Taking as their starting point images that depict the tangible reality of man-made wastelands, Wilmes & Mascaux probe the transience (or the pretension) of a civilization whose abuse of the natural world does not speak in its favor. As part of their project, they have “scanned” the memory of chaotic landscapes in Mexico, Europe, Quebec, the U.S.A. and Australia. In margin of the world, these landscapes form entities folded up on themselves, given up, forgotten, lost, far from all, in rupture with time. Life is motionless, time stopped or temporarily suspended.
On site, surrounding sound details, descriptive narrations, video and photographic surveys have been collected. These “samples” are connected in installations. The interaction of sound, visual and narrative images create a new imaginary site. The project has been presented since 1995 in museums, galleries, video festivals, art fairs, in Belgium, Luxemburg, France, Quebec, Australia and the USA.
Wilmes & Mascaux met in Mexico City where they were living in the 1980s. Back in Brussels, where they currently work, they began their collaboration as a visual artist duo in the mid 1990s.
