REMCO ROES and KOENRAAD CLAES
Postdoctoral Researcher at Hasselt University
Professor at ENSAV La Cambre and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp
Every day, from 6AM, the Vossenplein in Brussels fills up with stall after stall of second hand merchandise. Every day, from 3PM, the city council sends an army of cleaning trucks to dispose of the leftovers. It is the material heartbeat of urban life. A flotsam of objects that occupy the space between human bodies and the structures they build to live in, work in, be in. Every day the square is swept clean, the cardiographic chart is reset. But the cobble stones, with their gaping seams, offer resistance to this daily erasure. They capture shards of DNA of these objects of the interior.
All the other trajectories through the city are reframed by these fragments. The video oscillates between the found shards and the re-imagined, reconfigured, re-arranged tissue of the city, the people, the spaces. The pulse of the square is traced, exposing all the cracks, edges and delineations within the constellation of constellations that a city harbours. We run our fingers through these diffuse material veins, to recollect the stories that surround us.