A few years ago, during one of the frequent stops on the Ourthe railway line, I looked out of the train window and saw a building that had fallen there, a housing estate that just the day before shouldn’t have been there. In its fall, it had created a shock wave so powerful that all vegetation had been obliterated over a radius of several hundred meters. He, weighing in at the center, bare bricks, no windows or doors, blind, raw and ugly. In my headphones, the waves of a repetitive, haunting cello glissando became more and more present, the introduction to Nick Cave’s “Hallelujah”. I seemed to visualize these waves washing up on the building’s facade, but the more the instrument insisted, the more I had the sensation that they were eroding it, hollowing it out, making it bend if they persisted indefinitely. The sensation was so strong that I seemed to see the construction slipping, receding in all its mass, bending. When the train started up again, a feeling of happiness and strength remained!

Through my work, I’m interested in the representation of low, muted forces that are by nature not very tangible, or even invisible (atmospheric pressure, terrestrial attraction, atomic mass, being-there, unbearable lightness of being, infra-thinness, etc.). I call the objects and drawings I create in this field “tests_terrestres”. Following this research and the experiment described above, I created and presented a sculpture/installation entitled Wall VS…. This is a brick wall mounted on castors, which I move around and install in various contexts, inviting the public to confront and measure themselves (mentally, imaginatively, peacefully, musically, orally, etc.).

” Exploring the field of participation. (…) Sound – what is said, heard or listened to – is one of the cornerstones of his artistic practice. Antoine Van Impe questions the resonances and dissonances of perception, communication and expression. I remember his “Wall”, singularly displaced in the middle of a meadow, a brick wall but on wheels, a solitary chair placed opposite him, at a good distance. Antoine Van Impe invites musicians to perform in front of these bricks, telling them that the sounds they produce may well be the wall’s undoing. “

Aux Arts Etc. Jean-Michel Botquin, Éditions Yellow Now / Côté Arts, 2011.