Metrostation Maalbeek

Maalbeek is a unique metro station in Brussels. It is where the artist Benoît van Innis, working with architects Paul Vermeulen and Henk De Smet, installed eight portraits. Eight faces of men and women drawn in sober, black lines on a grid of white enamel tiles. In recent days, photographs of these innocenti, these blameless faces, have been transmitted around the world via social media. People made them into stickers and wore them on their coats as a sign of consolation and support. In an instant, Maalbeek called to mind the Bijlmer in Amsterdam, where years ago a tree survived a plane crash in which dozens of people were dragged to their death. The local residents rooted their sorrow in a tree, which they promptly turned into a monument, baptising it with the telling name: ‘The tree that witnessed everything’. Maalbeek has – or should I say had – eight faces that witnessed everything. Benoît has already conveyed that he is ready, if necessary, to remake the faience drawings, ‘but then differently’.

That ‘differently’ brings to mind the Japanese concept of kintsugi, in which fragments of precious porcelain objects are ‘repaired’ with gold. The carefully executed restoration work, namely the sutured wound, literally makes the original piece more valuable than before. Kintsugi teaches us that awound does not necessarily have to be surgically erased. By incorporating it, kintsugi can raise a work of art to a higher level.

Benoît van Innis realises that the people will claim the Maalbeek metro station as a sort of memorial. No wonder. Because the actual site of a trauma, whether an attack or an accident, simply seems to be the most significant place for a memorial or monument.

The Atocha station in Madrid commemorates the 2004 terrorist attack with a hollow pillar covered with inscriptions by the victims’ relatives. In London, the memorial for the 2004 victims of the metro attacks lies within Hyde Park. Were the British afraid of a memento mori in the underground station, or did they pragmatically opt for a ‘life goes on’ and ‘business as usual’ approach?
The Austrian architect Adolf Loos let it be understood as early as 1908 that, in architecture, only the tomb and the monument belong to art. What about Maalbeek? Will the eight portraits that witnessed everything be given a new face? A new and more meaningful role? Will the artist Benoît van Innis and the architects Paul Vermeulen and Henk De Smet be commissioned to design the Maalbeek Station Memorial? Because Maalbeek already possesses all of the fragments for a kintsugi artwork.