Connection Stations of Past and Present (Brussel-Schaarbeek/Bruxelles-Schaerbeek)
2022
spazioSERRA, Lancetti railway station, Milano (IT)
Former newspaperstand, wood, floor vinyl, plastic, printed vinyl adhesive on plexi, wood lacker, bister, charcoal, parquet varnish ,
computer screen, iPod, A0 poster frames, wires,A0 posters printed on blueback paper, advertisement banner 6 x 2 m
photo's by © spazioSERRA
photo's by © spazioSERRA
photo's by © spazioSERRA
photo's by © spazioSERRA
photo's by © spazioSERRA
photo's by © spazioSERRA
photo's by © spazioSERRA
photo's by © spazioSERRA
It is the public context of urban displacement that has always fascinated Cafmeyer. Trains, cars, parking lots and stations are often protagonists of his installations because public infrastructure is one of the most obvious aesthetic counterparts of social structures, or to put it better: because the form of our means of transportation blatantly translates the organization of our society. The case of the Lancetti - Schaarbeek relationship is particularly strong because these are two stations in the northern part of their respective cities, both of which are under-centralized and somewhat neglected areas. The willingness to play with the absurd, moreover, is closely connected with the reflection on the site: spazioSERRA in the vast majority of cases has an unintended audience, an audience of distracted observers who walk along the railway station directed toward their destinations and oriented by that signage and design that, as we said before, normalizes movement with the affordance of a fast-running system. The rupture in space-time of Connecting Stations of Past and Present is first of all intended to interrupt the functionalism of the system, and to produce for an instant in the passerby a new attitude, that of the observer, or rather of the flâneur, or the child: «To the child's gaze, the surrounding life appears as part of his own life: the child loses himself in it as he loses himself in a toy, hence the perpetual discovery of the flâneur, in a labyrinthine journey that brings an infinity of surprises.» (V. Ruggiero, Movimenti nella città, 2000).
If such an intent to produce a different gaze seems primarily driven by a playful impulse, it must be said that Cafmeyer's work is linked to social criticism more than it seems at first glance. The fake and the absurd are often tools for hypertrophizing certain issues in the system, and in our case the "Visit Belgium!" billboard indicates how much the functionalism that normalizes our travel is primarily aimed at the economy of tourism (and not, for example, at generative community development).
It is absolutely normal to expect to find a ticket machine in a train station, as we said in the beginning. But now, one wonders, can it also be otherwise?
Text written by Arianna Magsitrale
EN Every day we travel on roads and use means of transportation respecting the social order, knowing how to interpret which position to take, which distances, which directions. This is why it is absolutely normal to expect to find a ticket machine in a train station, just as it is normal to orient yourself with the signs provided, and to respect the line to buy your ticket. This is normal because more or less the whole globalized world is connected with communication routes, infrastructures that regulate nomadism, and normalize every individual movement.
What would happen if suddenly we were faced with another reality, if the functionalism of public transportation was disrupted, failed? This is the case of Connecting Stations of Past and Present, a site-specific installation that Belgian artist Elias Cafmeyer conceived and created ad hoc for spazioSERRA. The artist's idea is to present to passersby a "glitch in reality," one that is actually perceived as an error in space-time: in fact, enclosed in the vacuum of spazioSERRA — in the Lancetti railway station in Milan — there is an impenetrable fragment of another station, the Schaarbeek station, which actually exists in Brussels. In some respects this is an absurd deception, the purpose of which is to destabilize and catch off guard, an attitude that has illustrious precedents particularly among Belgian artists, some of whom proudly constitute Cafmeyer's main references: Guillaume Bijl and Luc Deleu are emblematic cases in point. But in Connecting Stations of Past and Present, compared to the many "Belgian absurdism"-style installations Cafmeyer has previously made in public spaces, there is an extra cue, for the station fragment we see here — from the name Schaarbeek indicated by the large sign — is nothing more than the reconstruction of a personal memory of the artist. In fact, the brief private life note, embedded in Cafmeyer's larger project of social critique, sees him involved in a long love story that took place precisely between Belgium and Italy, precisely between Brussels Schaarbeek station and Milan Lancetti station. Hence the choice of title Connecting Stations of Past and Present, which by connecting stations relates private lives to the collective dynamics of urban displacement.