Aussi léger que le soleil sur l'eau

In 1974, a hydroelectric dam project was set to flood the lower part of Chassepierre. It was never built. For the 52nd Festival international des Arts de la Rue, I placed the village’s church spire, 3D-printed in soap filament, in one of its old washhouses. In contact with the water, it dissolves.

A village that never was

Chassepierre is a village of water. Four springs, one of them said to cure skin diseases. A mill at the Trou des Fées. A loop of the Semois that holds the village like a hand. Its history is bound up with water.

In 1974, that water nearly took everything. A hydroelectric dam was meant to flood the land in the lower part of the village. To keep their fields and their houses, residents formed a committee and pressed the authorities until the project was abandoned. They printed a postcard to show what awaited them: a photograph of the village taken through the trees, two red lines, the 300 and 290 metre contours. The level the water would have reached. Half the church tower.

The dam was never built. What remains is the image: a drowned village with only its spire above the surface. The image d’Épinal of modernity, progress swallowing the landscape. A Chassepierre that never existed.

That same year, in the same village, the poet Marie Fizaine invited forty-nine friends to come and read and perform in the streets. It was the beginning of the Festival. Chassepierre kept its fields and gained a festival; 1974 left it both, what it refused and what it invented. This installation proposes a “what if?”.

The washhouse, where the news went round

The work is installed in one of the village’s old washhouses. The lavoir was a place of talk as much as a place of work: a typical public space of the 19th and 20th centuries, where people came to wash and, above all, to find out who was ill, who was leaving, who was getting married. News travelled over running water, where the private and the public met.

The spire rises in the middle of the main basin. Two machines produce a low mist that runs across the surface and does not rise. We look down on the village from very high up, and from very far away.

A material that does not hold

The piece grew out of a one-week residency in Chassepierre in autumn 2025, organised by the Centre d’Art Contemporain du Luxembourg belge and the Festival international des Arts de la Rue. A week of walking, listening, opening drawers: that is where the committee’s postcard turned up.

The spire is 3D-printed in soap filament, a very rare material sourced from an American manufacturer. It was printed with Studio Minimètre, a Brussels workshop specialising in 3D printing and bio-based materials.

Two copies were printed, one for each day of the festival. Within a few hours in the water, each one disappears. By late Saturday afternoon, little of the spire is left; on Sunday morning, we start again. It is the last metaphor of the piece, and the simplest: memories fade. We rebuild a future that never happened, in a material that does not hold.

This year the Festival’s theme was Se ressouvenir, to remember again. Here, it means remembering the future.

What never happened leaves no ruins. There is nothing to visit: no dam, no lake, no village at the bottom of the water. Just a red postcard in a drawer and, for two days, a spire melting in a washhouse.

Aussi léger que le soleil sur l’eau was produced by the Centre d’Art Contemporain du Luxembourg belge as part of its Laboratoires numériques, with the Festival international des Arts de la Rue de Chassepierre.