- Veerle Melis
- This is so
- Brussels, Belgium
- 15th March 2025, 12.00 CET
This is so is an installation by Veerle Melis situated in the back of a removals van between 12.00 and 16.00 CET on the 16th March 2025 at Rue Gabrielle Petit 6 1080, Molenbeek-Saint-Jean.
This is so much bigger than it looks from the outside. The back of a removals van is usually packed with all my possessions, ferrying back and forth between flats that I will only live in for a year. Somehow I’m always moving during the hottest week of the summer, tired and sweating while the rest of the city sits outside somewhere in the sun. Every year I surprise myself with how much stuff I have and wonder if getting rid of it all would actually be better, like people say. Whenever I try I can only throw away one or two things. So much of it feels necessary. And where would I find comfort, if not in the world I have built around myself?
But back here with the door closed and empty like This is so wrong. There is a place I remember from long ago but I can’t quite bring to my mind, a room in a house that I wasn’t supposed to go in to. Left behind from a time I didn’t know, stacks of papers stood quietly in empty corners and lamps collected dust and it felt too big for the objects it contained. Did I see something move out of the corner of my eye? No, never mind. I think of it now compared to places that overflowed, like the back of a wardrobe in my parents’ bedroom, where there were tangles of wires, hairdryers, a vacuum cleaner, where an automatic light used to switch on but now it doesn’t work, where I found a present that would be given to me by Father Christmas so I knew he wasn’t real.
This is so nearly somewhere that I could sit, but I’m worried that I would break it, like those wicker chairs that would stab you in the thighs with their snapped-apart straw seats, leaving splinters behind in your tights. Picking them out for the rest of the day. Or even worse, the day it would finally collapse leaving you in a pile on the floor. This, I fear, would crumple even sooner, disappearing beneath me like that video of the raccoon dropping cotton candy into a puddle and it dissolves. Has anyone else seen that? It just melts completely into the water.
But this is not as fragile as that. It also whispers somehow that it would absorb me instead, swelling outwards like a jellyfish or a plastic bag caught in the wind. Or more like a hot-air balloon that hasn’t taken off yet, burning from the inside, puffing up like a pie in the oven. Remember the other day when you bought the wrong type of pastry by mistake and our pizzas started filling with huge bubbles of air as they cooked? A transformation was occurring behind the oven glass, where we couldn’t quite see it from the kitchen table. Imagine what could happen when I slide the door here closed. Time to go. I’ll wait and see.
Veerle Melis (b. 1990, Tilburg, Netherlands) is a self-taught artist based in Brussels. Drawing from this autodidactic background, her work can be seen as an ongoing meditation on what it means to create. Melis’ approach is process led, performing countless repetitive gestures through which she learns from her materials. This material engagement facilitates a reconsidering and a rearranging of the substances that shape daily life. Themes such as architecture, domesticity, decoration and handicraft emerge as the building blocks for imagining different realities and exploring the entanglement of matter and meaning. Alongside her individual practice Melis is part of Syzygy collective.
@veerlemelis