Tour & Taxis Voix Off

A film by Lou Delamare

In 2016, for the first time, Art Brussels - the contemporary art fair - takes place at Tour&Taxis. The movie is a documentary essay about the recent memory of Tour&Taxis site, a large wasteland in the center of Brussels, abandonned for near 30 years. It was the territory of individuals and tribes living the end of a golden age before its reallocation in an organised urban zone.

Tour & Taxis Voix Off - color movie (HD video), 40 minutes, no spoken words.

Brussels, March 2014, Europe is investing. There is the imminent disappearance of 30 hectares of semi-marshy terrain in the wasteland surrounding Tour & Taxis. The building workers enter the territory from the south side to level off its vegetation cover. To the north, the various occupants on the edge of this vast wilderness continue their activities as if nothing can disturb them. They have stopped wavering between the desire to function uniquely by themselves and the need to address the world by asserting their individuality. They steal time and space. Another sort of thief of the hybrid variety, between a construction worker and an Indian, has inserted himself at the centre of the zone. He has penetrated into the last zone that has not yet been raked over to raze and preserve 21m2 of this "sacred ground". Here a turf war has been declared, which will be conducted not with guns, but with the territory itself as primary weapon. Some of them move heaps of earth, others whole pieces of land, others just sand and dust. We can see a relationship between ancestral practices and those of today in these acts of resistance to maintain a free territory. In silence and physical exertion, heads bent to the ground, everyone realises the enormity of dreams and the excessive expenditure of energy that these create on the ground. In their respective desires for accomplishment, a eulogy for slowness comes face-to-face with the anthems of global planetary speed and speculation.

The film will be projected on Friday 22 April at the grand auditorium of Bruxelles Environnement (Tour&Taxis), at 12:15 and 13:15. It will also be projected continuously at iMAL from 22 to 24 April, between 13:00 and 18:00.

The movie is part of a larger project, Tour & Taxis Space Graveyard, where the artist explores how memory originating from a territory can be recorded and preserved on the same territory.

Tour & Taxis Backup - Land relic (2014 > 2016) at Art Brussels

Tour & Taxis Backup is another existing component of this project : a sculpture made from the "scalp" of 21m2 of the low-relief plant cover preserved before the raking up of the site.

From April 20 to 24, Tour & Taxis backup is exhibited at Art Brussels (on the parking in front of Bruxelles Environnement building).

In February 2014, while workers were raking up the low-relief plant cover of the wasteland around Tour & Taxis, Lou Delamare cut out a 21m square of this wasteland by hand. She then reconstructed, true to the original, this sample which had been extracted from the landscape. This "soil scalp" dissociates the territory from the terrain, and the soil from the land surface. This work is an "extracted reality" which has been removed from its context, nature and own reality. This landscape sample, the only live memory of the site, has become a nomadic plot of land which travels and mutates according to the nature of the places that welcome it. In 2016 it will be returned to its promised land...

In 2017, Tour & Taxis Backup should be integrated in the new site. A project for a datacenter sculpture is planned, a kind of sarcophagus, digital repository of the past, present and future memory originating from the site.

About the Artist
Lou Delamare (Sisteron, FR - 1986) is a visual artist and architect (ENSAD, France). She combines in her art practice art architecture with landscape. Her main themes investigate the possession and appropriation of territory. She explores the spatial and fictional potentialities of functionless zones. She integrates in her projects the various angles of the realms she discovers: anthropological, geographical as well as historical. Lou produces "geographical performances", "places as devices" composed of a relational network of artefacts and materials : fragments of the physical world, installations, photographies, documentary movies, texts, architectural fictions, sculptures, small scale models and primitive architectures,...

Practical Info

Tour & Taxis Voix Off:

-Public projection at Bruxelles Environnement, Tour&Taxis site, Friday 22/04 (12:15 & 13:15, grand auditorium)
- Continuous projection at iMAL: 22-24/04, 13:00-18:00

Tour & Taxis Backup
- exhibited at Art Brussels (parking in front of Bruxelles-Environnement building, Avenue du Port 86C Havenlaan, 1000 Brussels).

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Credits

Tour & Taxis Voix Off is produced with the support of Halles de Schaerbeek, iMAL and Wallonie-Bruxelles Théâtre Danse.
Director: Lou Delamare
Camera : Lou Delamare, Kevin Dardenne, Stéphane Degoutin, Toma Wa, Nim & Samuel Fleury.
Editing : Samuel Fleury

Tour & Taxis Backup is supported by iMAL, Bruxelles Environnement and is exhibited in partnership with Art Brussels and Extensa. Curators: Yves Bernard & Stéphanie Pécourt.