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the LIVES and DEATHS of the GREAT BELGIAN HOUSE |
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This abandoned house stands isolated in a wasteland of carriageways and big box stores, a life-size maquette of the Belgian home on a baseplate of gravel, a typological example preserved to instruct and delight.
Usually hidden behind other houses, trees and fences — lost in the labyrinthine maze which Belgians devise to keep the threatening outside world at bay — here the ever more manic sequence of shoddy extensions is on full display, like a Muybridge photo of frozen movement.
The Belgian house so often develops into a cancerous growth, running out of control, unstoppably proliferating like a machine à habiter with failing emergency brakes — thundering on while the helpless inhabitants are steamrolled by a spiralling debt load.
Belgians never work for (a) living, they work for a house; and when the house is bought, it needs to be expanded and improved, renovated and upgraded. While the inhabitants are increasingly immobile within, the house moves and transforms around them.
The house is infused with the life energy sucked out of its inhabitants — an inverse Dorian Gray, lifeless matter rejuvenated at the expense of the living. Until finally the embalmed Belgian rests — his dead eyes staring at the flickering TV screen — like a pharaoh surrounded by his earthly possessions, the ossified fruits of his labour, now slowly disintegrating.
We may traditionally think of the home as a return to the womb — but for the Belgian is not his home more like an early tomb?
Location: Merksem, Belgium
Date: 21/07/2022
Technical data: Sony A7RII camera with Sony 16-35mm f/4 lens