Memory of a Brick Clamp

Film by Jonathan De Maeyer, script by Ciel Grommen and Maximiliaan Royakkers, 16 min
Free access in this link, request the password with a simple e-mail to cielgrommen@hotmail.com

The protagonist of this film is a brick clamp in which manually manufactured bricks, made from local contaminated soil, are baked. We see how the stack is meticulously built up. How the heap is ignited,  then smolderingly bakes off the stones, only to be broken down again. Various people and practices gather around the stone protagonist. Subtitles reflect on its environment, its content, its origins and peers, and finally its meaning.

The film was created in the context of “Le Paysage Ménagé”, a project that offers an alternative discourse for the development of C-mine, a former coal mine site in Genk that is characterized by a special landscape quality, a polluted subsoil and a recovering ecosystem, hosting a fascinating variety of spatial practices by a large group of invisible actors (migrants, adventurers, place seekers, plants, animals, …). The project challenges to replace the logic of development, extraction and management of a landscape with an approach based on habitation, regeneration and establishing relationships.

I am born and I die through many bodies a dance of stacking and unstacking waves of assembly and disassembly I am a collective entity a gatherer of words and gestures a silent smoking protagonist around which we come together intimately.

Screenshots and exhibition view “Au Charbon”
group exhibition from 25.09.2022 until 08.01.2023 in CID Grand-Hornu, Mons (BE)