Aspects of Life Within an Urban Environment
——

Artists respond to what surrounds them in life. In the case of Philippe Van Wolputte, the artist mainly responds to abandoned buildings in urban environments. Van Wolputte takes on the role of archaeologist highlighting complicated aspects of ‘past-present-future’ by accentuating visible yet initially inconspicuous details, such as broken façades.

The artist’s main motivation comes from how an architectural façade of decay interacts and influences its environment. He responds to disinterested passers-by, indifferent owners and city councils. He is concerned with the investigation of the unknown. As a caver, he enters a building in search of its origins, age and reason for existence. As an archaeologist, he searches for and investigates the traces of man.

Within this urban environment he explores different meanings: urban, social, individual, general. He does not directly explain what he has discovered, but every small discovery is part of the mosaic of life that man has built up, abandoned and dismantled.

The artist who does not offer answers but asks questions can symbolize the human conscience. He draws our attention to the human need to build and tear down. This is done by means of photo documentation and mapping incidental findings.

We are encouraged to participate in our daily lives, mutually communicating or conducting our own research into something better and more humane: looking at it all, absorbing it and responding to what surrounds us, as the artist did himself while asking various questions.

Brankica Perisic (2006)

A Manifesto Against Indifference
——

In the vernacular of Rotterdam, a city that is in the habit of bestowing nicknames on objects and buildings, the abstract ornaments from the 1950s that once adorned the entrance to Centraal Station had always been known as the speculaasjes (gingerbread cookies). The station’s architect, Sybold van Ravesteyn, had asked his assistant what it would cost to commission work from the British sculptor Henry Moore. When communicating with the assistant revealed that it would cost too much, Ravesteyn decided he would have to take on the job himself. This resulted in what were indeed very Moore- esque, open-work reliefs on the station walls. Unfortunately, as often usually happens in cities, particularly in Rotterdam, the reliefs were discarded after several decades when the station was demolished. Both the architecture by Van Ravesteyn, whose work would prove to be among the poorest survivors in the country, and the speculaasjes were considered redundant. Everything had to be newer, bigger, different than it had been. History consigned the project to the dumpster.

But the artist Philippe Van Wolputte had other ideas. In 2008, he was offered a solo exhibition by Galerie Wilfried Lentz, which was then located in another recently remodeled building next to the train station. Van Wolputte discovered the speculaasjes lying on the tracks beside the building site and decided to resurrect them in a new form. He repurposed the sculptures to create shelters for the city’s homeless. This Temporary Penetrable Exhibition Space (T.P.E.S.) was a social artwork, not only because it helped people on the margins of society - whose community shelters at the station and the Pauluskerk were closed down due to urban development - but also because it gave a new life to a historic relic. When Van Wolputte removed these pieces to the city fringes, he did not try to camouflage the degradations of time to which they had been subjected: as with his other editions of T.P.E.S., this iteration is dirty and cracked, a three-dimensional protest from the punk era.

Even knowing this, it is still shocking to look at the photographs that document the T.P.E.S. editions. One becomes an unwilling witness to gritty scenes of decay. These are simply ruined buildings. The black-and-white photography emphasizes the sense of filth, bleakness and despair. One would expect to see boldly lettered warning signs like ‘ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK’ or ‘WE ARE NOT LIABLE FOR RISKS’ at the entrances to the buildings that Van Wolputte invites you to view. But he invites you in without any warning. His interventions in the public space are invitations to enter buildings that are anything but welcoming. No offense to the artist, but this can feel like a tall order. These buildings just seem too abandoned, too forgotten.

Why would the artist write ‘ENTRANCE’ in large letters on the walls? There are several reasons. His interventions demand that you look at your surroundings with new eyes and employ new ways of thinking about them. All these buildings have seen their share of sorrow and love: lives have been lived there. These places are a part of history and contribute to the identity of a city. All too frequently, they are discarded out of a lazy notion of efficiency, of profit and loss, with all the risks inherent to such a dogmatic attitude. Cities arise slowly, layer upon layer. If the past is not acknowledged due to cultural blindness, then people are steering rudderless in a sea of contemporary delusion. Caught up in this delusion are the amnesiac developers and city marketers who dictate how we should value our cities.

Van Wolputte’s photographs swim against the current because they refer to earlier times. Even though they were taken recently, the pictures look dated, as though from the 1980s. The black writing on the façades of the buildings could easily be the names of galleries yet has the appearance of illegal, angry graffiti tags. These signifiers are signs of protest, intended to break open the city and reclaim the space that should belong to everyone. Down with walls, fences and private property

In the postwar years in which Van Ravesteyn and his associatesoperated, many of the western world’s cities were undergoing rapid development. But with the advent of skyscrapers and walls came a world that declared that happiness was synonymous with wealth and ownership. Just as Van Wolputte does now, the art world of the time questioned this ideology of expansionism. Artists in various European cities revisited Surrealist plans to explore the city psychogeographically: using a map of Paris to walk through London, rolling dice to decide which route to take while under the influence of drugs. The idea was to eliminate the all-too-familiar and obvious perceptions of a new city. Comfort and luxury were bourgeois and not a serious option, an attitude reflected in Van Wolputte’s disquieting photographs of squats.

While his interventions are relatively temporary, the photographs are more permanent. When you record something you save something. Van Wolputte began his visual plea for preservation in 2005, after which the underlying message of the social debate became more urgent. Firstly, there are the many evictions caused by rising mortgages, which while legal do not feel ethically correct. Secondly, the speculation and rapacious building boom that is occurring in many cities, including Antwerp and Rotterdam, have drastically increased the vacancy rate of commercial properties. Developers are effectively creating ghost towns.

This makes Van Wolputte’s spooky photographs both an indictment and a  proposal: look at things differently and find a way to value what already exists. The answer is not through gentrification, a temporary solution to an economic impasse. This is the point he makes by presenting us with photographs that are anything but positive and inviting. Instead, they demand that we shake off our indifference to the public space and become more aware of social injustice. The public space should be public, accessible to everyone.

That is how it used to be. Street names such as Meent (common land) recall the communal nature of areas where everyone had the right to graze sheep or grow vegetables. Van Wolputte’s photographs show us a post-community world where everything is fenced off and appropriated, but his interventions hack the space and ‘de-fence’. They are a plea for more commonality, allowing one to imagine the homeless living in artworks and sheep grazing everywhere.

In Rotterdam, he may have won the argument. The new train station building, which opened in 2014, is once again decorated with the same speculaasjes, and the frieze that runs through the building references the speculaasjes motif. The homeless people won a victory too: that same year, the new Pauluskerk homeless shelter annex opened, a stone’s throw from the station. This version of Van Wolputte’s Temporary Penetrable Exhibition Spaces will no doubt know a greater permanence.

Sandra Smets (2015)

Traces of Absence - On Philippe Van Wolputte’s T.P.E.S. (2005–2015)
——

Like all big cities, it consisted of irregularity, change, sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions of things and affairs, and fathomless points of silence in between, of paved ways and wilderness, of one great rhythmic throb and the perpetual discord and dislocation of all opposing rhythms, and as a whole resembled a seething, bubbling fluid in a vessel consisting of the solid materials of buildings, laws, regulations, and historical traditions. -Robert Musil (1)

Temporary Penetrable Exhibition Space (T.P.E.S.) is a long-term project that spans over a decade, consisting of various site-specific interventions in the public or semi-public space. The majority of these temporary, ephemeral actions are clandestine or illegal, and have therefore gone unnoticed by many visitors or passers-by. By deliberately blurring the lines between fact and fiction, Philippe Van Wolputte creates situations where production and documentation become mutually implicated. As such, they reflect the complicated way in which we use archive material as an access point to invoke a bygone art historical reality, thus often mythologizing its nature. Where does the work begin or end; what are its boundaries? Did the interventions actually take place or are they carefully staged? Are we even able to tell the difference? Can we still ‘visit’ these historical sites retrospectively, and how does urban memory work? The whole T.P.E.S. project concluded with a solo show at

M HKA, where images of its different iterations were put on display. As the final chapter of this long-term undertaking, the exhibition itself was a further articulation of the constant dialectics between construction and reconstruction. Only now, in retrospect, could we start tracing back the origins of this project, in search of recurrent motifs.

Breaking and entering

One apparent motif in Van Wolputte’s work is that of the grid. In fact, the grid has been there since the very first T.P.E.S., where it was applied using ordinary white paint and a long wooden stick. After that, we also see installations with spray-painted grids on large plastic sheets. The bluntness of their application and the physical directness of the gesture seem far removed from the formal rigidity of the modernist grid, as analyzed by Rosalind Krauss. Krauss argues that, understood in a spatial way, ‘the grid states the autonomy of the realm of art’. Its overall organization is ‘flattened, geometricized, ordered, [...] anti-natural, anti-mimetic, anti-real’.(2) Instead, Van Wolputte’s grids are concrete motifs evocative of urban structures, such as fences and lattices, that are used to demarcate and secure certain areas, intended to keep intruders and trespassers out. In several instances, the grid motifs become juxtaposed with the spider-web-like structure of urban maps.

As the title indicates, most of the T.P.E.S. editions are temporary; not only in terms of visitor access but also due to the fact that the structures themselves will either become demolished or refurbished. In this sense, Van Wolputte’s ten-year project perpetually engages with processes of gentrification, always one step ahead of urban renewal and decay. As most of it has already vanished, the remaining documentation becomes a ghostly trace of an absent, bygone reality. A vague memory of what once was.

One of the first T.P.E.S. editions occurred in 2005. Still a student in Antwerp at the time, Van Wolputte intended to create his first ‘solo show’ by illicitly entering an abandoned building right across from the campus. The artist entered the building at night, covering all the windows with rasterized plastic sheets. Black graffiti at the entrance read ‘Ingang/Entrance’, ‘from 18 Oct till 1 Nov / Penetrable Exhibition Space’. The text is merely an indicative gesture, highlighting the building’s presence and its accessibility for a limited amount of time. People actually entering the building would find a ‘list of intruders’ in a kind of grid-like template inviting them to scribble down their name, signature and date of entry. Since then, T.P.E.S. actions have been held in a wide variety of venues and contexts, ranging from minimal interventions to more elaborately staged settings. For the third edition, which took place in the artist-run space Factor 44 in Antwerp, the idea emerged of creating a base from which visitors could depart in order to locate and discover the actual spaces scattered around.

In 2008, on the occasion of his forthcoming solo show at the Wilfried Lentz gallery in Rotterdam, Van Wolputte decided to ‘open’ a run-down monument not far from the train station. Once part of a large-scale master plan for the renovation of the station and subsequent revaluation of the surrounding area, the structure had soon become a shelter for the homeless. With the gallery as a kind of ‘outpost’ (as it was called on the flyer), visitors were invited to set foot in the forgotten monument. Another T.P.E.S. was part of a symposium titled ‘Performing Politics I: Critical Spatial Practices in Art and Architecture’, organized by Eric Ellingsen and Alvaro Urbano at Olafur Eliasson’s Institut für Raumexperimente in Berlin (2012). In that same year, Van Wolputte made another installation during the open studios at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, where he chose to counteract the typically prestigious event by not opening his studio to visitors. Instead, he made a staircase out of recycled wood leading onto a small and unappealing yard on the backside of the building.

Looking Back While Walking Forward, the video piece included in the eponymous installation at BOZAR in Brussels (2013), also features a T.P.E.S. hidden in a silo in Charleroi. Otherwise inaccessible to visitors, the intervention only survives through this faux-documentary video featuring a group of unidentified characters breaking and entering into an industrial complex. The last two editions were presented in a more institutional setting. As part of an exchange project titled ‘Het Kanaal/Le Canal’, Van Wolputte’s work was shown at Kunsthal Extra City Antwerp (in collaboration with NICC) and Espace 251 Nord in Liège. Finally, the whole T.P.E.S. project was consolidated in a book and a joint retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art (M HKA) in Antwerp, where the dark, gloomy images eerily contrasted with the brightly lit white cube of the museum.

Urbanization and its discontents

Where the city is becoming a habitat for an ever-growing number of people, it is also an agonistic site of struggle for space involving multiple actors: citizens, project developers, property owners, real estate brokers, city councils and so on. In an attempt to transform the city into an appealing environment, that is to say, middle-class- and business-friendly, certain parts are intentionally hidden from view. The daily life of most citizens is subject to biopolitical power in a most literal sense, insofar as their bodies are being steered or directed, making only certain zones accessible while obliterating others. The increase in urban monitoring and surveillance, both by the police force and technology, is all too often justified by the delusional belief in the possibility of a public space that can be fully transparent. Just like the ideal of security, transparency is a modernist myth as it relies on neoliberal mechanisms of exclusion and repression.(3) This kind of policy is rooted in a biomorphic illusion of seeing the city as a ‘healthy body’ where diseases and cancerous spots can be cured or removed. Deviant or dysfunctional spaces are situated at the margin of a normalized, disciplined society, and are often also the locus of social injustice, alienation and homelessness. They can function as a refuge for derelicts and misfits,(4) the socially deprived living in poor conditions. These dilapidated and decaying edifices, the dwelling places of the Other, so to speak, are often hidden from public view by a façade. This is why the façade, in one form or another, acts as a kind of mask. ‘The façade comes from a world in which, by using masks well, one clearly separates the public from the private, increases the tension between the two and valorizes the difference.’(5)

Of course, there are still ways to resist the dominant, strategic powers that be.(6) Eluding institutional, hegemonic structures of control can be achieved by creating temporary autonomous zones.(7) Occupying and squatting can be seen as tactical ways to reclaim the public domain, as expressions of political protest against market-led housing or as related, socially inspired and anarchist gestures. These are apparent, physical acts of violence, whereby the performers can clearly be identified, localized and penalized by surveillance and monitoring techniques. This is what Žižek calls subjective violence.(8) Objective violence, on the other hand, refers to the inherent, invisible violence of a system creating the framework that renders subjective violence possible and that consolidates the status quo of the existing political-economic power relations. Due to its systemic nature, objective violence is less easy to identify or single out. The latter also has serious implications on the level of political framing, understood as symbolical violence. It enables policy makers to reason away the urban inequality and deprivation of certain neighborhoods as self-inflicted, a result of the individuals’ own shortcomings and not as the outcome of inadequate policy, discrimination, ghettoization, polarization or exclusion.(9) This perverted line of reasoning often becomes a thankful excuse to justify procedures of urban renewal and gentrification.

The architectural uncanny

Each instance of the T.P.E.S. project (2005-2015) installs a sense of disorientation or discomfort, inviting the visitor to leave his or her safety zone. Abandoned areas have always fascinated Van Wolputte, an interest that could easily date back to his upbringing. His family comes from Doel, a now deserted village threatened with complete demolition in order to make way for the further extension of the Port of Antwerp. Despite the protest of a large number of inhabitants, the demolition works were started in 2008, accompanied by an unseen riot police force. Still heavily contested, Doel now looks like a war-torn zone and has become a much-favoured spot for street artists. In recent years, Van Wolputte has deliberately refused to revisit the place, solely relying on documentation and his imagination, in order to avoid a physical confrontation with its current, depopulated state.

There is definitely something uncanny about this experience. As Freud noted in his 1919 essay, ‘this uncanny [unheimlich] place [...] is the entrance to the former home [heim] of all human beings, to the place where everyone dwelt once upon a time and in the beginning.’(10) The frightfulness of this experience has everything to do with an unexpected, ghostly return of the repressed, something that was supposed to stay hidden and secret. This ‘unhomeliness’ is brought about by the unfamiliarization and estrangement of what was once familiar. The uncanny effect is often amplified by effacing the distinction between reality and imagination. To speak, then, of an ‘architectural uncanny’(11) would have to be related to a return of the repressed.

As suggested above, our understanding of the urban space is highly ambivalent. On the one hand, the city is supposed to be a ‘healthy body’, monitored by complex forms of social and individual control. In this view, it would ideally have to take on the features of an ordered, rational grid: a utopian delusion that is fueled by the desire for power through transparency. On the other, this delusion of a bright, transparent space is doomed to be paired with its opposite, that is, obscurity or opacity. In Van Wolputte’s work, these two dimensions – bright and dark, transparent and opaque – are confronted in a complex, dialectical interplay. Inside and outside are mutually implicated, by not only making forgotten spaces accessible but also, for instance, bringing them into the museum.

Pieter Vermeulen (2015)


1. Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities. New York: Coward McCan,

1954, p. 4.

2. Rosalind Krauss: ‘Grids’. In: October, Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979),

pp. 50-64.

3. For a philosophical analysis of this ‘desire for transparency’, see

Byung-Chul Han: Transparenzgesellschaft. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz,

2012. The English translation of this essay is (finally) forthcoming at

Stanford University Press.

4. Not surprisingly, ‘Misfits’ is also the title of Van Wolputte’s 2014 solo

show at Elaine Levy Project gallery in Brussels.

5. Bart Verschaffel: ‘Of Façades and Faces’ (unpublished in English).

Original publication (in Dutch): ‘Face/Façade: van gevels en gezichten’.

In: Dietsche Warande en Belfort, 157(1), 2012, pp. 74-83.

6. The French sociologist Michel De Certeau has made the conceptual

distinction between ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’. ‘It must vigilantly make use

of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the

proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It

can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse.’ Michel De Certeau:

The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press,

1984, pg. 37.

7. Here we can also mention Hakim Bey’s anarchist notion of the TAZ

(Temporary Autonomous Zone), which has also been an important

reference for Van Wolputte. See Hakim Bey: TAZ: The Temporary

Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Brooklyn:

Autonomedia, 1991.

8. Slavoj Žižek: Violence. New York: Picador, 2008.

9. Guy Baeten: ‘The Uses of Deprivation in the Neoliberal City’.

In: BAVO (ed.), Urban Politics Now. Re-Imagining Democracy in the

Neoliberal City. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2007, p. 49.

10. Sigmund Freud: ‘The Uncanny’ (1919). In: Sigmund Freud: Art

and Literature. The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 14, ed. Albert Dickson.

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985, pp. 335-376.

11. See Anthony Vidler: The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern

Unhomely. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.

Temporary Penetrable Exhibition Spaces
——

Where does the T.P.E.S. series come from? How did you start it, and how has it evolved  since then?

The Temporary Penetrable Exhibition Spaces (T.P.E.S.) series was created out of my fascination for exploring vacant buildingsand the discoveries and experiences that resulted from them. The idea with this series of interventions is to share uncovered observations with the public. You could also see this action as a form of a final greeting to the locations before they are transformed and part of their history disappears. I always try to use a new method of communication to reveal the existence of a new T.P.E.S. to the public. The first T.P.E.S. was simply through word of mouth, the second through an email to my personal contacts. The third in the series was through an artist run space, where I had set up a documentation centre with a map of 7 locations near the exhibition space. The fourth was via a gallery exhibition in Rotterdam where the building location at the time was a colossal monument that was once part of the city’s Central Station but stood languishing next to the railway. The previous 3 in the series were exhibited within the gallery in documentation form alongside the excursion to the then-new location. The fifth in the series was a demolished house where the basement could be seen and entered. Here the audience had to start out from a private viewing in a collector’s apartment. I am always trying to find a new situation from which the audience starts and have them decide whether they will go to the location or settle for the documentation that Iprepared in advance.

Documenting these interventions is very important. How do you do

this, with what aesthetics and why?

I document for myself first and foremost. I like to archive all my walks and discoveries as well as my own interventions in these situations. Since my interventions usually only last a few days against the endless ‘progress’ of life, I find it essential to capture my work on camera. I mainly process these images as collages in combination with necessary information in text form. Visually, it is similar to what is found in the art books from the 1970s, primarily created in black and white, creating a certain distance from the documentation of a thing to the real thing. Previous documentations of interventions as revisited over the years by writers reveal that they only expand the dissonance between an original work viewed by a small group of people and its many interpretations over the years. Due to this, the photos that are used to understand the work actually present only a distorted image or even a disguise of reality. It is with this problem in mind that I also work on the documentation of my own interventions and play with the reality of what is and what is not.

In a number of works the documentation is ‘ false’ and explains a

certain action, for example, in 5 New Piercings. What is the meaning of this?

5 New Piercings is indeed an example of where the documentation leads people down the wrong path. The intervention took place in an apartment that I had available for only a few days. On the first floor I had a video projection of myself making 5 cuttings in the walls of the house. In addition, there were 5 fabric tarpaulins taped to the wall, with remnants of broken pieces of wall on the ground at the bottom.The combination of video, fabric tarpaulins and grit on the floor made the audience believe that this intervention actually happened. The same falsification occurred in the work 3 Closed

Conditions, where at the opening of the new NICC location in Antwerp, I placed 3 wooden panels next to found closed holes in the floor. Following the rules of captions for photos in art books, a collage was taped onto these wooden panels stating the sizes

of the different holes and the materials used for their closure. In this way, these closed holes became a so-called intervention, while the panels were the real intervention.

In a large number of works you bring outdoor locations inside the museum/exhibition hall, and you reconstruct the outside world using installation, photography and film. This once again gives it a fictional character; what you see within the walls is only a reflection of external reality. Is the intention to confuse the viewer with this?

My installations are more of a way to recreate certain profound experiences from outside the exhibition space, with no intention of confusing the viewer. They are created not in an ultra-realistic way, but rather in a naive, do-it-yourself way. The intention is to clearly stay away from stage building and the idea that you can completely recreate or imitate something, focusing on the feeling more than the thing. Sometimes they are reworkings of locations already visited. Others are collages from different places. Some other installations deal with the fascination surrounding the artist and his studio, mental space or hideout. The confusion is indeed present within the photographs and videos of my interventions and documentation of site-specific

work. I intentionally insert fiction into my documentations in an attempt to intervene in the public awareness of the dangers of media documentation. Only by visiting the places themselves will viewers see the true reality of what is and what was there.

Don’t you think your work would do better at the original locations? Or is penetrating the museum institution with your interventions just as important? Are you conducting some kind of institutional criticism or do you think this is no longer relevant?

My work involves entering or penetrating locations. This can be done from the inside out or from the outside in.

Do you see your interventions as site-specific in the sense that they are about experientially understanding a particular site defined as a collection of physical attributes (size, scale, texture, dimension, lighting conditions, etc.), or do you see the site more as an arena of

social, economic and political processes?

The T.P.E.S. sequence is rather site-specific in this instance. The place is usually chosen for its aesthetics and the strange feeling aroused when experiencing the space. The aim of this work is to place the audience in the role of discoverer or researcher. The T.P.E.S. is a fairly old series as my works from the past 3 years touch on more socioeconomic topics. Yet, I continue with this series because it is the basis for all my other work: discovering places and finding out their history and using them to understand our living world.

Many of your interventions are also ‘not real’, such as Conserve Until

Further Notice...

The work Conserve Until Further Notice fits within a body of new works I am making about asbestos and its dangers. The first work on this subject, a text created for a publication in Gagarin, shows the ignorance and misconceptions of the general public regarding asbestos. Conserve Until Further Notice is an intervention in which I partially demolish the ceiling in the exhibition space of Vrijstaat O. This action is accompanied by a white dust cloud of grit that forms around the chunks on the ground. The end result is the broken ceiling with the debris and fine dust on the floor underneath. Whether the grit contains asbestos remains uncertain.

Where does the urge come from to make forgotten and abandoned places visible/accessible again, cf. T.P.E.S?

I open these places because they serve an important function. In addition to their personal beauty, they are part of a city’s past and social landscape. The rapid actions taken to tear down these places is a way of unlocking everything that is irrational and chaotic. This creates a sense of disorientation and uncertainty in these closure decisions.

On the other hand, in a number of interventions you also shield places and make them difficult to reach and visible, such as with Profound Fascination. Is this a kind of game with the spectator, opening up somewhat towards the hermetic?

In some works I indeed try to amplify the frustrations of disclosure. This often happens with works that I would like to share with the public. For example, in Profound Fascination there is a metal entrance to an underground bunker or hideout that was unearthed in an excavation. The entrance rises up 3 metres above the ground and therefore becomes inaccessible, precisely because it was opened up. The work On All Fours, a video installation, consists of a stage with an entire route of corridors and tunnels underneath and a projection that shows my progression through this route. The audience is confronted with a work that is to some extent viewable but is hindered by certain elements obstructing passage. I think the best example is in the work A 16M Commemoration, in which I reconstruct a tunnel that I visited in Mljet, Croatia. At the time, I did not dare enter the tunnel further than 16 metres due to the sound of water and the lack of lighting. The installation represents the first 16 metres of that tunnel with an extra space at the back, an adaptation of my imagination of what might have been there. This space can only be visited if people go through the tunnel themselves, which is filled with water. In this work, viewers only see the outside and the construction of the installation, or they can choose to go through the tunnel to view the space at the back.

What are you currently working on? How do you see the evolution of your work?

The evolution is personified in the fact that I no longer often start from a location itself. I choose the location based on what I want to say. I am currently working on Chrysotile (white asbestos). I often come into contact with this mineral and saw the need to do some projects around it. For example, I went to Jakarta, the fourth largest importer of asbestos in the world, to make a work on asbestos. There I started looking for buildingsthat had recently been demolished and were  originally built by construction companies that worked with imported asbestos from Australia. I drove to these demolition works with a water tanker and, together with some volunteers, sprayed these demolition works with water so that the fine dust would not spread.

Interview by Laurence Dujardyn

(2011)

Stockage / Transmitter
——

Stockage / Transmitter is a site-specific installation that is an extension of Van Wolputte’s earlier work Reconstructed Construction.

The artist gives new meaning to vacant buildings. Using narrow corridors and holes, he creates new passageways and infiltrates into almost impenetrable non-spaces. Through extensive preliminary research, Van Wolputte investigates the accessibility of buildings and the possibilities they offer for interventions. His preliminary investigations take place in so-called communication spaces.

Here the artist applies a broad range of resources such as files, photographs, a radio and a television to increase the intensity of his quest. Van Wolputte’s working method puts the emphasis on reconstructions of unused spaces, raising the question of what defines public space. His work is characterized by the personal interpretation of his experiences and the intimate manner in which these spaces are viewed. With the help of short films, Van Wolputte shows fragments of various Antwerp locations that currently occupy the artist and might function as places for temporary interventions in the future. He does this in a communication space which is a construction inviting us to look inward.

Katayoun Arian (2006)

Profound Fascination
——

‘In parallel, certain artworks and theoretical positions dig below the surface typologies and hierarchies of human interaction to expose the foundation for survival as the nurturing of conceptual and existential emancipation. Van Wolputte’s bunker-like cavity is perhaps the most sinister of all the contributions. As an intervention into Tuazon’s excavation, it appears to keep striving to retrieve something from where it cannot be found, pulling the observer into a rusty hole.’

Clémentine Deliss (2008)

Zero Lot Line / A Hole Is to Dig

——

A solid wall wants an opening. An open field makes no such demands. One pleasure of the city is its constant assertion of boundaries: limits within which the imagination immediately

conceives exceptions. In the logical, reversed syntax of Ruth Krauss’s great children’s book, a wall is to find a gap.

To me, the open field wants a wall. In the U.S., where I live, buildings are rarely permitted to run along the property line without setbacks, making continuous street walls uncommon. As such, the almost endless expanses of perimeter block housing in Berlin, to take one example, can seem exotic and wondrous to a visitor from the states – me, for example, a 20-year-old student visiting in 1990, hunting for small cinemas or music clubs – especially upon discovering that none of them were accessible from the street, but must be sought inside, in the hof. After the seeker discovers the break in the neoclassical bluff and enters a cave, a second landscape is discovered behind the first, dressed stone giving way to rougher brick and plaster structures in jumbled, illegible layouts. In one, an upstairs cinema playing horror movies, with sofas instead of seats, a bar to the side and cigarette smoke in the air. In a different hof, a basement club where a minor SST band plays sprawling instrumentals. From

the street, one could imagine, all this did not exist.

In other, less porous cities, with tighter arrangements of streets and compressed building lots – Paris, for example – the continuous street wall might retain its solidity for long stretches.

Reminiscent of regular cliff faces with no caverns or grottoes, no springs issuing from deep within. Not for you, at least. Hence the splendors of the glassy storefront to Atget, or the arcades to Benjamin. A visual or physical penetration of the forbidding walls is available to all who pass by or through, even if the visions behind glass remain inaccessible.

The need to find a wall’s opening, to discover your own way through the fortification, is not only a natural response to the wall’s assertion of property or the segregations a wall maintains.

The allure of both the wall and its fissures seem more deeply embedded.

Start with the brain within its inescapable perimeter. The bone-white rotunda described in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ and the two pale bodies within, a light rising and falling, their breaths alongside. The brain in its skull, and your imagination constructing a rendering of its interior according to the author’s schematic instructions, imagining itself (for company). You might feel a strong desire to think your way out of that unyielding enclosure. Generally, in Beckett, you cannot.

Or start in the womb, the original enclosure. Like the wall, so necessary for security and shelter; like the wall, a naturalized limit to activity, a separation of inside from outside, of the

personal and familial from the public and polymorphous exterior. Beckett was greatly taken by the psychoanalyst and Freud protégé Otto Rank’s The Trauma of Birth, which argues that neuroses are driven by the trauma of expulsion from the womb, and attended by a compulsion to return. But for Beckett, who claimed he remembered life in the womb, it was a place of horror. A friend quoted him saying he wrote ‘out of obligation toward that enclosed poor embryo.’ Hence the half-buried protagonist of Happy Days, the three actor’s heads protruding from vases in Play and all the dark rooms and hollows of the fiction.

Eric Fredericksen (2015)

We Did It / Disputed Territory
——

We Did It / Disputed Territory divides and reopens the gallery space. By doing so, the artist reenacts the phenomenon of shrinking cities. The intervention seems to present itself as a question about what is public and what is private, fusing together some of the principal points the artist has been working on in recent years: the contrast between a space and a ‘non-space’, between an art-dedicated context and a temporarily created exhibition space.

The artist has placed the first object constituting the exhibition in the very public setting of the Schlesisches Tor U-Bahn corner. The sign, which reads ‘we did it/disputed territory’, gives an unequivocal direction to the intentions of the project. Pointing in the direction of the gallery, but without giving any further information, this street-specific piece completely loses its function, becoming an abstract object. Its unpredictable destiny emphasizes its non-function as well, in contrast with its appearance as an informative object.

Upon entering the gallery one is confronted with two different scenarios, again a reinterpretation of the contrast between public and private. The upper floor of the gallery has been transformed into an abandoned room, dark and dirty, seemingly long closed. A hole in one wall reveals a passage into the lower space: a clean, white, welcoming exhibition space. The artworks presented there share the same process-making of the upper floor of the gallery: with intentional elaboration the artist makes them look old and dirty.

In this way, the space itself becomes a camouflage for the artist, a stage where questions about use and interpretation can arise, reflecting on the idea of the authenticity and aesthetic honesty of the artistic practice.

Jenny Chert (2010)

We Did It / Disputed Territory
——

The 100%-Berlin courtyard leading to Chert gallery feels dark and cold as we approach the exhibition space, passing by a succession of wall-mounted, neon-lit display vitrines, the kind you find flanking old storefronts or outside movie theaters. These windows are elegantly scattered around the courtyard, anticipating the larger, brighter display of Motto bookstore and distracting from the small, beautifully designed signs demarcating the entrance of CHERT and its spin-off space, CHINO.

The entrance to the gallery is closed, its front windows revealing a sober installation of crumpled, taped photocopies, a solitary screen and a set of tilted wooden steps leading to a large crack in the wall. Taking the hint of a partially open door, out by the right side of the gallery space, we sneak into what seems like a bike storage or boiler room. The smell of cold rancid coffee and freshly violated construction materials lingers in the devastated space. Broken tiles, graffiti, drapings of black trash-bag plastic and accumulations of rubble/dirt might initially strike one as entropic sculptures but quickly reveal their intentional nature.

 
We can almost feel the doppelgänger presence of long-gone intruders, their hammers smashing hard against the sheet-rock wall, finally piercing it to reveal the adjacent gallery space. The work had started at the entrance door – marked in black duct tape and apparently tampered with – then proceeded with the vandalization of the room and finally focused on the partition wall, which had been smashed open to let adventurous visitors squeeze through it and intrude into the closed, lit-up gallery space and become themselves objects of the installation.

The temporary activation of the gallery space had been proclaimed on an outdoor banner hung by the nearby Schlesisches Tor U-Bahn stop. The banner coldly indicates the longitude and latitude of the reclaimed spot in black spray paint and bears the slightly naïve, triumphant words ‘We Did It!!! Undisputed Territoryy (sic)’. Philippe Van Wolputte’s loud declaration of accomplishment was almost immediately removed by mysterious hands and exists now only as document, xeroxed, crumpled and taped inside the gallery space. A seemingly faux security camera video further contextualizes the situation by showing the artist and an accomplice as they force their way into the room they decided to elect to the status of temporary autonomous zone.

But what is this temporary space and what should it be made autonomous from, exactly? Differently from much of his previous work, in which he has addressed public space and the phenomenon of shrinking cities by reclaiming actual condemned buildings, Van Wolputte is now at work on the fictionalization of an already rather fictional gesture. As Wilfried Lentz has noted in a text reprinted on the artist’s website, abandoned, deteriorated and reclaimed spaces serve an important function in the memory and social landscape of the city, possessing a beauty of their own and, we might want to add, functioning as reminders of urbanism’s very own dysfunctionalities and failures. The demolition of these spaces removes not only their ‘unsafety’ and/or inappropriateness, but also an unwanted history of chaotic and irrational urban development.

The gallery press release remarks on how the installation seems to present itself as a question about what is public and what is private, fusing space and non-space, the art context and the temporary context made available by Van Wolputte’s hammer, tape and spray paint. While the superficial appearance of the work remains rough, pragmatic and direct, that very look and feel also seems to camouflage the more important issues of authenticity and intellectual honesty. Van Wolputte’s handling of the inherent fictionality of his environments/actions is complex and confusing, pointing in different directions while maintaining a consistent attention to detail as well as a rigorous overarching aesthetic. The use of ‘poor’ materials for the reproduction and presentation of his actions, for example, radicalizes the artist’s control over what is shown and betrays a partial and – ultimately – idealistic conception of reality. The artist’s break-in cannot be considered a performance in itself. It rather suggests a synthetic re enactment and transfiguration of countless other fictional (and real) break-ins, fragmented memories and afterimages collected from art and non-art sources and projected onto the imagination and personal memories of the viewer. The broken wall and its opening onto the light of the clean gallery space is the pierced skin separating the illusion of a fictionalized reality bite from the hard, cold fact of artifice, spectacle and commercialization.

Rubble and smashed walls look really great on photocopy, but in the case of this installation they actually are photocopies. One presumes that at the end of this show every single shard of broken wall, lump of plastic sheet, spray paint and coffee stain will be cleaned. The artist’s ‘disputed territory’ will hopelessly get back to its normalcy.

Marco Antonini (2010)

We Did It / Disputed Territory
——

In his first solo exhibition in Berlin, Belgian artist Philippe Van Wolputte fuses guerrilla art in public spaces with the

more viewer-friendly art-dedicated exhibition space. Entitled ‘We Did It / Disputed Territory’, the show divides the gallery space into two levels. The upper level has been sealed off with a sheetrock wall, giving it the air of an abandoned and neglected space.

It is dirty and cold, and the power has been long cut off. In order to reach the gallery’s lower level, viewers must walk through this antechamber that looks more like a construction site than an exhibition space. The door and parts of the walls are covered with large sheets of black plastic, cut out from industrial garbage bags and sprayed on with construction waste and dust. The only source of light in this derelict cavity comes from a literal hole in the wall. Through the hole, one can see the galley’s lower level and leap, like a curious Alice in Wonderland, into a different realm – a clean, white and welcoming exhibition space.

However, the artworks on view here share the same guerrilla aesthetic. They are rigid, deliberately dirty and low-budget. The images are made of xeroxed copies pasted together to complete pictures which document the process of appropriating the gallery space. The main image is a shot of the short-lived ‘exhibition poster’ – a site specific piece hung at the very public space of Schlesisches Tor Station, just across the street from Chert. The sign bears the exhibition title alongside the gallery’s geographic coordinates. It is an abstract object, unrevealing and uninformative, that is, unless one was to enter the coordinates into a portable navigation device or look up the show’s title on the internet. And so, whether intentionally or not, the temporary public piece (it was removed after only one day) also explores the meaning of public and private in the age of digital information.

Hili Perlson (2010)

Into the Dark
——

Elaine Levy, a young gallerist in the rapidly expanding gallery hotspot that is Europe’s capital, is currently hosting a solo exhibition by the young Belgian artist Philippe Van Wolputte (°1982, Antwerp). The title of the show, ‘Inside, Outside, Downside’, quite accurately expresses its underlying tendencies.

Having a background in street art and urban exploring, Van Wolputte spent several years in Amsterdam, where he attended the Rijksacademie. Meanwhile, he was avidly exploring the city’s architectural underbelly. Gradually, his action radius shifted towards the gallery circuit – not that the ‘inside’ gallery system and the ‘outside’ reality of the street are to be seen as two separate realms. Van Wolputte’s work rather deals with what’s happening between the two. Informed by the notion of the ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’ developed by the anarchist writer Hakim Bey, his earlier practice experimented with the tactics of occupying and squatting.

Needless to say this approach did not always match the mindset of the art world’s average members. Somewhat frustrated by this incongruence, the artist decided to focus more on the documentation process, using grainy, black-and-white photographs or videos. These are images that do not merely reproduce, but succeed at conveying a certain atmosphere to the viewer, endorsed by their author’s straightforward visual approach. Deliberately evoking the use of documentation in the 1960s and 70s for performances and interventions (by, say, Gordon Matta-Clark with his Office Baroque), Van Wolputte takes pleasure in the creation and proliferation of myths around his own artistic process, often leaving the spectator in the dark as to the exact meaning or nature of his actions.

Subsequently, Van Wolputte started to reconstruct spatial settings within a gallery or museum context, often accompanied by visible marks of material decay, generating an almost violent rupture with the white cube’s cleanliness. There is one material, however, that keeps on showing up in his pieces: asbestos. The solo show at Elaine Levy is the culmination of Van Wolputte’s preoccupation with the mineral, which he frequently encountered on his urban wanderings. A source of fear for many people today, asbestos was still considered a pretty harmless and common substance back in the 1970s, the proof of which we find in the enlarged, almost poppy advertisements the artist put on display.

There is one photograph of the hazardous mineral itself, with the physical threat being erased by the image surface. Another small photo seems to depict a public intervention by the artist, leaving us guessing at its supposed authenticity. On the floor is a small-scale construction sealed off with plastic and tape, an almost menacing presence haunting our visit. Standing out in its aestheticism is a triptych made out of white, cracked drywall panels covered with Perspex.

This may well seem like the artist’s most commercial show up to now, but his works still articulate a tangible tension with their exhibition format. It looks as if the artist himself is somehow hiding behind the scene, where he is quietly trying to lure us into the dark.

Pieter Vermeulen (2012)

Looking Back While Walking Forward
——

Créer, c’est résister. Résister, c’est créer. -Stéphane Hessel

Philippe Van Wolputte (°1982, Antwerp) is a Belgian artist who graduated from the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam, a city where he spent several years, combined with doing exhibitions and residencies abroad. Urban environments have always constituted his artistic biotope, with a clear preference for the city’s gloomy, shadowy underworld. In these times of city marketing, spectacular architecture and the inexorable privatization of the public sphere, Van Wolputte’s work offers us an insight into an often forgotten, but nonetheless integral, part of the urban fabric. Abandoned, asbestos-ridden buildings, hidden tunnels, shelters, drainage canals: they are all what we could call the underground of our everyday urban condition.

Van Wolputte’s grainy, mainly colourless photographs and videos evoke the historical performances and interventions in the 1960s and 70s, where documentation was employed to supplement their ephemeral, fleeting nature. It is precisely this intertwining of creation and documentation that led to the proliferation of myths around certain historical events, Gordon Matta-Clark’s Office Baroque in Antwerp (1977) being just one notorious example.

Van Wolputte’s practice is, unquestionably, inspired by the tactics of occupying and squatting, as his earlier fascination with anarchist writer Hakim Bey demonstrates,1 but it is not solely about that. On the one hand, the artist refuses to put the raw, edgy aesthetics of street culture up for grabs on the art market, and, on the other, his work cannot be read as a straightforward urbanistic or political statement either. His work does not ‘engage’ in any direct way, but is rather the expression of a longing for disappearance or withdrawal from the spectacle. It tends to exceed commodification; it stubbornly resists a clear-cut interpretation (be it art historical, political, philosophical, etc.).

Van Wolputte deliberately chooses to leave the viewer in the dark as to the exact nature of his actions, often frustrating their desire for authenticity. We are never really sure where the work finds itself exactly; it seems to wander through different media. This in-between or ‘interzone’ is the site where Van Wolputte tries to rearticulate, or even regain, the artistic quest for autonomy – an autonomy that no longer resides in the medium itself, but that emerges from the fissures and gaps within already existing domains of power and control.2

Where does the work end, and where does the world begin? Van Wolputte’s work is as much about the invisible, dark void of the image, as it is about the visible, tangible surface of the work that is put on display. It is as much about concealment and disappearance as it is about revelation or manifestation. We can easily recognize a dialectical tension here: to create is to resist, to resist is to create.

The title of the project in BOZAR, ‘Looking Back While Walking Forward’, clearly carries his artistic signature. The phrase inevitably recalls Walter Benjamin’s famous ‘angel of history’, inspired by Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. We have to imagine the eyes of this angel, so Benjamin writes, as directed towards the past, where he perceives an ever-growing pile of debris as time moves forward. And even though the angel would like to linger in the present, to take care of what has been destroyed, ‘a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. ... This storm,’ Walter Benjamin finally adds, ‘is what we call progress.’

What is left behind, left out, abandoned or forgotten is a constant source of inspiration for Van Wolputte. For the Prix de la Jeune Peinture in BOZAR, the artist decided to stage different characters in a kind of faux documentary video, following their urban exploration moves from behind the lens. The video installation is presented in conjunction with a series of photographs. The characters seem to function as a kind of alter egos, creating an intriguing hide-and-seek between fiction and reality. We might all be walking forward, being ruthlessly propelled into the future, but only some of us tend to remember what we are leaving behind.

Pieter Vermeulen (2013)

1. American writer and theorist Hakim Bey (pseudonym) talks about the notion of the ‘temporary autonomous zone’. See his TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991.

2. French sociologist Michel De Certeau has coined the term ‘tactic’, as opposed to the ‘strategies’ that tend to dominate the city as a whole. ‘It must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse.’ The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, pg. 37.

Fade)Outs
——

Philippe Van Wolputte was invited by the Be-Part project and Bruthaus gallery to create an installation in an old industrial site, the Claessens Artists’ Canvas factory in Waregem. It turned out to be the largest and most impressive site-specific intervention the artist has done up to the present day. It measures 45 m by 4 m and consists of approximately 1000 m² of painters’ canvas.

In the course of the past ten years, Van Wolputte has purposely searched for remote and often underground locations and tunnels for his installations. From his perspective, these are loci of escape in case of threat or danger; starting points from which to explore and transform or intervene in the public space. Van Wolputte mainly uses materials there on the spot – readily available, unsophisticated, left behind – for these ‘urban caves’. He recreates these places as an act of preservation, allowing them to be experienced anew. His projects aim to reclaim and hold on to what has often been singled out for demolition. The constructions are witnesses to an industrial past, imprints of bygone economic activities. So, the atmosphere in his installations is often unheimlich, uncanny. At the same time though, they are places of contemplation and isolation.

The title of the installation, ‘Fade-Outs’, refers to images in the memory of the artist, images of locations visited and lost. Mental imprints that wane and fade out, just like the places themselves. That is the reason the artist wants to recreate them. He holds on to the images in an attempt to mourn. Van Wolputte tries to revisit these lost refuges and draws the public’s attention back to them.

For the Fade-Outs show at Claessens’, Van Wolputte built an installation using a mixture of tunnels and corridors he had previously discovered and explored. It has been deliberately assembled in a rudimentary way, with a DIY aesthetic. Quickly crafted together, helter-skelter like the barricades left behind after a demolition that got out of hand; an improvised camp made from stuff left behind at the spot. Van Wolputte toys with the relics of previously visited tunnels: signposts of urban explorers in the catacombs of Paris, scaffolding left behind by construction workers at unfinished and derelict city developments.

At the end of the tunnel in Fade-Outs the light quite literally fades out. The tunnel ends in a larger, wider, space, where all light is absent. The visitor is in the dark. In this obscured ‘womb’ – a ‘dome’ according to the artist himself – a video is projected showing fading tunnels, taking with them the ghosts of workers toiling away. The images in the video of these corridors have been assembled in Van Wolputte’s signature print and collage technique, while the soundscape completes the uncannyness and shows the artist’s ‘noise’ prowess.

It is no coincidence that Van Wolputte created the Fade-Outs installation at Claessens’ Artists’ Canvas. Claessens is the global market leader in premium artist canvas. The buildings are typically one hundred years old, industrial workshops that have served the needs of renowned artists all over the world. The factory is simply an outstanding example of industrial archaeology.

Some of the ateliers are no longer in use because modern-day, cutting-edge products have replaced the handmade fabric of old. Many of these remain preserved as they were in the interbellum. It is in one of these that Van Wolputte has presented his installation. Here, in his own highly personal way, the artist loads meaning onto what was. This artistic intervention must be considered a key work in his as yet developing oeuvre. New meanings are created without using the original function of the venue in any obvious or literal way.

In Galerie Bruthaus in Waregem, Van Wolputte shows graphic interventions; images made during the construction at Claessens’. He overprints, scrapes, scours, scribbles and pastes scraps of other works to create unique screenprints, monotypes and photoassemblages. Memories of what once was. As an archive of documents relating to the temporary, short-lived installation, the graphic work amounts to an attempt to hold on to what will be wiped out.

Joris Van der Borght (2015)

Linked Surfaces
——

For his solo show in his hometown of Antwerp, Philippe Van Wolputte (°1982) has created a large installation consisting of two parts that follow the architecture of LLS 387. Upon entering the exhibition space, visitors suddenly find themselves in dazzlingly white surroundings composed of Styrofoam sheets held together by mint green polyurethane foam and metal stakes. This makeshift faux-ice landscape fills the room all the way up to the ceiling, the floor covered with powdery snow-like remains – all traces of a bold yet playful sculptural gesture. We notice several antennas sticking out of the foam, connected by black wires to a radio sender/receiver and modular synth at the back of the exhibition space. This brightly lit environment – overexposed, as it were – stands in stark contrast to the dark and gloomy installations that characterize Van Wolputte’s earlier practice. There is a continuum from the visual to the auditory; we hear an atmospheric soundscape composed of white noise, occasionally interrupted by undefined radio transmissions. The second room of the exhibition – located in the backyard – has a narrow passageway and is filled with large Styrofoam blocks, carved as if they were blocks of marble or ice. There are stacks of bricks suggesting a kind of construction activity, similar to Van Wolputte’s installation at M HKA in 2015.

It does not take much effort for the visitor to envision a basecamp in the barren conditions of the Arctic or Antarctic region or, for that matter, the pioneering expeditions to the North and South Pole at the beginning of last century. Surrounded by numerous myths and legends, these perilous missions were, in fact, driven by competition between male individuals in the hunt for eternal fame and glory. Although many scientists now assume the exact geographic poles – imaginary points after all – were not discovered until much later, the accounts of those early explorers still continue to spark the imagination. Perhaps most notorious was the rivalry between Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, former friends and shipmates who decided to venture on separate journeys to the Arctic. They both claimed to have ‘discovered’ the North Pole, in 1908 and 1909, respectively, accusing each other of forgery, incompetence and lies. Peary fiercely contested Cook’s earlier claim, consulting numerous scientific experts in an attempt to prove that some of the expedition pictures had been staged at a different place or the wrong navigational tools had been used. Eventually, Peary would win a series of subsequent trials and make history as the first person who discovered the ‘last spot’ on Earth.

The blurring of truth and lies, reality and documentation has fascinated Van Wolputte for a long time. Also, the parallel between these pioneering explorers and the heroic or marginal position of the artist is not even that far-fetched. Looking at the few photos of travellers made during these historic expeditions, one is easily reminded of the nomadic outsider figures in Van Wolputte’s Looking Back While Walking Forward, a series of works presented at BOZAR in Brussels in 2013. Except in the case of this exhibition, there are no characters to be seen. Or is it the visitor who suddenly becomes the protagonist, wandering through an otherworldly terrain like a post-apocalypse survivor? If the issue of climate change is indirectly being tackled here, why would the artist be making a sculptural installation with insulation materials that biodegrade slower than the ice caps are melting? Today more than ever, the polar region is being threatened by political and ecological struggle, as it becomes increasingly accessible to industrial activity such as gas and oil drilling. The same kind of antagonism can be found in urban development, one of the core themes in Van Wolputte’s work, where economic colonization is translated into processes of gentrification.

Linked Surfaces stages an intriguing conflict between fact and fiction, nature and artifact, purity and pollution. In this polar twilight zone, the exact message of the work is deliberately obfuscated, leaving the viewer in the dark amid the bright white lights.

Pieter Vermeulen (2017)

Artist as Interloper -  Roughing it with Philippe Van Wolputte
——

Industrial wastelands, derelict buildings and dark tunnels are the habitats in which Belgian visual artist Philippe Van Wolputte feels at his best. He penetrates these kinds of cancerous urban landscapes, making interventions which he later documents, bringing his work into the museum context by means of reconstructions.

You started making art on the streets. How did this shift to the world of museums and galleries occur?

Around 1997 I started exhibiting my work in the form of posters and banners applied to the façades of buildings and to fences. That is how I learned to work in a DIY manner and to create a big impact with little means. After five years I joined together with other like-minded artists that I was in contact with through the internet and we started documenting our actions as explorers rather than documenting the art we produced. At the same time, I exchanged the street for more desolate locations and started making site-specific works. That was an inspiring practice, because obtaining access to those places involved a different way of thinking and moving. That is when I started developing interventions under the name ‘Temporary Penetrable Exhibition Spaces (T.P.E.S.’s)’: run-down, derelict buildings that I reopened to the public before they were eventually demolished. Each T.P.E.S. was announced in a different way, whether in an art gallery, at a lecture, etc. I did this in order to find the best way to take the audience from the ‘white cube’ to an outdoor space. People had to leave the gallery if they wanted to see the actual artwork. It gave them the feeling of discovering the venue themselves; meanwhile, I was tackling issues of decay in architecture and reconversion. For 10 years I made these kinds of interventions. In parallel, I was receiving offers to recreate spaces that I had once visited or would want to discover, which resulted in installations like Reconstructed Construction (2006) and We Did It / Disputed Territory (2010).

Gentrification in cities like Antwerp or Amsterdam must not make your work easy?

Indeed. I studied for a couple of years at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and had a real problem making site-specific work. Everything in the Netherlands is over regulated; it’s completely different from Belgium. (laughs) If I had lived in that country all my life, I could never have made these kinds of works. When I was in Amsterdam, I decided to concentrate on the problem of asbestos, a material I often came across during my explorations in run-down buildings. I researched the exhibition spaces I was invited to, even if there was a danger of asbestos being present in the building.

My final work on the subject was a project in Indonesia, which is still one of the largest importers of the material. We drove around Jakarta in a truck containing a water tank and watered down recently demolished buildings to prevent the fine concrete dust, which contains asbestos fibre, from spreading through the air. It was primarily a poetic gesture, because it did not help a lot. But it was a way to create awareness.

To return to your question about gentrification, artists are often engaged in upgrading neighbourhoods. That is something I experienced in the Netherlands. Almost all of the exhibitions I was invited to take part in were collaborations with the city services department or real estate people. Although such projects can provide interesting opportunities, I refuse them out of principle. As an artist, you have to try not to become an instrument.

How do you go about finding these kinds of places?

Property functions are clearly delineated, such as residential, commercial and industrial zones. And it is the boundaries between them that are often the most interesting – I like to walk around in such places and become inspired. These kinds of disputed territories have an uncanny atmosphere as well as visual and formalistic aspects. Fences that have been cut open, smashed glass, torn-down posters, leaking pipes, broken walls. All of these elements recur in my work.

Lately you seem to have abandoned the notion of the city. Is that so?

In the beginning, building façades were my medium – they expressed how I experienced such places. Now, more and more, I’m tackling issues related to the zeitgeist, the misfits of society, fiction in the media or political themes that come close to my own interests. But, of course, I still incorporate the formal aspects of decay and renewal.

Interview by Sam Steverlynck (2017)