I ♥ Rückbau with Footnote 1. CAT, Footnote 2. Rückbaukristall and Footnote 3. Concrete

"I have a deep fascination for the brute force of demolition works." Aglaia Konrad, 2020.

In 2015 Aglaia Konrad filmed the demolition of the iconic headquarters of the BNP Paribas Fortis bank, located on the Montagne du Parc in the heart of Brussels. In short order, wrecking machines tore down the 1970s modernist building by (interior) architects Hugo Van Kuyck, Jules Wabbes and Christophe Gevers.
 

I ♥ Rückbau [I love demolition] consists of a video and three framed images or "footnotes" that revolve around the demolition. A technical spec sheet of a CAT machine, a scan of a piece of debris and a black-and-white photograph of a concrete block provide footnotes, so to speak, to what is happening on the adjacent screen. In the video, we see a mechanical ballet of moving machinery and falling rubble.

The artwork refers to Aglaia Konrad's personal fascination with demolition works and to her own practice around architecture, urban spaces and infrastructure. It criticises the one-sided relationship between humans and their built environment, while reflecting on vanity and transience - how things can be reduced to dust in the blink of an eye.