Longing for Wonder

Ive Stevenheydens

You dive into a place. Playfully, and with considerable enthusiasm, eager for the unknown. Before you dive in, however, you have already carried out quite a bit of research. So this ‘unknown’ is considerably less cryptic to you. Also, before you jump, you imagine what you will come across during your dive. And then: plop, plish, splash! Splatters and bubbles – in your head, especially. After diving into the (almost) unknown – because, again, you’ve carried out some detective work beforehand –, you gather a load of new knowledge. It makes your head spin, it fires you up even more. Later, that baggage crystallizes in your memory, like a trace of writing. You also managed to glean some material along the way. Things you expected beforehand but also things you didn’t imagine at all. Your dive makes you imagine new worlds and territories. And create things, material objects. A splash is something messy. It spatters. So after your dive, there is also such a thing as a remnant, a résidu in French. You don’t think of it as waste. Rather as sediment, something new that can spur you to analyse, imagine and explore other things. And hop, on to the next dive!

The Mental Masonry Lab (TMML) is a fixed/fluid group that, depending on the project, collaborates with individuals and groups from very different backgrounds – from archaeologists to architects, journalists to musicians, conceptual artists to storytellers. But they also collaborate with citizens, casual passers-by and visitors. Or with the perception of the recipient tout court. More on that later.

The fluid collective initiated by Mira Sanders and Cédric Noël always starts from a fascination for public space. Across a range of diverse projects, they question how we relate to public space, how we use streets, parks, squares and the like. The artistic sanctuary TMML also engages in criticism and analysis: how can we possibly create public space? TMML tries to create a public place within the public space, to accommodate an opening in the density of the everyday by using different means: artefacts, workshops and a radio broadcast, for instance. The group attempts to distance itself from the complex reality they, like all of us, live in. They set themselves up as observers, analysing the space that surrounds us, obliquely pointing out where things are going well – the glorious moments – but also where things are not.

Splash Résidu is the title of this publication issued to mark ten years of TMML’s thinking, exploring, working and more. Both terms are known and used in many languages and cultures. But they come from English (splash) and French (résidu), respectively. On the surface, they don’t have much in common. They might even seem to be opposite or polar concepts – usually with relatively positive (‘plunge’) and negative (‘surplus’) connotations. Or do they? For me, the juxtaposition Splash Résidu emanates a strong poetic force. Like all TMML’s work, this title makes a powerful appeal to the imagination. In the context of TMML, Splash Résidu immediately reminds me of the work and intellectual legacy of Guy de Cointet. During his short life, the Frenchman, who moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, managed to develop a singular visual idiom that has since become something of an art movement in itself. He too always played with language in his performances and in his works on paper – especially on the friction between French and English, his ‘new’ language, which he didn’t master very well. Above all, his works raised pertinent questions about how the object relates to its environment/context – the space, the public, society. This idea, which is indebted to Marcel Duchamp, also occupies a prominent place in TMML (in fact, TMML’s initiators Sanders and Noël also have different [linguistic] backgrounds)

So, with the publication of Splash Résidu, TMML is celebrating no less than ten years. Over this time span, TMML has refined an exploratory, investigative methodology that spotlights the nuances of residue aesthetics. Play and wonder are central to it, although a headstrong, almost ‘scientific’ approach is also at work. TMML applies certain ‘principles’. But these only serve as a guideline and may certainly be questioned – gladly so, in fact.

For instance, TMML starts in the first place from observation. To do so, they set off, explore the ‘field’. Like ‘flâneurs’, they go out into the streets, the city, where they collect objects they come across on their random walks. Any number of things can trigger TMML to pick up objects in the street. However, these often involve: traces of events (for example, remnants of fireworks, which Sanders and Noël found quite a few of in the streets of Berlin on 1 January 2014); things that can’t quite be brought home (and which alienate and thus trigger the imagination); or things that belong to the streetscape but are loose. The group has a lyrical name for all these objects, like a cobble, for example. They call them ‘urban treasures’. The things they collect must be portable: they have to fit in the backpack of whoever picks them up. For TMML, urban messages and codes (graffiti, posters, stickers, etc.) also make up a type of non-material object that can be/are noted and documented. After all, they might later incite (further) thinking and processing.

In a second phase, during workshops, TMML moves on to the collective analysis of their found materials – i.e. physical objects, but also notes, drawings, videos, sound recordings, photos, etc. Together, they search for new meanings, drawing inspiration from the thinking of, among others, Geir Kaufmann, who in 1979 published his doctoral thesis Visual Imagery and Its Relation to Problem Solving: A Theoretical and Experimental Inquiry. In it, the Norwegian cognitive psychologist developed unconventional – though by now rather outdated and often criticized – thought exercises concerning our perception of objects. Formulating a problem (visually), he would place various objects next to each other (e.g. a pair of scissors, a piece of thread, a table, a poster, etc.), which then had to be ‘mentally’ assembled into a new whole (say, in a small jar). Kaufmann proposed a kind of game to the recipient, a mental exercise that sought to incite new ways of thinking creatively. Although Kaufmann’s publication has been contested, TMML took from it its free approach in relation to objects and our possible interpretations of them. After all, TMML is an ode to the imagination!

In the third phase, which follows the analysis and discussion, the group ‘reactivates’ its selected materials across new constellations in which the idea of play is central. This is based on some simple principles (from physics) such as gravity, balance, stretching and mirroring and on methods such as constructing, assembling, stacking, folding and unfolding, deconstructing, etc.

The ideas developed by German art historian Aby Warburg in his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1921–27) are everywhere here. A century ago, Warburg appealed to both the collective and individual imagination with his Pathosformel (pathos formula). He encouraged viewers to seek out visual connections between prints and impressions that are independent of, say, the type, size, origin or period they come from. Warburg brought together various images from antiquity to the 1920s, his era.

A striking thing about TMML over ten years is that the group loves to ruminate. I deliberately use this rather pejorative-sounding term here. In this case, that ruminating involves a positive attitude with results that keep filtering out and transforming, that keep manifesting themselves in ever-changing forms. In any given project or idea, TMML observes, considers and contemplates. The group weighs up, deliberates, ponders, plays with an idea, thinks, reflects, thinks again, weighs and weighs again. And so, for instance, wonder evolves into reflection, then into exploration, experience, a trace – and perhaps also a ‘thing’. With TMML, however, a work is never completed; it remains in a state of flux. TMML thinks on the edge of the unthinkable. A project such as Game of Stones develops and evolves from a workshop from which a trail of notes, photos, drawings and other visual material emerges to a presentation (in various forms) and then again to a film and more. TMML also has an exceptional appetite for working with very different media, and for exploring the limits of a given tool – I’m thinking, for instance, of the famous TMMRadio experiment. TMML’s work is in the process of transformation. From their still young oeuvre, I can draw that it revolves more around the handling and questioning of a selfimposed methodology, around the conceiving and refuting of idiosyncratic procedures, around a work process that, although determined to some extent, is nevertheless always evolving.

For the viewer, spectator or recipient in general, TMML also supplies a set of mental exercises. Their goal is for viewers to master mental techniques so that they can view and imagine differently the subject shared by TMML. Their work encourages us, recipients, to come up with new alternative readings and commentaries and to seek connections between the elements put forward.

Let me conclude by talking about TMML’s appetite for collaboration. This may already be clear from the above, but I want to underline it. Because for just about every project, TMML seeks out (other) people. These are generally students, often ordinary citizens (TMML encourages them to get involved through open calls but there are also casual passers-by). There are frequently also ‘specialists’ from various fields who lend and articulate their cooperation and shared wonder. In all these kinds of collaborations, TMML always keeps the door wide open: the group longs for input, for other opinions, for different ways of seeing and imagining. After all, these different inputs can only serve to colour, adjust, criticize and – ultimately and above all – strengthen a proposed project. And hop, on to the next dive!

Ive Stevenheydens, November 2021 & February 2024
This text is a revised version of the press text previously written by the
author for the exhibition The Phenomenal Park, Botanique, Brussels
09 December 2021 – 06 February 2022.