On a recent visit to Sint Niklaas I met again with curator of Coupe de Ville, Stef Van Bellingen. He invited some other participating artists along to meet me, which was nice. We are slowly starting to build relationships and discuss parallels that appear in our work which is very interesting. It’s also interesting to hear some of these artists have attended events/residencies in Ireland and have liaised/collborated/exhibited with other Irish artists I know – it’s a small world.
Karen Wulgaert has been a great help in sourcing information about the building I will be exhibiting in along with artist, Jonas Van Steenkiste. I have also been gathering information through evidence found in archival images, in relation to the changes that have occured to the superficial, more visible layers of the city…ie. it’s layout, structure, buildings, etc.
The main central square looks very different now to what it used to and some of its most interesting features have been (re)moved for reasons, which appear to be a direct result of “urban planning/developement”/”regeneration”/space reclamation etc.
One such structure which fell victim to these changes was the city’s Kiosk or Bandstand. Designed by architect Jan De Somme-Servais, the kiosk was given prime position on the main square when it was installed in 1860. Photographic archives reveal a decorative tree-lined parameter around the structue. Just over 100 years later, the Kiosk was dismantled in 1966 and moved to another location.
Within my practice, I am interesteed in the remains of cultural phenomena that have since lost their place in contemporary society. To me, the dismantling and “dislocation” of this structure reveals something of the shifting social/cultural imperatives we continually experience in our age of “progress” and (re)development. It also, I believe, undermines the very purpose and function of the structure, rendering it redundant – an invisible and insignificant part of the city’s built heritage – despite earning “protected status” in 1993.
To this end, I’m playing with the idea of reproducing an image of the kiosk using printmaking – printing black ink on black ink so that the image “appears to disappear” into itself. Challenging the oftentimes limited scale of printmaking, I am reproducing the image in sections so that the image overall will (hopefully) reach dimensions of up to 2.4mt X 1.6mt. This method of sections/fragmenting/montage is not just a practical solution to limitations in scale, but is a conceptual device, which says something of the history/(story) of the strucuture and its memory.
