Is the city still a dream? - PBF03 / Paul D’Haese
16 November to 20 December 2018
As an architect by training, Paul D’Haese draws on Belgium’s architectural absurdity in the pursuit of his project Belgopolis: building an imaginary city.
Paul D’Haese’s photos seem to have stepped straight out of a hyper-realist dream from which you won’t wake up. Paul D’Haese explores the limits of the frame, casting a critical eye and making us feel like a character in a surrealist painting. He seems to lose himself in dead-end alleys and to come up against blind walls. The result is a fictitious city called Belgopolis. This working title is a reference to a defined territory, Belgium, which over time, is likely to extend to other countries. Every photograph in the series is taken in one of the 133 towns in Belgium without any airbrushing. He is already up to 45 towns, and his project is continuing! With its close links to the world of dreams, Belgopolis chimes perfectly with the theme of the festival, describing as it does the building of an imaginary city, where the raw images from a dream-like whole.
