solitesse invites to reflect on the intrinsic stigma of everyday life and our relationship with perception. The works of Fabiola Burgos Labra, Massao Mascaro, Wim De Pauw and Reinier Vrancken stand out as testimonies of fleeting moments, like traces collected in the shadow of visible silhouettes. These silhouettes are those of well-known or anonymous monuments, from the Latin monumentum, derived from the verb moneo “to remember”.
Gathered for the inauguration of the new SB34 concorde space, the artworks of different techniques and forms raise the question of what distinguishes the work of art from the product, and of its unique persistence. Halfway between past and future, the duality of these projections’s testimonies questions the legitimacy of a congress of our soliloquious monuments.
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Massao Mascaro, Untitled (Ghosts), 2019–2025
Two silver gelatin prints on baryta paper, 24 x 30 cm each
This diptych is part of a series of around fifty photographs taken in Brussels between 2019 and 2025, all focusing on a single subject: mattresses abandoned in public space. Often stripped of their covers, exposed and frame-less, these objects lie unnoticed. Massao Mascaro stops to photograph them as he roams the city streets. He inventories them, building a kind of catalogue — an anonymous directory of discarded mattresses. There are no markers of place, yet their casual presence contrasts with the urban setting. Their patterns echo those of paving stones and cobblestones. Seemingly silent, these forsaken objects speak volumes. Their surfaces bear traces of bodies; their reliefs are imprinted with the shape of human presence. At times, the way they lie suggests postures — moods, states of mind, fragments of interior life. Both numerous and unique, Brussels’ mattresses carry a palpable duality, tightly bound to the city’s context. Invisible yet cumbersome, they display our most intimate marks in broad daylight, exposing our vulnerabilities and slouched positions. Too worn to be wanted, too free to be valued, they remain nonetheless relics of our lives — witnesses to our nights. Their sculptural silhouettes inhabit the street. Through this never-before-exhibited series, which reads like a visual manifesto, the artist confronts our gaze with what we choose not to see — with what is simply there.
Born in 1990 in Lille, France, Massao Mascaro’s work revolves around territories he enjoys drifting through. His practice strikes a subtle balance between autobiography, topography, and politics. Blending documentary with poetry, he composes lyrical, literary journeys through cities along the Mediterranean Sea — from his ancestors’ Calabria to the mythical space of the garden, via the streets and parks of Madrid. His work is deeply political, grounded in the need to explore the relationships between people and the cultural and geographic spaces they inhabit.
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Fabiola Burgos Labra, Structure that Builds Space, Also Confines It IV, 2025
Gift ribbon on metal mesh, 200 × 13 × 13 cm
Structure that Builds Space, Also Confines It IV is a work created especially for this exhibition. Part of the Torres series — interventions designed for public space — it consists of a vertical metal mesh structure woven with gift ribbon. Weaving, a recurring element in Fabiola Burgos Labra’s artistic vocabulary, is deeply rooted in her cultural environment. This traditional technique, practiced by the Indigenous peoples of Latin America and long associated with domestic craft, carries a strong gesture of resistance. The act of weaving becomes a form of armor — a modular system of construction comparable to language or architecture. Standing two meters tall, reaching skyward, this articulate sculpture reflects on the relationship between past and future exchanges, sketching their outline in space. The gift ribbon, sourced by the artist in Chile (where it is produced), connects the tower to a wider network of global exchange. Though visible and seemingly solid, it is made of inexpensive material manufactured in China — a “poor” material, yet one tied to the popular rituals of gift-giving and celebration. This structure evokes an intimate, human-scale gesture of generosity, while simultaneously inscribing the verticality of the human form into vast spatial dimensions, subtly altering the landscape.
Fabiola Burgos Labra, 167 Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, 2022
Bronze, 46.5 × 1 cm
167 Greenpoint Avenue, Apt. 4R, Brooklyn, NY is a site-specific work that speaks both of a place and a journey — a way of connecting with personal history and an intimate landscape. The title refers to the exact address where Fabiola Burgos Labra’s husband lived before they met. When she visited the house, she gathered branches from a walnut tree in the garden and brought them back to Brussels. There, she cut the branches into segments and reassembled them into a single, carefully straightened branch. This reconstructed form was then cast in bronze — a unique and final version. While the casting process caused the original material to vanish, it also united two entities in permanence. The piece thus becomes a metaphor for a relational history: something lost, something merged, something made lasting. To activate the work and extend its story, Fabiola carried it to the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. By the end of the day, her hand bore greenish stains from bronze oxidation. These traces are integral to the piece: touching it is part of its protocol. If the bronze is left untouched, it darkens and dulls. In this sense, the piece demands interaction — it invites visitors to hold it, to connect physically. Without that contact, it risks falling silent, disappearing once more.
Born in 1984 in Rancagua, Chile, Fabiola Burgos Labra gathers popular expressions, often tied to her personal history. Her practice is driven by intuition and context, focusing on processes, material culture, and the narrative threads they carry. She works closely with the materials around her, allowing them to speak through use, reuse, and the stories they tell — guided by the logics of circulation. Reclaiming Latin American craft traditions, she gives value to their origins, whether public or domestic, luxurious or precarious.
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Wim De Pauw, A King Listens, 2025
Video installation, 4’14”
A King Listens is a video installation that brings together two live versions of Elvis Presley’s Are You Lonesome Tonight? Stripped of its instrumental backing, the piece features a blurred video image captured from WIELS, Brussels, framing the Palais de Justice and The Hotel under constant rain and a mist-laden sky. Through editing, a dialogue emerges between the two buildings — voiced by Elvis alone. The work draws inspiration from Italo Calvino’s short story A King Listens (Un Re in Ascolto), in which a paranoid monarch hears the distant echoes of rebellion reverberating endlessly through the walls of his palace, transformed into a vast auditory organ. In imposing repetition upon his subjects, the king reassures himself — his power lies in the predictability of sound. As long as what he hears remains familiar, his rule is safe. But then a new sound reaches him: the voice of a young woman. Its silvery tone stirs something within him, unsettling his composure. He seeks to reach her, to possess her voice, to hold the sound as one might hold a body. But he cannot — and he drowns, ultimately, in a world shaped only by his own perception.
Born in 1989 in Ghent, Belgium, Wim De Pauw explores language as an unstable material — a space of hesitation and ambiguity. His practice centers on what escapes definition, what lingers in silences, in gaps, in dissonances. Shifting according to context, his work unfolds through displacement, affinities, and collaborative or hybrid artistic identities. In 2020, he founded the fictional institution The Letter Space Department (TLSD) to foster collective practices. Architecture and language are foundational to his approach, guiding the development of sound installations, video, text, and visual works. Through curated constellations of words and images, De Pauw creates slippages in meaning — absences, oxymorons, and rupture points. These moments of uncertainty, where the visible and the sayable no longer fully align, hold a particular potential for the artist: the persistence of what resists articulation.
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Reinier Vrancken, swallowswallow 2025,
Jeweller’s ring sizers, brass, variable dimensions swallowswallow is a work in progress — a portrait shaped through and by time. A set of jeweller’s ring sizers, once used to measure countless fingers, is carefully arranged in ascending order, from the smallest to the largest. Their original function — to take the measure of the body at a given moment — now transforms them into markers of life’s cycles. This utilitarian role grants them a memorial quality, as silent witnesses to many forms of intimacy. Each repetition of the same gesture by countless strangers echoes through them. Yet precision also introduces a split: the ring sizers are divided into two sets. One represents the present body, separating what has been from what will be — the rise from the fall, the past from the future. The title swallowswallow itself mirrors this motion, repeating to suggest the self of today swallowing the self of yesterday. “Every Friday buries a Thursday,” wrote James Joyce. But the doubled s also opens a space of ambiguity: it shifts its position, giving rise to multiple readings — swallow swallow, swallows wallow. The piece questions the trajectory and destination of words, the weight and meaning of their order. Are some words younger than others? Do the earlier ones in a sentence age first?
Born in 1992 in Weert, the Netherlands, Reinier Vrancken moves between material and immaterial realms through poetic leaps and associative connections. His installations, interventions, objects, and books explore the fluid contours of physical and conceptual bodies — their dispersion and multiplicity form the heart of his practice. Each work becomes an access point through which the artist articulates the shifting relationships that lie beneath.
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