A Place Apart

A Place Apart brings the poetic universes of Ane Vester and Lucile Bertrand into dialogue with each other and with the Queens building. Individual, but also universal memories and souvenirs from the house’s past are highlighted; with colour and sound, through the absence of colour and through silence. A Place Apart is about memories, spaciousness, the special house and the lack of a home.

As with Ane Vester, memory is central to Lucile Bertrand’s work. Although her works have an undeniable poetic quality, they often refer to wars and violent conflicts. Lucile’s oeuvre raises questions about spatiality, the domestic, but also about not being at home, ‘apart from home’. The installation Beyrouth, for example, shows twelve crumbling blocks in fragile plaster: a barren landscape of destroyed homes, left defenceless by a devastating war. The bleakness of displacement, of being deprived of a home (temporarily or permanently), contrasts sharply with the warm, homely atmosphere of Queens, a building in which traces of colourful wallpaper transport you to happy family moments. But apart from the destructive hint, Beyrouth also refers to the universal hope after the war, to the rebirth and reconstruction of a new home.

“After each war someone needs to clean up. (…) Somebody needs to haul a beam to support the wall, somebody has to glaze the windown and hang the door on its hinges.” (quote from the poem The End and the Beginning by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska). In a scene from Lucile’s film Les inoubliables, women recite poems about war from different periods, set to the music of their own language. At the same time, black-and-white photographs are superimposed on each other in an almost hypnotic rhythm. Piled up, because wars arise from wars and although the memories remain pertinent, unfortunately no lessons are learned. The image eventually turns black. But apart from black, there is also colour in Lucile’s work.

In the photographs of the botanical garden in Hasselt, for example, whose colours resonate in Ane’s stained glass paintings. And in the colourful world of birds and the ‘couleur locale’ of juicy dialects the artist evokes in her soundscape in the stairwell. She suprises you with bird sounds and fragments of conversations in lost languages. In the silence in between, the past of the house echoes. In Chanter comme des oiseauxn Lucile also pays tribute to the songs of endangered or extinct bird species. She attempted to capture some of these songs in her own unique handwriting. The musical scores are an invitation to you, the visitor, to interpret them, and they implicitly ask you to take care of the planet and its inhabitants.

And so, both Lucile Bertrand’s and Ane Vester’s works subtly demand attention. Attention for the unusual building and the traces of its past, attention for being in space, but also for being spaceless, attention for the devastating past and present.

– Roxane Baeyens, curator

Opening Sunday 28.09, 1pm > 5pm
Open Fridays and Saturdays, 11am > 6pm
Tour with the artists on Saturday 18.10
Until 18.10

Location
Queens Brussels
Av. de la Reine 266
1020 – Brussels (BE)

More info about Lucile Bertrand