Unearthing (crumbled, lit and overflown)

" In collaboration with the Memento Poetry Festival, ELDERS collective presents Dutch artist Lennart Lahuis with a series of new and existing installations, spread across the three floors of the medieval northern Broeltower. Lahuis combines visual information with natural processes, such as erosion, burning, and evaporating, as well as technological and scientific elements, contrasting the precision of science, technology and readability with the volatility of nature.

Just below the sandy loam and clay of Buda Island, in the subsoil room of the medieval Broeltower, we find the installation Murmur. This installation consists of remnants of large clay plates that were originally printed with a scientific article about the erosion process of a land bridge that once connected the United Kingdom to the European continent. During the Land Slides exhibition in National Museum for Ceramics Princessehof (NL), water flowed over these slabs, slowly fading the text and drawings. What remains here are remnants of that installation, clay fragments with short, poetic texts about landscape, time, and erosion. Words that resonate with the old Leie arm that flows alongside the location of this exhibition." - Elders Collective

"At the entrance, visitors receive a rubber stamp on their arm that they can wear throughout their visit. The work Deeply Held Beliefs leaves a subtle impression on the skin in the form of texts and drawings, turning the experience of the exhibition into a physical, albeit temporary memory." - Elders Collective

"On the first floor, traces of an old fireplace remain visible, a place where guards and watchmen warmed themselves while guarding the entrance to the city. Scattered throughout the space are the ashes of burned images, titled Pressing Issues. The images are a photographic document that the artist made of a May 1 gathering in Brussels. In these fragmented images, political motifs can still be recognized, as well as motifs that evoke the elements of earth, water, air, and fire. A stone lies on political flyers to keep out the wind, the same wind that pulls on a May Day balloon floating through the air, and lighters are arranged amid all kinds of paraphernalia from ‘The European Left’. As in the clay fragments that are presented on the ground floor, Lahuis links political and current themes to the instability, unpredictability, and transience of natural processes and the elements." - Elders Collective

"On the top floor, with its imposing roof structure consisting of heavy wooden beams, Lahuis has arranged ceramic tiles as a shadow of the architecture. The same type of beams were used in the canals of Kortrijk during the Middle Ages to block and regulate water. As a reference to this history, texts are formed from letters in water in this installation. These liquid texts were written by Loeke Vanhoutteghem, a member of the city poets' collective De Letterzetter. Vanhoutteghem links the architecture of this space and water with causality, the central theme of the Memento Poetry Festival."- Elders Collective