Underneath it Flickers
Lau Persijn

Lau Persijn’s Underneath It Flickers begins with a simple, urgent question: how do we listen to a space considered empty? Set in La Friche Josaphat – a verdant fallow land in Brussels threatened by real estate development – the film answers by showing that the site is anything but vacant. By attending to “the jay, the train, the moss and the soil’s tremors,” Persijn re-reads this urban refuge as a living body worthy of protection. The work becomes a filmed argument for the value of what planners might disregard.

Digging, listening, developing. By burying strips of 16mm film, deploying geophones and sensitive microphones, the artist surfaces barely perceptible micro-movements. These materials arrive as traces rather than statements, and the film stages them as a kind of collaboration with place. Subtly, the film converses with Sparre’s Golden Monolith & Black Monolith – both projects insist that attentive listening is how we register what a landscape holds and how we might begin to defend it.