Alec De Busschère. Memory Cache Collection 99
MACS. Grand-Hornu | Extra-muros. Brussels
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.
