Chantal: "I am Dutch, but I studied photography at the KASK in Ghent. I started working on installations and objects during the Master’s programme. And I am pursuing that path now."
Maud: "I am from France. I studied illustration and graphic design, and then enrolled in a new Master’s at the KASK. It was much broader than only drawing; we also experimented with sculpting techniques, working in a space, etc."
Chantal: "We met one another at the KASK, but our first real collaboration was a joint exhibition at M-idzomer 2019."
Maud: "They were pre-existing pieces, we didn’t make them together. But we did combine them to create a joint exhibition. And the M-residency followed from that."
Fictional language
Chantal: "Our research is very language-oriented – signs that carry meaning, you could say. And additionally, how that meaning can be transferred from one language to another. Maud’s work had focused on that for a while. Language can take on very diverse forms for us. The binary code that computers use, for example. For the exhibition at M-idzomer, I made prints of the patterns that woodworms make. They reminded me of punch cards or braille, which are also forms of language."
"I am currently working with the spruce bark beetle, which lives in the bark of trees. They make little passages that look a little bit like letters. I have three branches with tracks of the spruce bark beetle, and I have isolated eight different ‘letters’. I make impressions of them in silicone. These are the positives, and I use them to make moulds, the negatives. I sometimes do this several times, copy-paste, copy-paste… I use the copies to make collages, and I can then use the collages to make new moulds, and new copies. Almost like a copy machine."
Maud: "Language and text are my primary subjects – my way of thinking, even. I take words and I twist them, I invent wordplays… You can make small changes to create something completely new: I love that."
"When Chantal showed me the tracks of the spruce bark beetle, I immediately thought: what if we assumed that they are not random, but that they have meaning – a meaning that we cannot possibly translate? That was the germ of our project. I look for things like that in nature too. I work with dried melon peel, with seeds… If you are speculatively inclined, everything contains information. Everything has a story to tell."
"Chantal uses copy-paste to multiply and expand this language. You lose a little bit of meaning each time because the copy is never perfect. But you also acquire new information. In this project, I want to explore the opposite direction: concentrating language in the extreme, to the point that only information remains. Seed is a good example: it contains all the instructions needed to develop the entire plant."
