Alec De Busschère

Annexed as an extra-mural project to the programming of MACS (Grand-Hornu), Alec De Busschère's installation ‘Memory Cache Collection 99’ presents a maze of images printed on large finely-woven veils freely suspended in the exhibition space. This translucent architecture in which the public is invited to wander and lose itself is all the more disconcerting for its ingenious suspension mechanism, whereby the slightest draught can change the orientation of the partitions.  The spectacle of these phantom-like images then takes on a slightly kinetic, even cinematographic dimension from the instability of the veils, the movement of spectators and the effect of successive overprintings and dissolves. Labyrinthine and kaleidoscopic, the device has the appearance of a “theatre of memory”,  this mnemonic tool which locates on an architectural distribution plan the fragmentary images of a story to be reconstructed. This archaeological connotation also gains in meaning when we learn that this visual material was extracted in 1999 from the memories of several personal computers: cache files recovered by the artist to create, at the time, his ‘Keep the cache in memory’ video. Low in information and quality, orphaned from their authors and their original websites, one image follows another at an almost stroboscopic rhythm, echoing the frenzy that once seized an entire generation of insomniac computer navigators. Twenty-five years on, Alec De Busschère returns to this ocean of archives to deliver a diametrically opposite vision: in the form of images he has reduced in number, enlarged and slowed down to give them, for all their superficiality, the existential depth of a human gesture and its trace, albeit using technology.

► Address:
Bloc 5 | Rue du Ruisseau, 37 – 1080 Brussels 

► Opening:
30.08.24 | 18:00

► Exhibition:
31.08 > 22.09.24

► Opening hours:
Wednesday - Sunday | 14:00 - 19:00

About the artist

Alec De Busschère lives and works in Brussels.

Alec De Busschère is a self-taught artist who began in the 1980s with painting and then developed an oeuvre that exploits varied mediums and languages. His polymorphous practice seeks to expand the white cube by opening fictional spaces. Many times he integrates data, surveys, architectural plans and algorithms, viewing everything peripheral to the work as dynamic elements for potential inclusion in his creative process, considering accidents and randomness as productive data, and collaborating with authors who use other forms of language. He questions the transmission of information in any project, with its resulting loss of information and densification of the work. His work is structured mainly around long-term projects, such as Casting for Generics, UC Box, UNEXISTANT or Possible Tracks for Short Cuts.

The audience is invited to enter the exhibition space through a back door at the rear of the building, a metaphorical approach to access the ‘cache memory’ of our computers.

The space is inhabited by 20 veils individually suspended from the metal framework using a system of tubes and magnets that Alec De Busschère has grafted onto the architecture of the space for the duration of the exhibition. The graphic network of the framework, with its magnetic fastenings, allows the system of veils to extend flush with the ground. The overall arrangement creates a kind of cartography of the dwellings of memory. The veils float in space, one behind the other, side by side. They rotate on their axis without ever touching.

Each veil is printed with an image selected from a database collected by the artist in 1999 from anonymous Internet users who agreed to share files from their cache memory. These images are orphaned: we know neither their authors nor their origins, nor the sites on which they appeared.

Using these sources as a starting point, Alec De Busschère enlarges these micro-files, each just a few kilobytes in size, to room-scale prints. By reinventing the entire framing process, he restores their operational, existential value. He makes them appear as if they had disappeared, and we appear as if we will disappear.
If the physicality of the elements suddenly becomes immersive, it's to give us a better understanding of our relationship with data, oscillating from a digital to an analogue state, moving from a micro to a macro scale, and through the disappearance of our respective bodies in the field of these veils. At this stage of the project, most of the image files in the collection are no longer available on the Internet. The artist selected 20 of those that had disappeared. With its topological aspect, he proposes an installation in which we circulate without appearing, where we veil ourselves in order to exist differently, where movement persists.

The 20 image file names are listed on a wall outside the exhibition space. This textual presentation adds another layer to the process of transforming these files. What is written, read, and thought is contemplated. What was inside is now outside. The audience is free to wander around the spaces between the images. In this way, we move from a time of reading that we might call symbolic to a time in which we move forward physically. It’s a time for walking versus daydreaming.

The elements are aesthetic and theoretical objects: they relate to looking and seeing, to display and phenomenal visibility, to mimesis. Here, all the devices are meticulously positioned so that the boundaries between these various degrees of equally real fiction are visible.

 Béatrice Delcorde, 2024