Picture this: Anouck De Clercq

Building

In her digital videos, Anouk De Clercq explores the ideal combination of content, technology, and formal aesthetics. The starting point in her process is often a sketch of a composition or a script used to create a 3D environment through animation programs. Patterns and loops are then selected to allow for significant intuitive tinkering with this foundational form. “What matters to me here is quite simple: to build a concept where I have the space to visualize my feelings with abstract forms,” says De Clercq. The visual language of the various works is highly diverse, yet all films resonate with each other. Tempo, atmosphere, and composition can be repeated, sampled, distorted, and reinvented to return in new films. Essential to her is the collaboration with artists from various disciplines, such as composers of digital music, architects, and visual artists.

For the work Building (2003), the starting point was a very concrete 3D model of the new Concertgebouw in Bruges. Walls were removed from this model to create more freedom of movement. Whether this building would collapse was of little importance: while architects are subject to gravity, artists are not. What remains are precisely the least supportive elements: the openings where the light enters. The architects of the Concertgebouw, Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem, always work around light and its incidence. They essentially build a structure around the light and the possible movements people make within that structure. Hence, Anouk De Clercq started from the idea that it is a dark body or space, where surfaces light up. Through the light, you get to know the building. She wanted to create a very narrative story about architecture with light as the narrator. Also very important to her was how Robbrecht and Daem brought rhythm into the architecture of their buildings. This rhythm is reflected in the editing through the light that constantly shifts, but also through the music by Anton Aeki, which is a fundamental part of Building.

The screening of the video Building in the Picture this program aligns with the idea of ​​following an artist’s work and achieving an intense collaboration between the artist and MDD.