Maxime Vancoillie

For the project Topography of the Night, spatial designer Maxime Vancoillie sought out residents of specific landscapes and their night-time dreams. Maxime collected, described and modelled a series of descriptions of night-time dream locations, thereby unravelling the architecture in night-time dreams. Through these dreams, she sought to discover a universal 'inner' architecture or spatial cultural differences.

The first landscape Maxime studied was that of the misty city, the area between the city and the countryside, of which the ribbon development of the regional road between Ostend and Brussels N9 is a cross-section. Do the dreams of the residents resonate with this specific environment? Or not? Interviews with the residents of this road inspired Maxime to build and photograph scale models. Topography of the Night-01-the nebulous city raises questions about our built environment and depicts a collective imaginary landscape.

Maxime presented a step in her research in the form of a Spatial Dreaming Matrix and exhibited it at Netwerk Aalst. In this discussion format, participants were invited to explore their own dream architecture and connect it to the scale models of the dreamers along the N9.