station dyades - Francoise Schein`s Projects

STATION DYADES
AU PARVIS DE ST GILLES
Bruxelles
FRANCOISE SCHEIN
Le voyageur qui pénètre dans ma station de métro à
Bruxelles y lit d'emblée deux phrases d'Erasme
inscrites en blanc sur un fond de céramique bleu
cobalt :
“Hâte-toi lentement.”
“Si tu veux du miel, supportes les abeilles.”
Puis, tout en descendant petit à petit sous la terre, il
s'enfonce entre des strates composées de milliers de
lettres et d'une longue ligne abstraite blanche faite
d'une suite de segments répertoriés par des chiffres
à l'entrée de l'espace. La ligne tourne autour de lui et
l'enferme dans un panorama abstrait pour l'obliger à
comprendre ce territoire abstrait dans lequel il se
trouve momentanément pris, le temps de l'attente
d'un train: un continent au double visage de Janus
compris entre deux pierres angulaires l’une
cartographique et l‘autre légale : l'Europe de la
démocratie et des frontières.
Bruxelles, 1992
Parvis de St. Gilles Subway station
Title: "Dyads"
1992
200 m2
'Speed up slowly'
'If you want to have honey, bear bees'
When a traveller enters my metro station in Brussels, his eyes are immediatelly attracted
by these two sentences of Erasme:
The subway is the most democratic network. It is vital for the cities, it make them fluid
and organizes their movements. It creates possible encounters. It lives like the arteries
of an organ.
Then, as he goes deep under the earth, he walks in between the stratas made of
thousands of letters and of one long abstract white line running through the blue tiles.
The line wraps around him and encloses him into a panorama, obliging him to
understand the abstract territory in which he is momentarly taken, while waiting for his
train.
Then he realizes that- just like Janus and his doubled faces- the continent he lives in is
comprised in between two angular stones: democracy and borders.
F Schein
Dyads : In philosophy a dyad means the union of two principles which complete each other. In
geography, it means the border which divide or unify two countries.