25 Sep 2009

Bn Projects - Maison Gregoire presents Beatrijs Albers, Twins

Bn PROJECTS and Maison GREGOIRE are particularly proud to invite you to TWINS, an in situ project specially conceived by Beatrijs ALBERS for the space of Maison Grégoire.

Everything started with a click, or, to be more precise, with a series of clicks, those by which Beatrijs Albers managed to successfully bid for a 1950's armchair in the style of Marco Zanuso on a well-known auctions web site.

It had to be an easy bidding, for Beatrijs Albers, had a very precise intention: she just wanted to destroy the armchair, to perform the very act of severing this utilitarian symbol of long-gone golden age, cutting it into two identical halves, before carefully reassembling them in a variety of configurations and photographing them.

Behind the gesture carried out by Albers, there is a whole series of questions which are being implicitely raised: the question of our relationship to our modernist heritage, which, although being relatively recent, is nonetheless already threatened, the question of destruction as a sine qua non condition for regeneration of society, of a specific urban fabric, not to mention as the very metaphor of the 'poiesis' i.e. of the creative gesture.

Just like the PARK 58 / 58T project (www.park58.be), the utopian city project which it originates from and which had a long genesis, Twins can also act as a metaphor for the Belgian capital: an undoubtly rich and stimulating context but whose energies may sometimes get hindered through the dichotomy of its presently compartmentalised institutional organisation. Brussels is also a town, a region, which is possibly somehow looking for a new destiny of its own. In a way, this reassembled severed sculpture speaks of all the possible configurations of an urban context, of a society apprehended as the actual decision of living 'together'..

The translation of the project into the modernist space of Maison Grégoire is particularly adequate since the building implicitely conveys similar interrogations on these notions of the transmission of forms and volumes and of reactivation of a given memory and heritage, as it is presently used simultaneously as a residence, as an office and an arts centre

The armchair of TWINS is somehow revived, given a new life through its very destruction, or, to be more accurate, through its disarticulation. Thereby, it also quite litterally reminds us of the organic duality of the birth and development of a body through the demultiplicated division of its cells.
In a way, and this might be the highest message the work conveys, it invites us to accept the alienation or the loss of one's own integrity, one's arbitrarily fixed identity to attain a state of polymorphous, polysemic and a- or poly-functional freedom...