EUROPAVOSTRA - The Brussel-based artist run space: Etablissement d'en Face at Trafó Gallery
Participating artists: Jos De Gruyter & Harald Thys, Geert De Mot, David Evrard, Arnaud Hendrickx, Joost Schouppe, Michael Van den Abeele and Freek Wambacq
The title 'Europa VOSTRA' is based upon the existing organisation 'EUROPA NOSTRA', which is an organisation consisting of rather wealthy women, mainly the wives of rich eurocrats (European Parliament bureaucrats). In order not to get bored while their husbands are at work in the European parliament, they gather frequently at each other’s house. Their main occupation is putting up commissions for the restoration and conservation of the European heritage.
One could imagine these domestic activities control the conservative and regressive politics spreading throughout Europe, where nations disappear and regions see the daylight like medieval fortresses. Their only objective is to see to it that eventually everything comes to a standstill. The ‘VOSTRA’ is handing it back. Reducing everything to a mass, a heap of mud.
Rather than presenting a fine selection of coming artists from Belgium, Europa VOSTRA appears as a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ in which it is difficult to distinguish the individual works, or their authors. The scenery in Trafo will refer to the aforementioned medieval imagery like the relics of a marketplace full of mud and other relics of western civilisation. We are in Europe’s subconscious, whose landscape is broody-brown like Flemish paintings and whose air is heavy with the odour of earth.
The centre of the installation is a muddy race-track for miniature cars, once adorned by the European flag designed out of sand, but by now murky with the muddy chaos left behind by the racing cars already lining the track as milestones. Europe is scattered and trampled into the ground. Replicas of antique Olympian marble starting blocks appear throughout the space, reminding us that the unity of Europe – whether true or imaginary – still asserts itself along the lines of competition. Video screens show, in addition to the opening’s events, animations of an Arcadian gated landscape, contemporary residential parks, our Europe, inhabited by adolescent jumpers introducing a contemporary line-dance. A beer-barrel shows a magic lantern show of the obscure excavation of a hole. A classic street-lamp with creepy cold light illuminates the whole space of which the walls are painted in brown, uniting and reducing us to the same thing.
On the night of the opening, Europa VOSTRA offered an all-entertaining program, featuring an independency-rally with the miniature cars, a concert with brass-band and a dance-performance.
www.etablissementdenfaceprojects.org
