Marinda Vandenheede Belgian, 1976

The starting point is a page from an old legal codex — here, texts on "Armée" and "Assistance Publique," regulations that structured people's lives down to the smallest detail: who was liable for military service, how an abandoned child was legally protected. Systems that tried to hold grip on the human.

For these works, I cover every letter of the text with a drop of enamel paint, one drop per letter, applied with a toothpick. The shape each drop takes is not something I control — it emerges from chance, from the paint's own stubbornness. Two logics meet here: the strict, literal precision of the original — letter by letter, line by line — and the unpredictability of the gesture that covers it.

The result is a text that is no longer legible, replaced by a new image: a dense fabric of marks, in white or in black, that doesn't destroy the system but overwrites it. What remains is the memory of structure — the columns, the regularity, the rhythm of the original page — while the content itself has disappeared. A system that can no longer be read but can still be felt. — Marinda Vandenheede