Laure Prouvost installation presented at Brussels-South throughout Europalia festival

8 December 2021

The 2021 edition of the EUROPALIA festival, titled TRAINS & TRACKS, presents more than 70 different projects spread across artistic institutions as well as in stations and on trains in Belgium and in neighbouring countries. The multidisciplinary programme revolves around three themes, starting with the impact of the invention of the train on society that to this day is increasing. Originally a symbol for acceleration, the train is now becoming a symbol of slowing down. In addition, themes of time and motion, meetings and farewells, provide starting points for the projects commissioned.

Laure Prouvost's In your own time, tingalong, tingalong, Who’s been here since I’ve been gone? is a sculptural body situated behind Brussels-South station, forming part of the festival's Endless Express exhibition. This copper weathervane turns with the wind atop a monumental tower, overseeing an illuminated sign suggesting that you, too, can let yourself be carried away by the elements and be more in tune with the directions they are guiding you towards.

Railway stations have directly altered passengers' experience of time by introducing synchronised clocks, which overrode different local times. Considering the parallel histories of the Industrial Revolution and women’s emancipation movements in the nineteenth century, Prouvost wonders how one can substitute forces that regulate the way we move in the world with softer, more intimate and unpredictable currents. Floating among the clouds, her visionary oracle is a harbinger of a world that privileges multiple viewpoints.

Read more about Prouvost's project here.