Jacques Coelho - KUD4 Junction - mixed media installation
22.04. - 09.05.2010
Jacques Coelho - 01 - Equus 1 30x23 cm
KUD4 (Junction)
Kin Undisclosed Digital (Junction)
A temporal-spatial study
«Junction» is the name given to the railway line opened in Brussels in 1952. It joins the North and South stations. It is one of the most important traffic interchanges in Europe. For this reason it became a symbol of European unification and of cultural exchange.
However many have seen it as a symbol of the destruction of European historical values sacrificed to the glorification of modernism.
In 2001, I found out that my great grandfather was a professional musician who had become a Belgian citizen in 1887. He was from a family originally from Portugal which had settled in Amsterdam in the 17th Century. This temporal and spatial detail combined with my own move to Finland provided the impetus for this project, which in fact traverses Europe from North to South. A few inherited family papers and old photographs, among others ambrotypes (1843), made this complex exhibition possible.
I started this historical and detective research work with the purpose of identifying the people in these photographs, and of finding potential cousins in Holland and in France in this family intersection. «Junction» naturally became the working name of this exhibition as it symbolises too the family connection between Amsterdam and Paris.
The family tree took nine years to build, and the construction of the visual tree, the main work of this exhibition, took nine months and has about 200 photoshop layers in it.
As the project was progressing I noticed that these unknown people began to «live» their own stories. This made me wonder a great deal about the nature of life and the evolution of things, and to generate such wonderings in the observer is my aim here.
This exhibition has been supported by the Arts Council of Finland.
