Haren is a Brussels commune where deserted industries have supplanted the farmlands. Here, plenty of rail hubs bind and unbind while planes don’t take off anymore from its missing airport, but from nearby Zaventem.
Despite it being unattractive though desirable, I felt immediately at ease over there, at the frontier of abandonment & forgetting ; I could listen to & gaze at desolate spots with a constantly renewed amazement of still being in Brussels.
The Wanson factories where I have recorded in 2011 have since been destroyed, they’ll make room shortly for a mega-prison. The Hamesse garden city left in a state of ruin will be renovated.
The recordings are always an archive of a disappeared now ; in Haren more than anywhere else, I’m aware of the ephemeral, the impermanence. I wanted to record a lot to keep all those sound environments, all those places in memory ; then I recomposed them to make them mine for a moment, before handing them over to for listening.