Hugo Roelandt

In collaboration with Greet Verlinden, Marc Holthof & Johan Bafcop

Pavimenti was a monumental intervention that transformed the perception of public space. Behind the current M HKA building, where private homes once stood, Hugo Roelandt extended paving slabs vertically up a house façade. During the inauguration of the work in 1987, Roelandt suspended himself horizontally on pulleys in front of the newly-paved facade. The eventual demolition of the row of buildings in 1990 meant that the work had to be removed. Although the performance at the opening was not filmed, the dismantling of Pavimenti was captured on video. Roelandt himself saw Pavimenti as a sculptural, architectural intervention that achieved a movement from horizontal to vertical.

A monument is made in the city with (objects that are typical for) the city. Building materials characteristic for an urban environment are used with a different, artistic function. Material: concrete paving stones, 30 × 30 × 5 cm. The project consists of the extension of a 2-dimensional row of paving stones (the footpath) into the 3th dimension: the row of stones is extended upwards the front of a house. The city in this way naturally flows over in its own monument. A movement, a displacement takes place that is constitutive for the monumental character of the work: material that is usually only used as a two dimensional flat plane, is used here three-dimensionally: as a stack, as a wall. The project is part of a series of architecturally oriented monumental ‘displacements’. Other works in the series were the use of a shipyard as a stage in the Boel-project (1985), a pyramid formed of everyday objects like tables (Keizershallenproject 1986), or plastic bags filled with water (Aalst, Fondacio Miro – Barcelona 1986), and an obelisk built out of new composite materials (Hard op de Tong, Beursschouwburg 1987).

(Abstracts from Hugo Roelandt: Let's Expand The Sky, red. Mark Holthof, Occasional Papers, London, 2016)