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LEFT: Verbandkammer installation FLACC, Belgium. MIDDLE: The nifty research areas within the Verbandkammer. ABOVE: Magnus Nilsson and Ralf Pflugfelder enjoy a cup of tea. BO TT OM: The archive material and unique storage systems.
formulaically from 11 nos. types of frames, 10 nos. types of cladding, 40 nos. types of modules, 6 nos. programmatic entities and 1 no. Verbandkammer. The Verbandkammer is a form of institutional memory – a sedimentation and fossilisation of information. As a cross-section through the institutional shifts, it gauges where FLACC has been in the past, where it is situated at the present, and acts as a firm foundation from where the institution can propel towards the future. It is a framework for mining and reusing existing information previously produced at FLACC – a tangible feedback loop obsessed with keeping past
information in the productive present. In its second guise post-Manifesta 9, the Verbandkammer will move from the ground floor gallery to the first floor where the various components will be reconfigured to enable and guide future thinking and production at the institution. In conjunction with the physical framework, critical research into FLACC as a workplace for the visual arts will be conducted. The Verbandkammer is conceived as a blank canvas that can be hacked by future artists in residence as well as the institution itself. Just like the host institution, the structure has no predetermined final form, it is an open ended, 73
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on going project, constantly in the making. Conceptually, the project is rooted in this analogous processing; that of the dense geological stratification of matter and the layered, strategic archiving of information. Unlike the finite and irreversible process of coal mining, the mining of the Verbandkammer is a sustainable act concerned with retrieval and production of matter. This functional ‘capsule’ is successful on [literally] many levels – it is a space to work in, a space to catalogue and a space to ponder in/on, but perhaps most importantly it is, in itself, a place not just a space.