“You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass.”
Seamus Heaney
KOPENHAGENER
To drift in and out of days, even weeks. When I was young, drifting was a thing of promise, an invisibly privileged position that let the world and its adventures find me. Now, in middle-age with a young child, it feels like the way that days fill into and fall over each other, time that can’t be stopped or substantiated.
Perhaps drift is perfectly aligned with the realities of time and agency? There is so much talk these days of accepting what we can’t control but I have trouble with the language—surrender, release, letting go—too much new-age talk. Maybe the idea of drift, with its graceful acquiescence, is a path to resisting the ways we are scripted to miss this, here, now.
My friend has left Berlin and returned to live in Brussels. I visit him and he takes me to the social project where he works as a chef leading a team of apprentices, most of whom are refugees. It’s in an area, he tells me, where many white Belgians will not go. The low-slung buildings lack the polish of the city center and I can feel that sense of abandonment common to poor neighborhoods everywhere. But there is vitality and lightness in the echoes of conversations among its cafes and markets. The three perpetrators of the infamous attack on the Bataclan nightclub in Paris were all linked back to this place. The whole neighborhood became marked, its name, Moelenbeek, became suspect itself. The press descended to tell the story of a radical, jihadi turn in Europe.
I am not convinced. I see a canal that clearly demarcates a division. Here, one city ends along an industrial waterfront and another begins. And so a sense of otherness persists through time and space: those ones over there.
Brussels is haunted by the specter of the colonial project that built it. In 1885, the Belgian king, Leopold II, claimed what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo as his personal colony, initiating a genocide that killed millions. So many of the grand buildings, boulevards and museums in the city were built with money acquired through the brutal forced labor of the colony’s rubber plantations. Weaving through this supposed no-go zone, I become aware of a vast web of complications and duplicities. What if every polished part of a city is evidence of a parallel place, terrorized?
IMPRESSUM
For Juno
Thank you
Jennie Lee, Duncan Ballantyne-Way, Otis Kriegel, Renaud Regnery, Alexej Meschtschanow, Daniel Lazar, Ivan Liovik Ebel, Eric Tswchernow and Mom & Dad
This book was published with the generous support of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, NYC
Editor
Duncan Ballantyne-Way
Essay “Mapping Abstraction”
Duncan Ballantyne-Way
All other texts and images
Benjamin Rubloff
Concept Benjamin Rubloff and BAR PACIFICO/
Design
BAR PACIFICO/ Büro für Gestaltung und Prozesse Ivan Liovik Ebel, Moritz Lichtwarck-Aschoff
Typeface
DM Sans
DM Mono
GT Sectra
Production Druckerei Kettler, Bönen
Published by Verlag Kettler, Dortmund www.verlag-kettler.de
Edition 600
ISBN: 978-3-98741-144-1
Copyright Benjamin Rubloff, Verlag Kettler
Benjamin Rubloff is a Berlin-based artist. www.benjaminrubloff.com