On the strength of his Lost Tablets art project l’Escaut, a creative cooperative in Brussels, invited Jan van Schaik to install a work in their project space.

There in 2023 he explored what the next stage of that project would be, and began looking for ways to extend the idea of Lost Tablets – where he had treated second-hand Lego bricks as if ‘found objects’ and reconfigured them into small artworks about the semiotics of architecture.

Looking for something beyond the obvious idea of scaling the works, he came to realise that the ‘found object’ he was most interested in reconfiguring was the l’Escaut project space itself. This began with an affectionate reconfiguring of the circa 1913 architecture of the building.

He made ‘object-mirrors’ by measuring and recreating a number of existing elements of the ‘found architecture’ which transformed the rough but renovated warehouse space into an exhibit in its own right. On reflecting on what he’d made, van Schaik was:

“... as enamored with my own architectural reconfiguring of the space as I was suspicious of it. The architectural language that I was ‘playing’ with did not seem to adequately capture or reconfigure the powerful ideas and emotions that being in space and amongst its people had generated. I realised that I was in love with l’Escaut. But expressing this through the tools of architecture alone was showing my emotions to be merely an infatuation.

Who would come to see my beautiful objects? It was suddenly and painfully clear: only me. The strong social contracts, the living sense of memorial, the careful optimism of the place, and all the layers of meaning in it that are accessible to those with a workable knowledge of French and Flemish were absent. I realised that what I had created was a beautiful stage set.