Walter Benjamin was an outsider in more than one sense of the word. A brilliant intellect who was never able to acquire an academic position, a Jew who had to flee from Nazi Germany, a German who felt only really at home in Paris, a 19th century Einzelgänger stranded in the brave new world of capitalist commodification. Benjamin took position in the in-between. In his work we hear the echo of crumbling ruins, we embrace a vision of fallen humanity. In response, Benjamin sought to rekindle the revolutionary potential of the fetish, the figment, and the fragment. It was such a missing morsel, a stamp in a passport, that brought an end to his life’s journey in the Spanish border town of Port Bou. This photographic exploration takes its cue from that geographical field of gravity, the French Côte Vermeille. It seeks to
filter our contemporary experience of permanent catastrophe through the sensibility of that brooding polytechnician and briljant poet.
I am a Belgian writer and photographer. In an age flooded by the flicker of screens and the flutter of news tickers this I am seeking the shadow, the static. My work is an enactment of geopoetics, a critical practice that is concerned with developing sensitive and intelligent contact between the human mind and our planetary habitat, and with developing novel ways to express that contact. It is a journey that is partly metaphorical: a process of resisting, research, and regrounding. The journey is also literal and physical. Geopoetics is an invitation to approach the earth in a new way, to immerse ourselves into foreign territories and languages and viscerally experience the state of not knowing. Often my work is percolated by poetic and philosophical echoes from the 19th century, an age in which humanity viscerally started to experience a final unmooring from its mythic origins.
