David De Beyter
Edifices - Installation - 2009
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 11
Installation
This project is built around a series of photographs. the piece marks the onset of a reflection on the links between the imaginary and the real, by way of the habitat and its relationship to the landscape. the core idea focuses on roofs that emerge from the ground. Comprised of three roofs, the intervention occurs on a site treated as a set in which various micro-fictions are played out. it is the result of a vision, a personal interpretation, founded in the familiar reality of a residential district. the act of divorcing these roofs from their erstwhile realityreveals what i see as a potential for fiction. the value of the operation resides in the fact that it genuinely took place: the act of realizing it in situ means it is a work within the image that is conscious of handling objects, of creating traces, of concocting a story. Each photograph is a fragment of this, each an echo of the universe of the neighborhoods concerned. The rescheduling thus creates images that resonate with the imaginary world of the viewer. Beyond these bits of roof, the suggestion is of a world of generic, brownfield landscapes. these fragments of houses function as a metonymy for the surface habitat and acquire autonomy as a subject of thought. This imagined documentary is also in itself a proposal for analyzing the real and our relationship to reality through the language of fiction.
