The Absence of Mark Manders: Woning Van Wassenhove, Belgium

The Absence of Mark Manders unfolds in the Woning Van Wassenhove, a residency organized by Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens. This is a post-Brutalist house designed by the Flemish architect Juliaan Lampens in 1974. In jarring contrast to prevailing depictions of clean and mostly empty Brutalist interiors, the original occupant, Albert Van Wassenhove, who lived there until his passing in 2012, stuffed the house to hoarder-like proportions.

The Absence of Mark Manders treats Lampens’s architecture with the dignity of the permanent sculpture that it is, while also putting forth Van Wassenhove’s logic of accumulation. Although Manders has hardly touched some spaces, he treats the bed, office, and kitchen as stages for aggregation in line with the original occupant’s mindset: drawings, architectural proposals, photographs, artworks, paint pots, and seemingly wet clay are piled on top of one another. These spaces have been used as an artist’s studio, unveiling traces of a temporary occupant living in, and thinking with, Lampens’s architecture.

In Manders’s words: “The aim is to show the house in a perfect situation. While some spaces derail when you zoom in on them, there is a kaleidoscopic element to them, as if you are looking inside a head.”

Installation photos by Tim Van de Velde