In the beginning There was a blackboard wall in Eke In 1961 a chapel that was a site of pilgrimage in the small Belgian village of Kerselare burned to the ground. All that could be saved was the Late Gothic statue of the Virgin Mary. A new chapel arose from the ashes, designed by the Flemish Brutalist* architect Juliaan Lampens. That building was erected of raw architectural concrete and criticized from day one for melding so poorly with its surroundings. I, on the other hand, fell for it like a tonne of bricks. Despite having been built for eternity, the new chapel already suffers from concrete rot and there is even talk of tearing it down. I visited the 92-year-old Lampens and asked whether I could draw on the chapel with school chalk. He disclosed to me that he had originally sketched the chapel in chalk on a blackboard wall in his studio in Eke before it was built from 1963 to 1966. The chalk drawings I want to make on the chapel represent a reimagination, a return to the erased ideas that originated on the wall in Eke. Working with the photographer Jan Kempenaers sporadically across the seasons, my idea is to create an artistic perspective in which the chapel reclaims its place in time. We want to preserve the building from demolition – without having to move a single stone.
* Brutalism: A style of architecture that emerged from modernism (from the fifties through the seventies of last century). The term ‘brutalism’ derives from the French ‘béton brut’, for ‘raw concrete’. The Chapel of Our Lady of Kerselare in Edelare (Oudenaarde, Belgium) is located on Edelareberg in Kerselare on the eponymous street, along the regional carriageway N8 running from Oudenaarde to Geraardsbergen in the Flemish Ardennes.
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