Empty Spaces (Souvenirs), 2017

13 sheets of  protective paper from found photo albums, 26 sheets of collored paper 180m/g2
digitally manipulated photographs and text printed on paper, variable dimensions

This work had two starting points that intersected and formed the final work. The first one was the textbook "Histoire de Belgique", from 1947, bought at the Jeu de Balle, most famous flea market of Brussels, from which I extracted specific excerpts and printed on 26 sheets of paper. The text comes from the book’s chapter on Belgian colonization of the Congo and King Leopold II’s life.

The second were the images presented alongside the text, essentially consisting of digitally manipulated archive photography printed on paper from old photo albums also found at the same flea market. The images which document the territory known in the early 20th century as Congo Free State, now DRC. 

"How many ever-increasing difficulties did they not have to overcome! Neither the overpowering heat, nor the deadly fevers, nor the ferocious Arabs: nothing stopped these courageous explorers."

"When, on 18 October 1908, the Belgian Chambers voted for the annexation of the Congo to Belgium, slavery had disappeared from the Belgian colony and barbarism had given way to civilization."

The photographs in this piece, like memories, they are increasingly weak, faded and disappearing, in different degrees of oblivion. The paper onto which they were printed, the kind of which is used to protect photographs on old family albums, is thin and delicate, but also aged, twisted, folded, almost disintegrating at the mere breeze created by the walking public.

"If you abandon the territories, your old king will rise from his grave to reproach you!"

Extracts from "History of Belgium, R. Bynens. Taught to the pupils of the 3rd and 4th primary grades and preparatory sections of the middle schools athenees and colleges. Brussels, 1947."

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View of the installation at the Biennale of Contemporary Art in Lebanon.
MACAM (Alita/Byblos) - 2017.