Le Paysage Ménagé

Le Paysage Ménagé unfolds in the post-industrial landscape of C-mine in Genk. The location of C-mine on the ground of the former Winterslag coal mine provides for unexpected encounters. Since the heavy extraction industry has left, it’s infrastructures were transformed into a heritage site and taken over by more benevolent, cultural industries. At the same time, large parts of the landscape were reclaimend by nature and have since been indwelled by pioneering vegetation and unique insects. Here is where a sheperd and his stock, truck drivers, mediteranean plant species, local inhabitants, deer, artists,... cross paths. In this context Ciel Grommen and Maximiliaan Royakkers propose both a figurative valueframework and a physical platform for dialogue and opportunties for making new alliances between unlikely neighbours. Coinciding with artcenter JESTER’s move to the C-mine site in Genk (BE), the project challenges the redelopment plans of the site.

The idea of developig space for living together is reflected in the title of the project. Le Paysage Ménagé is a wordplay on the constructed landscape (Un paysage aménagé) and inspired by the challenge formulated by French literary historian Marielle Macé: “To invent new ways of living on this damaged world: neither to save (to safeguard, conserve, repair, return to old states) nor to survive, but to live, that is to say again, by cooperating with all kinds of living beings,...to imagine practices and house them in the interstices of capitalism”. Each household owes its character to the construction of the house but perhaps even more to its furnishing. The interventions proposed have been imagined as gestures to “furnish” the landscape, to provide for the provisional and flexible, to take a stance without planting a flag or claiming the territory.