Spine (Double Act)

In 1981 a man with the name Ton Breuls made it his quest to chart the subterranean site Caestert, until then a blind spot in the minds of many. With a sole starting point: a polygonal delineation, he created his own system of grids to trace and divide the space into pentagons and hexagons, and subsequently – as put in his own words – knit more polygons from there. From a period of three years of navigating between a pitch-dark space and an attic we find an archive with a mise en abyme of drawn contours. In the residues of an almost blind process we find how the black space acted as an ‘abstract machine’ generating manifest patterns of thought. It is here that was found shared ground with the work of Ton Breuls, which has led to the drawing ‘Spine (Double Act)’, a hand drawn copy of his final chart. From a ‘double act’ of retracing the folds a pattern takes shape, expanding into a wider structure. This structure renders visible an essential part of the work ‘En échelon’ as a ‘multiple’: where the video tracks one line through the space, the chart reveals a countless number of lines enclosed in the space; a countless number of readings, and narrations.