The Joyful Apocalypse, Traumnovelle, Bruges Triennial 2024, © Filip DujardinA place where the body goes looking for their lost ones. Big enough to allow losing yourself in a lost quest. Small enough to make any escape impossible. It is a void tall from 3 meters to 6, to 9, and to the infinity of the sky. Its weakness is the gray that reflects what we project on it, the sadness of the cobblestones or the brightness of a ray of sun. Its ubiquity surrounds and fills the empty shapes. Surrounded by reflections, the eyes escape all the horizons. There is only one key that allows access to the four main doors. Two are left open. One is always locked. One is sometimes open. It is an industrial landscape of steel that is settled in a mirage of the eternal past. The space is impossible to find when you need it and can only appear when no one is looking for it. The color is the color of the sky.
The Joyful Apocalypse, Traumnovelle, Bruges Triennial 2024, © Filip Dujardin
It is always changing. The sound is clear, muted, and explosive. One of the accesses is made through a first antechamber, crushed by 10-meter-tall walls. It is a series of staircases and platforms from which to observe or to be observed. Its original use has been forgotten but is always reactivated by the crossing bodies. The ceiling is moving, activated by the first raindrops. It has cold moments and warm moments only depending on the movements of the bodies. In the dark, the bodies brush each other in an endless procession.
It is inhabited by a population of nobodies that all came for the same reason, as voluntary prisoners to escape the chaos of their modernity. The hands are in contact with the coldness of a frozen skeleton or the warm hands of a foreigner. Blood and bones, steel and concrete, Vlees en Beton.
The Joyful Apocalypse, Traumnovelle, Bruges Triennial 2024, © Filip Dujardin
To access one of the niches, one has to wait to receive enough steps from the steps collector. Some bodies wait years to elevate themselves, and other bodies don’t wait. There are also the ones that, sometimes by choice, are never able to go down again. Most of the time they have spent too much time above, and the staircase that allowed them access has already been moved to another part of the space. Keeping them in front of themselves, the sky, and the endless void.
The Joyful Apocalypse, Traumnovelle, Bruges Triennial 2024, © Filip Dujardin
Every dawn, the bodies align at the northern extremity and try to listen to the whispers of the wind left by the sound of the carillon. Once done, another procession starts. Their favorite is to reenact the quest of lost warriors in a forbidden land to find a holy plate that, as the story tells it, is the plate in which the first bone had its first meal. When in groups, one body speaks louder and louder and points to the sky while narrating memories of the lost world outside of their protected cobblestone and steel garden.
The Joyful Apocalypse, Traumnovelle, Bruges Triennial 2024, © Filip Dujardin
Most of them forgot their names and the names of their loved ones. They found a place to grieve all the former and next lost ones. Everyone accepts the inevitable: the loss of their lovers, their kids, their fathers, and mothers. The loss of the soil that they were used to spoil. They dance a quiet dance by walking one after the other, sometimes turning in circles. There is a story told from whisperer to whisperer that a way out could exist. This false hope seems somehow enough to slow down the tempo, every time that finally the bodies might be freed.
The Joyful Apocalypse, Traumnovelle, Bruges Triennial 2024, © Filip Dujardin
The Joyful Apocalypse, Traumnovelle, Bruges Triennial 2024, © Filip Dujardin