The Work of the Forest

"It cannot go unremarked that all of the countries that possess an Art Nouveau tradition were involved in the colonisation of Africa." Judith Barry in Art & Text, 1992.

In 1897 Victor Horta finishes the Hotel van Eetvelde, a stately townhouse in the Art Nouveau style, designed specifically for Edmond Van Eetvelde, who at the time was the Belgian "Minister" of the Congo under colonial rule. In that same year, architects working in the Art Nouveau showcased their Congo Pavilion at the World’s fair in Brussels. To this day, Art Nouveau remains Belgium’s most celebrated art movement and figures prominently in Brussels’ cultural history. The fact that the style is inextricably tied to Belgium’s colonial past is rarely mentioned.

For The Work of the Forest, Judith Barry arranges three big screens in a circle, which present different histories about the Belgian Congo and the development of the Art Nouveau style. Formally, the panorama invokes the design of Horta’s associate, Paul Hanker, for the central atrium of the van Eetvelde Hotel. The video juxtaposes artifacts collected during the colonisation of Africa with historical and contemporary images that refer to the Art Nouveau period. These stories focus on missionaries and traders in the Stanley Archives and derelict Art Nouveau houses haunted by ghosts from the colonial past, alongside the lush tropical gardens in Laeken Park and the technological advances that Belgian colonial wealth helped produce. With this work, Barry exposes and interrogates the colonial implications of our architectural environment.