Third Place or What? at Tick Tack

Artists: Xavier Duffaut, Jules Flamen, Paul Gérard, Romane Iskaria, Lucine Letassey, Anna Safiatou Touré, Charlotte Quinonero

Exhibition title: Third Place or What?

Venue: Tick Tack, Antwerp, Belgium

Date: April 2 – 17, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Tick Tack, Antwerp

Brought together by Jules Flamen and Paul Gérard, coordination by Laure Cottin Stefanelli with Cédric Noël and Raymond Balau.

Third place or What? hypothesizes the existence of a third place, an informal zone as a junction between rational space, our personal and collective fictions and our lived experience.

With works by

Xavier Duffaut (BE)
Jules Flamen (FR)
Paul Gérard (BE)
Romane Iskaria (FR)
Lucine Letassey (FR)
Anna Safiatou Touré (FR/ML)
Charlotte Quinonero (BE)

Presentation

Maps assemble information, details and diagrams that allow a rational reading of our environment. By momentarily freezing a situation, the map does not reflect the current agitation, neither the future metamorphosis of a territory. Its functional grip sets a distance between the human body and the space where it interacts. Where are our lived experiences and memories, our events, encounters, discussions, accidents, displacements, disappearances, our images and our objects? How do they continue to occupy the space? What influence do these past moments have on our world perception?

Third place or What? appropriates the concept of third-space as an informal zone, as a junction between rational space, our personal and collective fictions and our lived experience.

The American writer and activist Peter Lamborn Wilson proposes the concept of psycho- topography as an alternative to the geographical map. He assumes that each person, from their lived experience, sensations, and means of perception, gradually forms a personal repertoire, a mental map. According to him, only the human mind can model the world on a 1:1 scale and access a form of “psychic nomadism”. If the human body animates space by its effective movement, the mind is able to take over physical space through its projections.

This exhibition presents a constellation of personal and collective narratives, lived experiences and fictions in search of a common ground, haunted by a network of destinies and memories. The invisible is revealed through shared experiences, exhumed archive documents that build bridges between present and past, East and West, urban and rural, between inhabitants and their territory.

What are the wallpapers hiding? How do the Assyrians embody their lost country? Could it be that the flowers displayed in the Royal Greenhouses of Laeken are colonial trophies? What is a lost paradise?

Third place or What?

Cinema TICK TACK

Each video featured in this program transform the filmed territories into a space of memory by referring to ancient rituals and architectural heritage. Thus, the Royal Greenhouses of Laeken are turned into a mausoleum, a botanical laboratory is personified, the Kurdish mountains are the setting of a tomb and clay objects scattered over the city of Dakar invoke our common cultural legacy.

With videos by

Mehdi Gorbuz (BE)
Ophélie Hilbert (FR)