Between spatial and artistic instrument : exhibiting the photography commission of the Flemish Government Architect

Abstract:The function of Flemish Government Architect was implemented in 1998 by the Flemish government’s then competent minister Wivina Demeester and assigned to the architect and urban designer bOb Van Reeth the following year. He then became in charge of supervising, developing, and promoting procedures and policy instruments to accompany the commission and completion of qualitative public buildings, infrastructure, and spatial plans in Flanders (Belgium). To prepare for and fulfil parts of his mandate (of 6 years), he sought to compile a photographic inventory of his field of action: the Flemish territory. To this end, he commissioned the photographer Niels Donckers, who quickly accumulated hundreds of photographs documenting Flanders’s most ordinary landscapes. This inventory included photographs of the sites destined for the realisation of public works making use of the newly instigated policy instrument of the Government Architect: the ‘Open Call’. This procedure strengthened across the following mandates and is still in use today. About 700 realized and unrealized projects of all sizes and typologies grew out of it, and so did the photography inventory (now available online) which systematically registered the site photographs, before and – when applicable – after realisation, of these public projects steered by the Flemish community. These photographs have been used for the communication of the Open Calls’ project brief and occasionally also of the Government Architect’s activities. As such, they have been exhibited several times in Flanders and internationally. In this paper, I focus on the first public exhibition of these photographs. In 2002, this inventory was displayed in the exhibition “Portrait of Flemish biotopes. The photography commission of the Flemish Government Architect” curated by Moritz Küng in collaboration with Katrien Vandermarliere at the arts centre deSingel in Antwerp. The exhibition also included a collection of contemporary landscape photographs of Flanders acquired by the Flemish government. Through archival documents I seek to reconstruct the exhibitionary apparatus and discourse that framed and (re)situated these images within a cultural setting. More specifically, I intend to question the curatorial narrative that stressed the significance of these images “for establishing the identity of an area, for the registration of changes, the sharpening of perception and the depiction of subjective experience” with the goal of building an archive of the Flemish community’s patrimonium as well as contribute to the search for a qualitative architecture. By unpacking and contextualising this exhibition, I aim to critically examine how the status and meaning of these photographs shifted through the site of their mediation and how this process was entangled in institutional complexities negotiating the convergence of aesthetics and politics.

Publication year:2022