Assembly - Bert Villa

--- Order 'Assembly' here ---
 

This summer, architect and visual artist Bert Villa cycled through the outskirts of Ghent for Veldwerk. During his Memory Landscape project, he intuitively and associatively compiled an inventory of the environmental elements that intrigued him, in order to question the origin of his own frame of reference. This collection of photographs can now be found in the book Assembly, published by MER Books - Borgerhoff & Lamberigts. 

What is our perceived environment and how do we connect one environment to another? For Bert Villa, every landscape is an assemblage. In our view, the different characteristics we see and have seen before are intuitively connected through memory and association. Built structures, in turn, remind us of other histories connected by similar looks and functions, thus connecting landscapes with each other. Fences, cooling towers, antennas or drainpipes are part of both their immediate surroundings and mental maps of collected environments.

In Assembly, Bert Villa explores this process by creating a collection of photographs that depict different environments and describe their material constitution in detail. The publication playfully includes shots of some of Bert Villa's existing works and images taken during his travels in the peripheries of suburbia, industry and cityscapes. Following a personal logic that allows one element or spatial arrangement to be associated with another, the book jumps from one observed environment to another. In this way, Assembly takes its reader on an associative journey through constructed landscapes, navigating the boundaries between artistic, functional and spontaneous constructions and everything in between.

The photographed elements in Assembly could be described using Gilbert Simondon's term 'key points'. These are objects that are both aesthetic and technical. Their relationship to a larger background makes them recognisable and prominent, creating and structuring a topography. Bert is specifically interested in how these key points relate to memory and association, and considers them to be forms of (personal) lieux de mémoire.

Publisher: MER Books - Borgerhoff & Lamberigts
Design: Lore Snauwaert
Cost: £28 (excluding shipping costs) Want to get

your hands on 'Assembly'? Order it here by email.

With the support of Cera, the Flemish government, and the Dutch Embassy in Belgium.