Interlaced Grounds
Interlaced Grounds marks the fourth exhibition project by art collective House of Bones, unfolding within Convent 15, in the historic Groot Begijnhof of Sint-Amandsberg. There are places where time does not move in a straight line.
It settles.
It gathers in walls, in thresholds, in gardens, in worn surfaces and in the spaces between one body and another. One layer does not disappear when another arrives. It remains underneath, sometimes visible, sometimes buried, continuing to shape what comes after. The begijnhof is such a place. Once a world organised around women’s lives, work, knowledge and forms of collective existence, it carries the trace of a community that created its own structures within the structures of the city. A society within a society. A space where women could gather, work, care, learn and live alongside one another, while maintaining a degree of independence from the social forms expected of them.
Centuries later, another community enters these grounds. Eighteen artistic practices arrive with their own histories, materials, memories, languages and ways of seeing. They do not replace what was here before. They add another layer. Nietzsche’s idea of the untimely becomes a way of looking at this encounter: the past is not necessarily behind us. It can return to the present, disturb it, speak through it, become something else. Time folds rather than simply passes. What belonged to another moment can suddenly become contemporary again.
The begijnhof is therefore not only a historical setting.
It is a memory beneath the exhibition. A previous community becomes an invisible architecture for a new one.
The reclaiming of space, of women’s bodies, labour and knowledge becomes another thread running through the grounds. Women shaped by existing structures began to create spaces of their own — spaces for living, working, learning and caring together. Within these spaces, other forms of relation became possible. Knowledge could move from body to body, from hand to hand. Labour could become collective. Care could become a structure of its own.
These histories remain beneath the surface. Like roots. Like traces that continue to grow long after the hands that planted them have disappeared.
In the book by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodrígue Let’s Become Fungal, the mycelial network offers another image for this kind of existence: a world sustained through exchange, interdependence and invisible connections. Nothing exists entirely on its own. The visible emerges from what is hidden; one body becomes connected to another through networks that extend beyond what can be seen.
The exhibition enters this network.
Its artists remain distinct, carrying their own histories, materials and ways of seeing, while becoming part of something larger through proximity and exchange. Their practices touch and start merging but they create connections without requiring sameness.
What lies beneath one work may surface in another.
What belongs to another time may become present again.
What appears separate may already be connected.
The grounds hold these layers together.
Many of the artists gathered here have moved between places, languages and cultures. Their practices carry these movements within them. Ghent becomes another layer — a place where different histories arrive, meet and become entangled.
The begijnhof once formed a city within the city. Now, within its grounds, another temporary community takes shape. Not a reconstruction of what came before, but an encounter with its echo.
The past does not sit behind the present like a finished image.
It folds into it.
It resurfaces through gestures, materials, bodies and relationships.
The artists enter this accumulated time with their own fragments, adding to a landscape that was already in motion long before they arrived.
House of Bones has always been concerned with structures — with what remains, what supports, what holds bodies and histories together. Interlaced Grounds moves through those structures and toward the spaces between them: the relationships, encounters, tensions and exchanges that allow something collective to emerge.
The exhibition becomes another layer in the life of the begijnhof.
A temporary ecology of bodies, materials, histories and forms of knowledge. A place where difference does not need to disappear in order for connection to occur.
Where knowledge can travel.
Where histories can touch.
Where the invisible can become briefly visible.
The grounds remain.
The threads continue.
And somewhere between past and present, between one body and another, between one history and the next, they become interlaced.
