandfather had left the area at the beginning of the war and worked for the german occupied government in Brussels, but also joined a resistance group. He had printed their pamphlets in his office. Meanwhile in Eupen, his grandfather and grandmother were enlisted in the German Wehrmacht and the labour service for the war effort. Another grandfather of underwent the same scenario but quickly deserted and joined the resistance too.
For my part, instead of diving into the Joe English history again, I presented the group the story and archival pieces of Molly English, which I explored earlier in ‘the outs and abouts of Molly English’.
We embarked on a common project, Borderlines and Frontlines, handing over the archival pieces and information to the others so each could work on a personal approach with other people’s materials.
My goal was to embark on a pilgrimage to the places where they had lived their ordeal, document that as precisely as possible and create new work from my personal perspective. I received a fragment of Frederick Walker’s war diary, some regiment information and two possible locations for the gas attack in Houplines as well as several addresses in Brussels and Eupen from the Beck family. The latter resulted in a series of pictures that accompanies Julians take on the material that Philippe handed him.
With the help of the Flanders Fields Museum, I got hold of more detailed information that could pinpoint the exact location of the gas attack. I spent a week in the area, figuring out the possible routes Frederick’s regiment must have followed and went on numerous nightly trips filming those spots. On the 9th of october 2022, exactly 104 years later, I was in the field where it all happened. Well, actually I documented the three locations: the two Julian had pointed me too and the one I discovered. I made ‘reconnaissance’ drawings of those places as they are now, just like my own great-grandfather Joe had done during his time when he was on the lookout with his friend Samuel. This resulted in an accordion fold sketchbook with three landscapes and with the nightly videofootage, i made a short film retracing the exact route I had finally discovered.
For the exhibition, with a group of 16 different artist each having their own output and collaborations, we presented our work as a common project: Philippe presented his personal work and 5 new portraits of our protagonists. Julian analysed and reworked a letter, in fourfold, of Molly English that she had sent during WWII to Kathleen Molloy, a relative in Waterford. He also presented four postcards – genuine WWI mail from soldiers to their family – he had erased to write a personal message to his grandfather. A third piece of his is a meticulous description of one of Philippes historical items: the doorknob of his great-grandfathers office. He also wrote a text on the wall as a reflection the common path we had walked.
My work consists of the sketchbook and the video called ‘The Field’
Together with Yves Geunes, we created an interface to browse alternatively through the archive that is our groups ever expanding body of work: the Fictive Archive Investigations…
A residency at ZSenne Artlab had me experimenting with some new idea’s for visual work. Although I strive for a low to no-waste way of living, it has to be said that is quite a challenge. Just to have an idea of how much I consume in packaging alone, I had been collecting every plastic package of (evidently non food) items I purchased over a few months time. Looking for new purpouse of these obsolete items, it was a challenge to find something for an item that, all in all, has a certain aesthetic quality. The inspiration came from my time in boarding school, where I captured spiders under a plastic package just to see how long I could keep them alive.
I played around with all kind of objects to combine them with, but in the end I stuck to the pierced stones I found on a Croatian beach last year. It made me think of the bell jars that used to clad people’s interiors.
birdsundecimalgogglesmapguessdisksticksallallUniversal Minutes on displayMarklin folders to browse through.
But maybe it’s better to just simply recycle them?
The latest residency at ZSenne Artlab has turned the place into a full-on exhibition space, presenting a series called ‘Marklin’. I have previously experimented with the series during the very first ‘Archive of Untold Stories’ but now I’ve taken the step of making the large format prints this series needs to be gazed upon.
‘Marklin’ is a series that reflects on how mankind treats Mother Earth. Each time I take a plane, I shoot through the window with my LCA-compact camera, while the landscape disappears underneath me. The series expresses a nostalgic fantasy, but also that universal vision in dreams, to fly without wings, or to fall out of a nightmare.
Given the state of the world we’re living in right now, what I’ve registered might soon be gone for good. The strange aesthetics of these images pushes one to reflect on how we are dealing with our habitat.
The pandemic urged me to review my means of living as well, so I’m blatantly stating it as it is: I’m presenting this work to survive the consecutive waves of lockdowns and closures in the cultural field.
check the instagram account @byebyeleopold for an overview of all our adventures!
Somewhere before the summer of 2021, a call was made for a project with the title ‘ByeBye Leopold, Destination Simonis’. A group of neighbours of the Leopold II boulevard (between Sainctelette and Simonis) were looking for an action that could gather people. Questionning the renaming of the boulevard, since it’s namegiver is considered highly problematic in the (de-)colonisation context, but also about mobility and the use of public space on one of the busiest lanes of the brussels region, sitting on top of a tunnel. A tunnel carrying the same name but due to change… But mainly: it has been renovated to keep cars coming swiftly from the highway right into the center of town.
I got to work with visual artist and St.Lukas teacher Roel Kerkhofs. We quickly concocted the idea of a wooden replica of an existing statue of Leopold II that we would scale down to the size of a car and give it some wooden wheels. So that we could push around slowly from one end of the boulevard to the other, trying to park it every night.
After a construction period of about three weeks, we rolled out our statue onto the boulevard. Pretty quickly we adapted our plans of constantly rolling around to stay put on certain spots where we could reach out to the users of the space: inhabitants as well as passerbyers were sometimes perplexed, vexed, enchanted or enthousiastic to our action. We used the artifact to simply ask questions whilst not pretending to have any answers or preconceptions. Over a period of three weeks driving and hanging around, we also tried to engage people into taking part in a closing event with concerts, free coffee, tea and cakes that were ordered at several bakeries in the area, calling it a baking competition. After a few stretches along the boulevard, we had some regulars hanging around, helping us moving, painting and taking polls: Nourredine and Mouha in the end glued together a pinata, modelled to Leopold’s head that was cracked open on the last day, releasing a load of ‘napoleon’ candy.
As a final act of erasing the stains of history, the statue that was painted with red and black board paint over the course of the three weeks, the whole statue was crayed white and took its final journey down the boulevard, to end up in the freezone of Toestand/Allée du Kaai, next to Tour and Taxi.
The statue got reappropriated but eventually had to be taken down, as homeless people started using it to sleep overnight, while others were always talking of burning it to the ground. Surely a risk no one wanted to take…
A film of this action/project is in the making, check this space soon!
I had some mighty fine time again, residing at ZSenne Artlab for two weeks. Next to presenting The Archive of Untold Stories and The Extinction Survival Archive, I worked on a new film within the framework of the latter project: “Moments before the apocalypse”. I started shooting footage during a summer escape in Portugal and swiftly, the idea rose to do something meaningfull with it. But it wasn’t untill the world’s environmental problems caught up on us at our little sanctuary, that the right counterpoint for the storyline popped up. The Austrian world summit was going on and frankly, the news coming from there only made things more grimm and doomy, while I was having a great time enjoying nature and all it’s creatures. Greta Thunberg’s speech was a kick in the gut again, so I fiddled about with al the ‘acting’ metaphores it contained. Animals don’t act, but people do.
I got to finish a first draft of the movie and presented it, mainly to get some feedback from the visitors. At the moment the film is not ready. Running 45 minutes, it’s quite long and now I’m hesitating to go either for timestretching slow cinema or to focus on the story and drasticly ‘kill some darlings’. I will present it here after a second session of editing and mixing. Watch this space.
During those weeks I had some nice encounters. One was with a family from Glasgow on holiday in Brussels, who were curious so I presented some stories from the archive while the kids were having a blast with the children’s section of the Extinction Survival Archive. They were working in the arts too so we quickly found common ground. I forgot their names already of course, I hope they keep in touch.
On the last day, an ukrainien man came round, who only knew a few words of dutch (Museum? ja!), so it was quite difficult to interact about the archives. But he hung around for a while, checking out things. He asked for some water, I gave him a beer (Pivo?! santé!). And then some tobacco. After smoking outside, he came in and layed himself down on the cold floor, to listen to the film that was playing. The smoke must have hit him a bit too hard, he was nauseous. A little later, he asked for some paper, I only had an old covid-test certificate that had a blank back. (I recycle scrutinously.) He sat down, took his four colour bic pen and started drawing. He went looking for leaves and took some tobacco, mixed with beer, to color it in.
He drew my portrait. It’s the small things that make us happy at the archives…
The Extinction Survival Archive is a spin-off archive of the ‘Archive of Untold Stories’ where we look into the possibilities of survival in a post-apocalyptic world.
The Extinction Survival Archive started during a previous residency at ZSenne Artlab. The pandemic has turned the attention away from an impending problem: The tipping point of our climate, the inescapable ecological disaster if we don’t take action. The apocalypse hasn’t been repelled, so we might as wel think about survival in such circumstances. How can I leave my children, who only know the internet as a source of knowledge, the necessary information if electricity might not even be available?
Last edition the premise resulted in a naive, humbling collection of books, for parents and children. Now, I’m looking for people who can share the knowledge to survive such an apocalypse. This time I was talking to (an) expert(s) (one had to cancel due to illness) and our findings were presented live on Saturday february 21st at 17h. With Ir. Geert Palmers, a founder of the durable energy study bureau 3E, we were challenging the energy question under those circumstances. Check out the full interview here:
With the collaboration of Davis Freeman and Stephy Maes who runs the multicam stream. The presentation is english spoken.
Funded by the cultural activities support by the Flemish Community
The Archive of Untold Stories is a research project on how to use the archive as a narrative, using ‘raw’ materials to tell stories. The numerous boxes contain a mixture of projects and idea’s, all in different states of completion, some merely a concept, others as good as ready to go into production.
For this live broadcast, we took out one of te boxes that connect to my heritage and talk about Molly English (°1880+1956): an independent woman who made her own life in a time such things weren”t always obvious. Through a box of pictures, postcards, obituaries, news paper clippings and objects – a donation by Hilde Verstraete I received in 2018 – we try to find out more about the life and times of Molly. While doing so we get an insight in the wobbly path collecting memories and describing heritage sometimes takes, with contradicting testimonials, stubborn misinterpretations or in this occasion even: overenthousiast fictionalising by my partner in crime.
The broadcast was funded by the Flemish Community via the cultural activities primes.
Errata: Was it the nerves or sheer excitement? I missed some accuracy in the dates I should have memorised, so here are some errata straigthened out:
– Henry English was born march 17th, 1853 (St.Patrick’s!), left Ireland in 1862 for London, and arrived in Bruges on januari 22, 1863. (the dates of decease of his father Thomas English, born 181?, and mother Judith Halligan, born 1813, are unknown but situated after 1860 and before 1862)
– The two pictures, one of Molly English and one of the marriage of Raf English and Marie-Josée Daele are to be situated in 1938.
A collaboration by Sergio Leitãoand Sam Vanoverschelde
During a residency at ZSenne Artlab in january 2020, Sergio and Sam got in touch for the first time and made plans for future collaborations. The pandemic decided otherwise so a residency in Porto that summer got cancelled and when Sergio was supposed to take up his residence weeks at ZSenne the 25th of januari 2021 to february 5th, he’s stuck in Porto… So instead, they set up an exchange in the surrealist tradition, feeding each other images and montages to freely associate with. Numerous gigabytes transferred between Porto and Brussels and the results were presented at ZSenne Artlab Feb. 5th and 6th.
The video’s are mainly based on a multitude of Sergio’s productions, cut up and reproduced by Sam (with a pinch of Visual Kitchen nostalgia) and also adding new sounds by Sam and Reinhold Zisser (AU)
The video’s were also presented at Edicola Radetzky, a historical kiosk in Milan, that presents contemporary works from artists on residency at the Progetto Citta Ideale. Here’s the catalog of what was presented in the spring of 2021.
During the quarantine I took part in a Random Scream project ‘Universal Minutes’ conceived by my friend Davis Freeman. From march 23d to may 1st, at 17:21pm sharp, I took pictures together with my fellow photographers, wherever we were. I took a batch of perished polaroids from the archives and took several shots within that one minute. Time took its toll on these polaroids, they hardly could develop properly as they dried out over the years. Some simply wouldn’t expose, so I pressure-painted the emulsion. A relative experience of time in this relative time experience the quarantine enforced us. Check out the complete series here.
I’m selling these time pieces now, at 50€ a pop but for each sale 10€ goes to Couscous Connection a project of a neighbour of mine, distributing free meals twice a week for the poor, homeless and needy in my area.
The series is on display at the group exhibition ‘Over tijd – Du temps’ at De Markten in Brussels from sept 17th to november 8th. It had to shut down earlier because of covid restrictions, but there’s a guided tour by curator Nora Kempeneer (in dutch) so you can have a virtual visit (and some pictures)
exhibition view courtesy of De Markten by Lander Loeckx
I had the pleasure of being invited for a residency of two weeks at ZSenne Art Lab. The intention was to research and experiment with different forms of presentation, looking for solutions to tell stories with pictures and objects in a different and personal way. I came up with the archive as a form of unfolding different spatial scenarios. It refers to the historical research I’ve been doing a lot lately, spending a lot of time in different archives, but also to the temporality of items and their meanings.
The Archive of untold stories sprouted from the urge to find a way of presenting some of the projects that have been developing over the last months and years. These all vary in different stages of completion, some are over, some are ready to present, some are merely vague ideas still locked-in in a collection of items. By gathering all these projects box per box in an archive and a public space, it also gave me the opportunity of presenting the links between them, developing themes through different projects. When people visited, they related to different themes and boxes, but it always started long conversations that resulted in me getting lots of new paths to discover.
During the first days I mainly regrouped the items in separate collections and presented the keynotes that describe the different projects: Mystic Land, Marklin, Strada, Grenzen, The extinction survival archive and Molly.
As wel as some leftover prints, catalogues and books from older series, (Stadsbiografie, Bastards and Heldenhulde) a selection of prints from ‘Mystic Land’ were presented as an introduction to my work. Mystic Land used historical research to define places and routes to travel, resulting in a series that exposes how man uses his environment, manipulates it to his benefit, but not always to great result.
Building further on that environmental theme, the Marklin series took up the most attention as it is on the brink of completion. It was presented with the item that connects it through time, the inspiration from my childhood, a papier-maché maquette, in front of a projection illustrating the size of prints this series needs to be presented in.
Gathering the material from over 15 years of shooting these images, I composed several series looking for formal connections and combinations. The Marklin series is ready for print and display, but I’m still thinking about counterpoint objects like the papier-maché maquette: maps, wireframes, 3D prints, scrap sculptures etc…
Building and thinking further on the environmental, Strada is the next project that tackles the theme. Back with my feet on the ground I would be exploring the highway researching its quality as a landscape and as a biotope. It is temporarily on hold due to a complete blocking of the flemish roads and traffic agency. The issue being safety, I suggested that knowing the problem may also resolve it, resulted in a categorical ’Njet’.
Another project in development is ‘Grenzen’ (Limits, but merely a working title). My ancestral research got me greatly interested and thoroughly knowledgeable about flemish nationalism. That movement has had a great impact on politics and society in the country. It has defined a language border, regional borders and many issues during its development over the last century. Like in Mystic Land I’m planning to meticulously travel alongside this demarcation and reflect on this division, supported by a study on limology, compiled and written by an expert in the field, Luc Boeva, who confirmed his aid and collaboration. I’m also looking into financing a residency in Dandong, China, on the North Korean border to do likewise research and creation on that border and the specific aspects of the bordertown. It will be a combination of landscape and documentary photography.
Shortly before starting the residency I came up with another idea to work on: The Extinction Survival Archive. The state of our global environment, the state of national and international politics, it all seems to be announcing an impending doom. While previously working on this theme with the company Random Scream (the pieces Investment, Expanding Energy, 7 promises and A better place) it seems twenty years of activism hasn’t really amounted up to much resolve: I should instead be organising the survival of my offspring. If our systems collapses, how can I provide the necessary information for my kids (or grandkids) who only have known the internet as a source of information when electricity will probably not be available to power a global network. Naively, I collected everything I had gathered from my ancestors (and just couldn’t part from): the horticulture courses from my grandfather, pocketbooks on basic building techniques from my architect father, books my parents had about health, natural medicine, internal medicine and even my own ‘SAS survival guide’ from my scouting days. It also includes a section of children’s books on geography, physics, the human body…
The Extinction Survival Archive instigated many long talks with visitors. We reflected on how a new monetary system would be needed and eventually we would go back to seeds as a payment method. How brussels people grew vegetables in public parks during WWII, or grew mushrooms, rhubarb and chicory in their basements. Reflections on ‘the power of the archive’. What would we need to stock in order to survive? The next step in this project will be starting up a Brussels ’preppers’ community: doomsday preparers are a common phenomenon in the states, so there must be a lot of knowledge. The aim is to gather and prepare for doomsday in a metropolitan environment.
Finally, one of the most bewildering boxes contained a donation I received from Hilde Verstraete, granddaughter of Karel, who was a friend of my great-great-grandfather Henry English. It contained a photo album, loose pictures, letters and postcards from my great-grand-aunt Molly, who must have been a peculiar person in her days. She was crippled as a child due to a medical mistake, stayed single all her life and travelled all over, even to ‘indochine’. She had a career as a governess, maitre-d’hotel, a Red Cross nurse in the UK during WWI, worked for the Belgian government in London during WWII and eventually retired back in Bruges. I got to know of all this because I still have two 90 year old great-aunts, twins, who have known her in the days. I had gotten first impressions on her extraordinary life when researching for ‘Mystic Land’. As she was the one who organised lodging for her three sisters and little brother in the UK during WW1, I had visited the addresses in the UK in 2016, because Joe went to visit them during his leave from the battlefields. Now I have even more addresses in the UK, in Biarritz, Knokke, Hasselt and Brussels, places where she lived as a guest in befriended households. From Waterford in Ireland, I received copies of all the letters she had sent to another friend of the family, Kathleen Molloy, that had been carefully preserved by her offspring, Renée Fraher. There’s material in there for a new quest, not sure what it could turn out to be: a documentary or a vodcast. There’s some urgency while there’s still witnesses to talk to. To many of the visitors, this was one of the most intriguing ‘untold stories’.
While I would have wanted to do even more creatively, I must say the concept of presenting an archive of several projects in different stages of completion, felt like the right way of dealing with my work. It has something ancient, archaic, and refers back to my sources, the historical research and the knowledge I have been accumulating. But it also stays an active source, it keeps growing, keeps building up. Even if not every individual project will see completion, it enables me to keep working on my material and present it to a public, even if I can’t find the resources to start up new creations or the funding commissions keeps treating my work as irrelevant.
Following my own expo Mystisch Land, Museum aan de IJzer set up an expo: “Joe English, from inspiring art to propaganda”. It shows the art of Joe English during WW1 and the evolution of that body of work towards the flemish nationalist propaganda of the interbellum. I designed the info-posters and helped Peter Verplancke, the museum’s conservator, to set up the scenography.
Over the course of a decade now, I’ve been regularly working with Piazza del’Arte, an Antwerp based organisation that plunges children and youngsters in various artistic and creative workshops. Having the vj and audiovisual background, I started off mainly doing live video, installations and mapping. But over the years those Mixed Media sessions evolved into something even more open, getting back to the origins of the term ‘mixed media’ in paintings and sculpture. Here’s some highlights of those years working in schools:
In 2016 I started researching the whereabouts of Joe English during WW1 and consequently visited all these places. His get-away from the besieged city of Antwerp towards the Belgian coast eventually bringing him to Calais was one of the trips I attempted to do as he did, on foot. I described the research and the travels on a blog (in dutch) and presented the results at Museum aan de IJzer, from september 2017 to march 2018.
There’s two sets of pictures:
contemporary landscape photography shot on film with a Pentax67.
A set of cross-processed snapshots of subjects that survived 100 years of history.
