Winnie Claessens
"Now on its way to the_______"
"Copy, one alpha"
" ________enduring laboratory in orbit."
FRED&FERRY GALLERY
03.04-07.05.2022
Smoke surrounds the launch pad. There is a noticeable delay between the female voice over
and the excited countdown of the agitated audience at the scene - “3!” “4!” “2!” “3!” “1!” “2!”
“0!” “1!”. A blinding inflammation. From the rising orange glow, a flickering lilac tail emerges,
impossible to capture properly on screen. The cloud transforms into a white-hot streak,
contrasting sharply against the black night. One rocket, four astronauts, in a straight line to
the International Space Station. A commentator in the background dramatically declares:
“Now on its way to the enduring laboratory in orbit.” She is briefly interrupted. It is November
11, 2021 and the Crew-3 mission has been launched.
This mission is part of a frantic race to space: various world powers today are still
conducting intensive studies into space equipment, astrobiology and space physics -
knowledge is and remains power. In collaboration with NASA, a new player was however
working on Crew-3: SpaceX, the aerospace company of billionaire Elon Musk. Musk has
repeatedly expressed his ambition to put humans on Mars within five years. Is that kind of
boundless belief in the promise of a new world admirable? How much will this achievement
require, and from whom? Doesn’t space travel sickens the Earth even more? Who decides
how a new society on a new planet would take shape? The first settler?
These are multifaceted questions that also resonated with Winnie Claessens. In her
previous work, she already delved into similar visionary projects in which the limits of human
knowledge were explored, into frenzied ideals in which people lost themselves. For this
exhibition, however, she exchanges a historical for a futuristic perspective; the noble
mountaineers and arctic explorers of the past for the space pioneers of the future. It
nevertheless completes the circle serendipitously that the Crew-3 rocket was nicknamed
“Endurance”, after the ship that adventurer Ernest Shackleton sailed to the South Pole with
in 1914, in pursuit of crossing the continent over land.
Whether she focuses on modernist utopias (based on traditional techniques) or future
dystopias (shaped by a reality that sometimes seems to trump science fiction), Claessens
makes no judgment. With a lucid curiosity, she recreates worlds in which interpretations are
stimulated, the imagination enticed. Claessens's installations are strongly narratively
charged and testify to her background in scenography and fascination for film. Each
installation is an immersive universe in which the beautiful and the abject, the comic and the
tragic, the good and the evil can coexist.
Claessens usually translates these grand stories into a smaller material form. She
reconstructs the often melancholic scenes and atmospheres in fragile models. These
aesthetic scale models transcend their purely applied function; they are an ode to manual
making and attentive observation. Herein, Claessens's approach feeds on her predilection
for old Japanese theater forms and film effects, in which the same care and craftsmanship
are central. For Claessens, every imitation is an attempt to make things more
comprehensible, better understood. By doing so, she reduces inconceivable experiences to
a conceivable scale. She manages to capture the sublime feeling of the overwhelmingly
uncontrollable in a controlled, still fragment. And although that recording seems naturalistic,
the realistic is a mere starting point. Claessens rethinks and reworks and does not hide her
constructions. Sometimes advanced CGI worsens emotional engagement and visual imagination more than analog effects. The magic of “make-believe” doesn't disappear
because the apparatus is showing - maybe even, quite the contrary.
Also for this exhibition, Claessens made several models. There are the rescaled
versions of alien landscapes. They could be true representations of the planet Mars, in their
brownish-red hues and crumbled texture. But how do you imagine something that only a few
will experience in person? It still is an imperfect pursuit - much like in the 19th-century, when
astronomer James Nasmyth wanted to make a photographic image of the lunar surface, but
therefore had to plaster model lunar landscapes based on his telescopic observations (due
to the limited possibilities of the photographic medium at the time). Claessens plays with
these multiple layers in the show: she made videos of the models, which she in turn projects
in the same space.
This transposing of objects in different media is also repeated in the sculptures that
refer to space debris. Space junk is man-made and left behind trash that floats aimlessly
through space. Claessens used earthly waste to make these works and in doing so ascribed
singular voices to them. She then brought these characters together in a new video work.
The ballet of space debris is influenced by science fiction film (music), but is most inspired
by a quote from the book “Sputnik Love” by Haruki Murakami: “Lonely metal souls in the
unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other, and part, never to meet again.
No words passing between them. No promises to keep.”
Equally lonely are the satellites that hover around the earth as symbols of the
intrinsically human lust for knowledge. And also the unmanned Voyager probes are left to
their own devices. The probes were launched in the 1970s and are currently in interstellar
space. They each carry a golden record with illustrations and sounds, representative of the
diversity of life on Earth. It includes sounds of nature, musical recordings and greetings in 55
languages. The critical caveat to this, however, is that it is highly likely that extraterrestrial
life will not pick up the probes until after Earth and humanity have already been wiped out.
It can all seem quite naive. Golden records that potentially no one ever hears.
Exploring new red soil while the waste accumulates elsewhere. Industrial magnates
investing money in trans-arctic expeditions. A white line en route to the ISS. But does naive
have to be negative? Can naivety be a refusal to give up? A stand against the total
relativization of everything and everyone, in the words of writer Stefan Hertmans? A form of
hope in spite of, perhaps?
“Hartelijke groeten aan iedereen.”
EXTRA
As part of her artistic practice, Winnie Claessens runs 1:40.5 Gallery since September 2020.
As the name suggests, this gallery is a model on scale 1:40.5 of Fred&Ferry Gallery. It was
also shown in the office space there. Claessens built the mini-gallery and, after an open call,
selected eight artists for a solo exhibition. These artists were given carte blanche: the
invitation and challenge was precisely to rethink exhibition practices, averse to production or
financial feasibility - anything was possible in the world of the model. In line with her practice,
1:40.5 gallery functioned as Claessens's own utopian project about a shared, scaled down
imagination.
The past exhibitions were:
#1 Karina Beumer, “Some, or all, have been a projection of Uhl’s mind”, 06.09-10.10.2020
#2 Elleke Frijters, “I never promised you a rosegarden”, 25.10-28.11.2020
#3 Rien Schellemans & Gijs Waterschoot, “Fruit en notes”, 14.02-20.03.2021
#4 Winnie Claessens, “The truth is out there”, 13.05-04.07.2021
#5 Winnie Claessens, “The pool edition” , 05.09-09.10.2021
#6 Gunther Segers, “Bottom’s up”, 24.10-28.11.2021
#7 Ludivine Thomas Anderson, “Reluctor et emergo”, 05.12.2021-22.01.2022
#8 Ben Van den Broeck, “Reprojection1”, 06.02-12.03.2022
#9 Kasper De Vos, “Beams & Dreams”, 03.04-07.05.2022
