Europe, In the search of new narratives, Exhibition at Bozar, Brussels, 13.4.16-29.4.16 More infos here

The room provides several works as entry points about urban spaces called Europe Square. The works explore the way a concrete (urban, public) space can be connected to the (symbolic, abstract, distant) space made and named Europe.

Modified barriers for working sites and beer crates from all over Europe serve as basic furniture. A surplus suggest a further extension or modification of the space.

The table provides satellites views and a series of statistics of over 250 Europe Squares, freely browsable by the public. While the data is available, the question rises of who is enabled of making concrete use of them.

An assemblage of original postcards & photos provide a thematic mapping of the relation of cities and european thematics. A fictive report mayor gone missing after searching for the ideal Europe Square provides a narrative structure.

At the end of the room a double videoslideshow shows the local Europe Square of Brussels. The slideshow asks the viewer to recall his own memory of the square. While one monitor concentrates on the cycle of the weekly market, the other one reports on the physical features of the square, thus marking the rythmic complementarity of the empty square and its weekly occupation. The video is available on vimeo, you need to enter the word europe

Europaplatz (From With Love)
BW photographs, postcards, printed texts, frames, 357x278cm, Swiss art collection

The composition gathers a research that began twelve years ago and formalizes new work horizons. the work combines a set of photographs of urban squares called «Europe Square» with a collection of old and new postcards showing Europe squares.

The postcards in the foreground, are grouped according to different themes associated with the issue of representation of Europe and urban development. The photographs are from my own archive. They complement or question the groups according to formal issues, customs, territorial or historical.

The text is a fiction that links the images and lets you know the places shown, allowing to locate and build relationships between the actual geography and the subjective mapping. The fiction is a report of a town deputy whose mayor has launched himself with body and soul into a project of a Europe Square in his town. While collecting them he eventually disappears, leaving a void to filled by the citizens, a call to take over his passion.

The installation follows an 1:1 reproduction of Juncker's office in Brussels by Rem Kolhaas, AMO/OMA. A safe next to the door to my installation bears a sticky where one can read "Plan B".