UNDER CONSTRUCTION!

Palais des Beaux-Arts / Charleroi, 1996

Mark1

Series of 7 : index cards, texts, drawings, architecture models, videos and flags

Exhibition's projects:

Initially, there are sites with technical indications written by Alec De Busschère that describe imaginary rooms: height, width, colour of the walls, shape of the windows, position of the openings, ceiling and floor materials, lighting, etc. Some of the information is very detailed; others are not. The suggested spaces are invented from scratch, but are nevertheless of a certain consistency, volume and orderly dimensions. Alec De Busschère described them according to a logic known to him.

Secondly, there are texts, written by writers to whom these technical sheets were given. The authors wrote a page or two to evoke the space, gave it a function, gave importance to some details or invented others to construct their fiction.

Each text is not interpretation but imagination and lays the foundations of a story that takes place in this room, which takes shape as the story is read and unfolds. And here a second room appears, related to the first, but also different because it comes from another language; it also has an existence, a presence, virtual no doubt, but also very concrete in terms of the work of writing.

*BRUCE DEHESSE* by Thomas Gunzig, 30 January 1996.

These texts were then sent to architects, who drew up plans based on what they read. They traced the limits of surfaces, walls and openings, specifying by means of cross-sections and elevations the technical supports of the place they envisioned while reading. The third volume is ordered in a drawing that makes it visible, that gives it the capacity to be concretised in a different and new form.

*BRUCE DEHESSE* by Wim Cuyvers, 10 March 1996.

So far, however, none of these three images is more or less real than the others - they are all quite imaginary, but isn't imagination also a considerable part of reality?

Later, with the technical data sheets, texts and plans taking his own path, that of the writer and that of the architect, Alec De Busschère made models. However, a model is not a place itself, it is a representation, in a scale that the eye takes up, of a space where the human proportion is diverted; it is a space where the spirit settles down by imagining itself to have lived there.

*BRUCE DEHESSE*, model, 1996. © Delphine Bedel

After that, Alec De Busschère, using a tiny camera, shot inside these models. He penetrated the interior of the volume, walked through the rooms in a circular movement, walked along the walls, went down the slopes, followed the contours of the windows and doors, roamed the floors, etc.

*BRUCE DEHESSE*, model (inside), 1996. © Delphine Bedel

Finally, these enlarged video images are projected in the exhibition room, to the dimensions of the space in which the spectators find themselves. The image rotates and sweeps over the walls; it is clear for a few moments, continues to run, distorts, returns to a flat surface, is again in focus and turns away once again...

Because it is in the proportions of the room we walk through, the intangible light is a reality for the visitor on which a cascade of fictions is poured. We walk through a place haunted by illuminated imaginations which, here, take shape in a representation that characterises them: in the fleeting and impalpable, in the dream and the addition of dreams.

The spectators see these imaginary spaces and only them know where they are and what space they live in ... It is a very real story, but filled with fleeting presences; it is a ghost story.

Laurent Busine

Charleroi, 1996