STILL LIFE

99 tiny installations for a former freight station

Gare Maritime, Brussels

​

​

 

During the Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish painting, the theme of Still Life became central in the development of a new allegorical vocabulary adapted to the times. Still life painting traditionally served as a symbolic representation of life’s transience, while the complexity of textures and the intricacy of details that characterized them allowed artists to display their mastery and skills. 

Overseas trading with Africa, Asia and the New World fueled the rise of a wealthy merchant class, eager to showcase and celebrate its newfound riches by commissioning or buying art from contemporary masters.

Increasing trade also introduced exotic luxuries from all over the world, such as spices, tea, silk, gems and porcelain from Asia, wine, oil and fruit from the Mediterranean, tobacco and sugar from the Americas, as well as enslaved persons from Africa, also considered a commodity at a time, and treated as any other merchandise.

Artists soon incorporated these new materialistic symbols of prosperity into their still life paintings. They often replaced inanimate objects with an obvious vanitas theme like skulls and draining hourglasses with more subtle symbols like flowers, flies, bird’s nests, snails, ladybugs, lizards and butterflies, hiding the message under cheerful layers of colors and overwhelming displays of wealth. 

The apparent empty narrative of the still life was in fact populated by small creatures attracted to food or flowers and by the quiet absence of humans in the scene, and filled with clues to interpret the underlying symbolism of life in the Golden Age.

---

This installation uses the entire Gare Maritime building as a still life representation, populated with tiny creatures rendered in allegorical - and sometimes ironic - representations of birth, life and death, reaffirming the central role art plays in exploring existence and the metaphysical.

An hour long sound installation, played randomly throughout the day, serves as soundtrack to 99 permanent miniature installations scattered throughout the space. A tiny population of territorial snails, sneaky lizards, electric bird’s nests, greedy scorpions, solitary mice, horny crickets, existential cockroaches and many others, discreetly colonize the columns, walls, tree branches, hidden corners and beams of Gare Maritime.

In a succession of small sculptural tableaux measuring only a few centimeters across, the visitor and the passer-by will discover by chance these tiny natures mortes in unexpected places, and may feel like a child finding a golden chocolate egg hidden in his grandparents’ garden on Easter morning.

Freight stations have always been populated by small animals living off the stored goods, often unwillingly imported with the merchandise from other countries.

By hitchhiking on human convoys, countless animal species move across continents and conquer new territories.

Art exhibitions have also frequently been the unwilling vehicle for changes in ecosystems. When some crates containing artworks were opened at the Australian pavilion of the Venice Biennale after a long journey in the late 1980s, it transpired that a few Australian beetles had bummed a ride across the ocean. They found themselves a new home in the Giardini della Biennale. Over the years, they multiplied exponentially and almost completely replaced the endemic beetle. 

Insects, reptiles, birds, rodents and other small mammals have all learned to survive in the urban environment, wary of humans and machines. The city is an ever-changing organism: while some urban species thrive, others face the constant loss of territories, as do the few animals that have survived in the wild, braving the consequence of the Anthropocene.

This installation is also a memorial to all those tiny creatures.