This post presents a text that Hilde wrote on the work of the Brussels-based artist Els Opsomer in early 2009. It served as the basis for a lecture delivered at the Erna Hécey Gallery on February 15, 2009. In 2011, Hilde integrated it into her blog for Le Magazine du Jeu de Paume with the title Construire des histoires (de constructions). She mused about the eerie possibility of a terror attack in Brussels. It is strange to read these lines now, years after this actually materialized.
Els Opsomer is well-known for her photographs that, throughout the years, have come to construct her ongoing image archive. She has composed slide projections from these images, or has made video letters from them, in the form of I_movies. The work that this post takes as a point of departure for discussion here is entitled Building stories: Love Suffering Mechanical Disorder (2008). In its installation form, Building stories is presented to the public as a diptych, since there is a continuous double projection of two films that need to be seen in interrelation to one another. Each screen shows an independent filmic travelogue through the monumental legacy of modern architecture. The first film, Building Stories #1, questions the fate of Atatürk Kültür Merkezi (AKM), the opera house in Istanbul, which once symbolized the utopia of a Modern Turkey and was for a while in danger of being demolished. Building Stories #2 investigates the architectural heritage of Brussels along the modernistic North-South junction.
When watching the projections, a few striking elements catch the eye: whereas the Brussels part seems to move in a linear, more straightforward way, the Istanbul part comes out more circularly. This offers an interesting contrast of impression, which becomes further strengthened by Opsomer’s use of old-fashioned technology. A side effect of the choice for the 16 mm film format is that it somehow makes the filmed buildings and constructions themselves look old. In this way, Els Opsomer has adapted her own filmic perception to the object of perception. Because of the slightly distorted images and the grainy effect of the film, it is as if these buildings were filmed in the past, when they still possessed their full utopian glory, now a dismantled myth.
Both projections alternate images of buildings with depictions of flowers in spring time. Thus enters into the work the metaphor of old/worn out architecture and young/fresh nature. These flowers come out as a pause/interval in the films’ journeys. They are a moment of peace after darkness — a respiration, a silence, in the musical definition of the term (an absolute moment of unspoiled beauty). But also are they a moment of contrast and, possibly, escape from the complexity of the urban context. Flowers are the architecture of nature itself, and are always renewing themselves.
The Istanbul film opens with footage of sun-drenched blossoms and of a leafed-trough book, apparently one in which the AKM is depicted. These opening scenes, together with the ‘amateurish’ use of an obsolete medium, the discoloration, the white flickering and the gritty appearance of the images, emphasize the promise of a narrative. Especially the blossom shots — which could be opening shots for a Japanese tragic film from the 1950’s — evoke a poetico-critical impression of past time (temps perdu), suggesting that what is shown on film already belongs to the realm of memory. After that, the camera seems to ‘fly’ through the building, making its beauty tangible, displaying its magnificent decorative choices, such as a row of bulb lights that obviously long predate the work of Félix González-Torres. There is a feeling of a transit-sphere that comes with it, of not belonging but longing to belong, to be overwhelmed and embraced by its breath-taking beauty. The emotion that arises, is a kind of vibe — a vibration perhaps. The AKM-opera house in Istanbul at the time of its construction was an icon of Turkey’s prosperous secular future. History has shown that modern buildings have been torn down, making place for new ones, not always as beautiful as the previous one. This sharply contrasts with the flowers, which are universal and always testify to the same beauty, every spring season again.
In the film about Brussels, Märklin size trains appear to be swallowed into the underground section of the North-South railway axis — ‘that beating pulse of Brussels.’ From such a perspective the city becomes an organic entity of its own — a [Moloch], a Dystopia — to which the autonomy and individual well being of the alienated ant-like inhabitants seem sacrificed. The north-south junction comes out as a rugged scar, a long whimsical line, which Els Opsomer nevertheless approaches with delicacy and with love. However aesthetically unattractive a scar might be on the city’s body, the artist seems to accept it with conviction, never blinded but always conscious, alert and reflective about it.
Els Opsomer has articulated the striking statement that Brussels is marked by its peculiar status as always being the second-best choice only. Foreign people ending up in Brussels usually first had other international city plans in mind, or at least longed for it. Young Belgians who install themselves in the country’s capital after having grown up in small towns or on the urbanized countryside, consider it the only place in the country worth calling a city, but they are well aware that this is a relative concept when compared to the dominant cities that are only one or two hours away by train.
Still, with all its lost ideals and shattered illusions lying right on the surface, the Brussels that was destroyed by and in its past, might — thanks to the wisdom inflicted by Els Opsomer’s film in our minds — become a mirror reflection for a future society: a place for inspiration, disbelief, surprise, hope and, who knows, survival. It might become a Brussels countering ‘love suffering mechanical disorder’ by love renewing itself, again and again. Nowhere in Europe so many languages are spoken, heard and intermingled as in Brussels. Thus, the verticality of Els Opsomer’s Brussels is a straightforward iconographic reference to the Tower of Babel, a powerful visual allegory in the history of art since the middle ages. It collapsed, of course, as we know, and so will some of the buildings the artist is quietly putting on display for us in Building Stories. Yet, in its dreamlike aspect, especially the passage through the north-south junction tunnel, the work becomes meditative and allows for a moment of re-connection with the urban environment.
This dual confrontation of Brussels and Istanbul demonstrates how modernity was a globalist ideal avant-la-lettre. It was shared by many people in various places throughout the globe, only to be shattered and broken to pieces as globalist society overwhelmingly expanded before entering general crisis. In telling a ‘sad story about a happy building,’ Building Stories speaks about people wandering like ghosts through another ghost. By talking about buildings in an organic way, and by giving them a soul and a memory, Els Opsomer also addresses the fate of human beings in conflict or war zones, without showing them literally. Stronger even, the buildings on display, destined to suffer and undergo their inglorious fate, are stand-ins for the terrible fate of so many human beings not only in these afflicted regions but potentially everywhere.
No city, and certainly not Brussels or Istanbul, is free from the threat of globalized terrorism. Even if humans save buildings, like the AKM, one bomb suffices to shatter them, and the people in there at that moment, to ashes. Especially the Brussels part offers the feeling of looking at a terrorist person holding a camera in order to find the optimal spot for an attack. The anxiety of the building becomes the anxiety of the individual, and this also counts for (iconic) buildings that are not on display, such as the former Brussels Mail Sorting Center (Postsorteercentrum/Tri postal) by the Midi railway station, for which this work was first conceived within the framework of the 2008 Brussels Biennial. Els Opsomer thus expresses her political engagement through poetical allegories. This working method makes her commitment all the more powerful. One feels forced to look, look again and re-look, as if one has become numb and somehow addicted to what one sees: it is as if one is seeing against the death drive to buildings that are now forever documented for the future as unmistakably having existed at some place and point in time.