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We are now outside, we walked through the sculpture.
It's not an exhibition, it's more a walk through a building,
and now we are here in a garden... Was that your intention?
Well yes, there's this building, and I wanted to
transform the whole building into one large sculpture,
and that's what I found interesting... An arts centre...
On the one hand you have the city,
and there's this enormous contrast with the courtyard here.
Maybe I wanted to intensify that contrast by making a terrace here.
But the terrace is on the other hand also the pedestal of the work.
But I also see it as a sort of dark oasis,
that's why I left room for the trees that were here first.
Those two trees I put back in show that collage element again.
On the other hand the terrace also has a social function.
There have been performances here, and there will be more in the future.
And speaking of that collage element again: the visitor is also important,
the people that stand here...
I actually want to place people in the sculpture again,
so everything becomes one big collage.
The two wings, the sculpture, the trees, the terrace...
It's all one large entity.
It was a cooperation with different artists,
who were these artists and how did you work with them?
The artists that I worked with are all people that I have known
for a very long time, and whom I have been following for a long time.
Is that the reason?
No it's also because we share a sort of...
I feel a resemblance between all their work.
It's hard to explain what that resemblance just is...
But in any case, I had it pictured in my head
how the sculpture should and would look like,
and then I asked Romeo Hoortnaert, who is a painter...
I particularly wanted to make his paintings three-dimensional,
make a sculpture with his paintings.
And then I asked Romeo to make two new paintings,
and we made a blow-up of them and printed them on a canvas.
We tried to make a spatial interpretation of his work here.
What the sculpture also really needed were two eyes.
Eye-shapes come back often in the work of Eva De Leener.
I gave her the size, so how big it needed to be,
and she gave her own interpretation of it.
And the upper part is a blow-up of
an existing work of mine that I made in the past.
And the cross is a detail that connects all these elements to each other.
So that was the outside, and here is the pedestal...
And on the inside I designed the architecture of the hallway.
I wanted the inside to be a sort of transit zone,
that evokes in the inside of the sculpture the feeling you get in the streets.
And then I asked Tom Tosseyn to design a pattern to decorate the hallway.
By looking at the technical plan of the sculpture
he created a new pattern,
and on the basis of this pattern he developed a new font
that also can be seen on the invitation of the exhibition.
And the cinema is also very important, a film by Toon Aerts is shown here.
What Toon did here...
I saw the film only two days before the opening,
but that gave it a very personal interpretation of the overall picture.
It's also important to mention that
Dave Schroyen and Aldo Struyf made the soundtrack of the film.
So that is again another interpretation of the overall picture.
So what actually happened, is that I showed
a rough scale-model to every artist or musician,
and they responded and reacted to it.