JONAS VANSTEENKISTE
FRACTUM DOMUM
06/04/24 - 27/04/24
DRAW ME A HOUSE
The participatory project 'Draw me a house' is initiated by Thomas Jacques and Jonas Vansteenkiste and took place on Sunday 7th of April. Anyone and everyone was invited to participate.
"The assignment is simple; draw us a house and fill in a short questionnaire. All submitted drawings and answers will become part of the research project, which will find its form in an installation with accompanying video. The growing archive already contains work from South Africa, Tawian, Spain, France, Belgium and more."
About the project:
Houses appear early on in children's drawings. It is a universal concept, and yet everyone has a different representation of it in their mind. Artists Jonas Vansteenkiste and Thomas Jacques want to collect drawings to compile an archive of houses and find out whether there is such a thing as an archetypal house.
To realise this, they have people, of all ages and from all walks of life, draw houses. Will you draw with them? The task is simple; draw a house, fill in a short questionnaire and become part of this fascinating research project.
Fractum Domum means broken house.
For Vansteenkiste this refers to a personal story and the relationship with his biological father. He uses architectural ornament as a motif. The use of typical 19th century ornamentation is not arbitrary; it refers to the use of floral motifs and bridges the gap to the content. The intervention creates the illusion of nature reclaiming culture. Reclaiming a place in the world is, of course, a complex, multifaceted process. reclaiming a place is for Vansteenkiste also the personal motive in this work.
By placing this work in the public/architectural domain, it activates a more layered dialogue, a palimpsest. The reference to the concept of a palimpsest is a powerful metaphor for the way memory works in different layers. And is a holistic view of the history of a place, a textual space. Palimpsest refers to the ancient tradition of scraping off texts on manuscripts in order to reuse them, and adding a new layer of text on top of the older layer, in this way the history of the base text continues in the new text and can affect its meaning. The public work 'fractum Domum' responds to the past of the place, but also to the past of the artist. And makes this intervention a palimpsest intervention. Vansteenkiste makes these interventions all through the world Bergen will be 8th place where he places that intervention.
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Jonas Vansteenkiste is a visual artist who investigates the field of tension between architectural spaces and the psychological impact of space. He has a broad visual language that ranges from installation, sculpture, video to drawings. He achieved a Master’s degree in Media Art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and later a second Master’s degree in Research in Art and Design at the ST Lucas in Antwerp.
Vansteenkiste is internationally active, he was invited as a resident at the renowned cité des arts international in Paris, he was selected for the ZK/U Residency in Berlin where he researched urbanism and scale models.
During the Sunday Morning residency at the European Work Center, The Netherlands, he developed an additional visual language by working with ceramics, which he incorporates into his installations.
He was selected and has won various awards and prizes, including the provincial prize for visual arts in east Flanders.
His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in multiple exhibitions.
