Until I see your dream in dark skies About Spaces and Intentions, Bodies real and virtual

Abstract

This visual essay and accompanying text explores the work of the Belgian assemblage artist Camiel Van Breedam through a series of dialogues: between Van Breedam’s personal archive of waste material, and the works that he has shaped out of it; through the very different works that Remco Roes has himself made using that same archive; through the relationship between the two-dimensional images that make up the visual essay, and the complex three-dimensional spaces they seek both to articulate and to conceal; and through the ensuing conversation between Roes and Peter Snowdon, which itself simultaneously explicates, complicates, revises and evades the visual modes of knowledge developed by the images. In this dialogue, it is suggested that none of these spaces – whether tactile, visual or verbal – can exist apart from the particular bodies that engage them as their “sole locus of reference,”and that the dark space where the raw, fragmentary material is collected and conserved is never exhausted by the emergent work, but persists and insists as its ground and its condition. The result is not a commentary or an analysis, in images or in words, but a form of resonance between interiority as a sensory practice, and the exposed surfaces of the always-provisional artistic work.