Topographies en Wallonie

"The house walls lined with zinc sheets dotted the slightly hilly, meadow landscape of the ‘butter-countryside’ with its tiny towns and scattered farm buildings and houses. These features become particularly evident if one travels from Liège to Aachen on a sunny afternoon, when the metal-plated facades literally come to light. Approximately one fourth of the wall coverings have been preserved".- Irmel Kamp

Within the cycle of our “Mimetic Landscapes” from the 1970s, we repeatedly endeavoured to give visual form to elements of nature and landscapes marked by human intervention, with the rear view [of a human figure] as an ideogram. At that time, we were living in East Belgium (in Raeren, to be precise), where we were deeply impressed by the hedgerows that delineate and define this landscape. - Barbara & Michael Leisgen

Two bodies of photographic work are presented from the collection of the IKOB, and both of them can be labeled as “classic”: Buildings Planked with Zinc Plates in East Belgium (1978-82) by Irmel Kamp as much as the five black-and-white photographs titled Rhombus by Barbara and Michael Leisgen who both participated in the documenta 6 in 1977. Two different and in each case very concise ways of working with place or topos, which make visible an inhabited space within a clearly defined image space that tends towards the poetic.