For a couple of years Maurice Bogaert has been developing a series of works that engage, each in different ways, with what can be called filmic architecture. In these works, he explores the relationships between scale models, sets, architecture, and the moving image. The explorations revolve around the question: would it be possible to do a remake of a film, let’s say Ridley Scotts Alien, with a set that would allow one to do so in one single shot? How to translate the combination of spaces, montage and shifts in size and angle as we see them in the film into the actual spatiality of a set that would allow one to shoot the film in a single continuity without the cut and paste of montage? This brought forward an idea of the Morphed Set as both a potential plan for a work and an intellectual exercise or figure of thought. Sometimes his works are extremely large “walkthrough installations” – at other times, they are infinite small scale models and prototypes.

 

 

During his stay at IFP Maurice aims to work on the follow up of Het Wezen van de Stad (Eng: The Soul of a City), a work that takes the city as protagonist as its starting point, in this case Beijing. In the visible (and invisible) history that lays behind the architecture and urban planning form the basis of a story in which the city and its architecture are the protagonists. What if these buildings also get a (literal) voice ,what if a personification of the buildings takes place? What stories they tell? And maybe more importantly: how do they tell them?

 

Het Wezen van de Stad  is an investigation into the narrative element in the work, a study of how to translate a narrative structure to a physical experience for the viewer. Het Wezen van de Stad is a work about the cinematic qualities of the city. A breathing and constantly changing city. A city in a perpetual transition, an ever repeating (movie) sequence of demolition, construction, tearing down and rebuilding