The weight of memory
For the Onuments series with Bas Smets, reclaimed gravestones from a cemetery in Leuven were crushed and reintroduced as aggregate — embedding memory directly into the material itself.
When the city of Leuven decommissioned a series of gravestones, we were asked whether the stone could find a second life within a new memorial landscape. The question was as emotional as it was technical: how do you work with a material that already carries the weight of human memory?
After careful sorting and crushing, the stone returned as aggregate in the concrete cast for the Onument. Each curved seating element holds within it fragments of a previous life — invisible at first glance, yet quietly present beneath the surface.
That same sensitivity continued in a second collaboration with Bas Smets: the memorial for the Brabant killings. The project began not with a single casting, but with a long sequence of studies — eight concrete panels, eight aggregates, one continuous transition of colour moving from warm yellow to deep red.
The brief was deceptively simple. The octagonal memorial space had to feel seamless, as though the colour shifted naturally from one wall to the next — neither abrupt nor uniform. We developed eight separate concrete recipes, each with its own balance of pigments and aggregates. For weeks the workshop filled with test pours and polished samples, studied in daylight, in shadow, in rain.
The final installation reads almost as one continuous breath of colour. Up close, each panel reveals its own texture and mineral composition — a quiet record of the craft behind the work.
Together, these projects shaped how we now approach circular sourcing: not simply as reuse, but as a way to root every project in the place, history and people it belongs to.
The material itself becomes a carrier of memory — not as image, but as substance.
