When light is broken, all the colours of the spectre appear. For an artwork at Campus Zuid of Karel de Grote Hogeschool in Antwerp, Dani O' Dean designed a light installation which, when in rest, beams out a soft white light. However, when walking beneath the installation, the white light is broken and turns into a spectre of colors.

The artwork is a place of contemplation and encounter. Anyone is able to break the light, no person or entity is being discriminated. An encounter with 'the light' is a sign of interaction with the world in al its true perspectives.

Concept: Sarah Hendrickx, Chloé Dierckx & Liesbeth Doms
Uitwerking: Sarah Hendrickx & Chloé Dierckx

A collaborative project that took place during a residency period at Lokaal 01 in Antwerp and was later exhibited in Extra City Antwerp, has as subject the police code of the city itself. This document states all the general rules of the city towards its citizens. During the residency, we read, analysed and interpreted this text. As a final result, we made a series of illustrations. The drawings accompany rules from the codex that are vague, multi-interpretable, poetic or absurd and show hiatus in the text.

Another part of this project was the attempt to organize an event that would extend over the entire city and would cover all day-to-day life in Antwerp: people working, eating, sleeping, walking, an occasional emergency, etc. Although we followed the rules stated in the police codex in order to organize the event, the city's administration thought our initiative "wasn't useful" and wouldn't allow it to take place.

Work by: Chloé Dierckx, Sarah Hendrickx & Liesbeth Doms 

Travelers’ Tales relates the current trend of democratic storytelling through social media to the way tales and myths got spread around the globe by the first traders and travelers. With the aid of new technology, we will create a network of people spread around the globe. Each participant will create part of a story and travel to another location in order to pass it on. The tale will thus ‘physically’ travel around the world, passed on from mouth to mouth, growing and altering with each of the 100 steps and include many personalities, cultures and visions.

People have always lived in communities, since living together is safer than living alone, provision of food is easier and we have that strong urge to be part of a group that does not just protect us in a physical way, but also forms our identity and by confirming who we are also protects us in a psychological way. In modern cities such as Antwerp however, this sense of safety is hard to find. When walking around in the city you live in, meeting someone you know is more exception than rule, things seem to change rapidly and people speak different languages or have different backgrounds. Living in a city is challenging, you often need to adapt to new things and are almost constantly confronted with a wide variety of impulses coming either from people, traffic, architecture, advertisement, art…

Cities are a scholarly example of the results of development and growth, and although the pursuit of progress and change is inherent in man, we also need safety, an intimate nest in which we can retreat and feel protected. 

In ‘The Poetics of Space’ (1958), Gaston Bachelard compares man to a turtle or snail, peeping outwards and directing its gaze on its surroundings, but all the time carrying its safe nest on its back. This is a nice metaphor for the duality between the urge to explore and the need for stability most people experience.

Although a shell can be heavy and slow the carrier down, it is crucial for its survival. We believe this to be the same for people and would like to look at city inhabitants as turtles, partly facing the high tempo and multitude of impulses, but also partly retreating in its safe shell on its back. We want to research how the shell manifests itself and investigate the patterns people follow, the places they visit to feel safe, the way they behave on the street and how they manage to create intimate space in the public area of a busy city.

'City Projects' is a long-term research- and experimental based project about the systems inhabitants of Antwerp created for themselves to stretch their chance of survival.

Through both observation and experiment, Dani O’Dean visualizes the concept of ‘The Intimate City’. By both observing and documenting the patterns people follow or the tactics they use to move around the city and by introducing new systems, we would like to shed a new light on the behavior of shell carrying people and the need for intimacy in a city.

As a collective with different expertise and interests in the scientific field we would like to conduct a multidisciplinary project that concentrates on the uncertainty and obscurity in science by making use of two intertwining themes: uncertainty in scientific experiments and the relationship between the scientist and the (uncertain) matter he or she studies.

We would like to further research the above themes and their underlying principles of uncertainty and obscurity, their presence in the studied matter itself (particle physics), the systems used to form interpretations and how scientist themselves relate to them. Because of the importance of imagination and the lack of tangibility in the two themes, we believe artistic methodologies to be an excellent way to offer further insights in their functioning in scientific practice. Because as opposed to hard science, art is not bound by the need to proof or scientifically verify its assumptions and can thus more easily offer knowledge about these -inherently undefinable- subjects. The artist is able to rethink the process or the system of ‘knowledge building’ itself and can create a new interpretation. For this, it is important not to haunt indisputable facts, but to accept that certain things can not be known and make uncertainty itself the purpose of our research.
We compare our research with staring into darkness, where when your eyes get used to the lack of clarity, you start to see not only the vague contours of things, but also the dots in your own eyes and the figures of your imagination.

For another way of working with the idea of the movement of the earth, we designed the plans for a sculpture both static and evolving at the same time.

The sculpture will consist of a vertical structure in metal and concrete with a surface of about 1m³ and more or less 4m in height. The structure will be divided into different compartments; each compartment holding 1m³ of ground coming from the coordinates where the sculpture will be/move to in the distant future. The ground will be held by glass cases, leaving room between each layer for plants naturally present in the soil to grow. In this way, the sculpture will condense time and space. And when time goes by, each layer will pass by the coordinates it once came from. We also expect that over time, the vegetation of the different layers will blend by moving from one layer to another and connect past, present and future.