"Now, Lord, hear the quivering whispers which rise from this little cell in my basilica, and counsel me. My servants, from the countries of Flanders and Germany even to the towns of Marseilles and Genoa, have brought me strange news. Women naked and speechless have been seen running through the cities. These shameless mutes were pointing to the sky. More than one madman has preached ruin in the public squares. The hermits and the wandering clerks are full of rumours. And I know not by what spell more than seven thousand children have been drawn from their homes. Seven thousand are on the roads with cross and staff. They have nothing eat ; they have no arms ; they are helpless and a shame to us. They are ignorant of all true religion. My servants questioned them. They answered that they were going to Jerusalem to conquer the Holy Land. My servants told them that they could not cross the sea. They answered that the sea would part and dry up to let them pass. Good parents, godly ones and wise, try to keep them back. They break their bolts by night and climb the walls. Many are sons of nobles and of courtizanes. It is very pitiful. Lord, all these innocents will be given over to shipwreck […]."
– Marcel Schwob, The Children’s Crusade (trans. Henry Copley Greene), 1905.
Benjamin Installé (b. 1990), artist-in-residence at WIELS in 2015, lives and works in Brussels. For his presentation in the Project Room, he will present a new series of paintings and installations combining a basic pictorial vocabulary with more conceptual and narrative image-making procedures. He is interested in, among other things, the hierarchical and expressive functions performed by motifs in the painted image, the perceptive mechanisms for identification, the essential differences between the sciences of geography and topography, or the metaphysical meanings of notches, spots and signs.
WIELS Project Room
14.05 – 22.05.2016
Tuesday – Sunday, 14:00 – 18:00
Opening: 13.05.2016, 18:00 – 21:00
