The Day You Where Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves, 2020-2025
Even though my work is very visual, text has always played a major role in it, whether it is self-written text or pre-existing texts I reuse, often in the form of fragments or collages. It is no wonder then that I’m attracted to textile. The words text and textile are both derived from the Latin verb texere, meaning to weave. It implies that weaving preceded writing, and that the first writers saw themselves as weavers. In The Elements of Typographic Style (1992), Robert Bringhurst writes: ‘An ancient metaphor: Thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns-but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver.’(1)
In that strange summer of 2020, when a virus had the entire world in its grip, I was rereading Virgil’s Aeneid. In part three, my attention was caught by the following lines: “And when, (…), you draw near to the town of Cumae, the haunted lakes, and Avernus with its rustling woods, you will see an inspired prophetess, who deep in a rocky cave sings the Fates and entrusts to leaves signs and symbols. Whatever verses the maid has traced on leaves she arranged in order and stores away in the cave. These remain unmoved in their places and do not quit their rank; but when at the turn of a hinge a light breeze has stirred them, and the open door has scattered the tender foliage, never thereafter does she care to catch them, as they flutter in the rocky cave, nor to recover their places and unite the verses; inquirers depart no wiser than they came, and loathe the Sibyl’s seat.” (2) Only enigmatic fragments remain of the Cumaean Sibyl’s prophecies, as she would not help reassemble the leaves and recreate the original prophecy if the wind had blown and scattered them: disjecta membra. It struck me as a metaphor for our desire to know the future in a period that now seems almost surreal, and its futility. When Aeneas, the main character of Virgil’s epic poem, asks the Sibyl of Cumaea for a prophecy about his future, he specifically requests that she not write it on leaves, which would be easily swirled around by gusts of wind, but instead speak it aloud. The hundred gates of her cave open with as many voices rushing out, the Sibyl’s rapt replies.
It was surely no coincidence that I thought of the Sibyl of Cumae, the prophetess who scribbled the future on leaves, when in November 2020 I spent four weeks collecting fallen autumn leaves in my hometown of Brussels. It was trying to clear my mind after a government-imposed lockdown had closed my solo exhibition at Bozar in Brussels a second time. In that difficult period, I touched the ground by picking up hundreds of leaves, taking them home and drying them between newspaper pages (3). At the time, the dailies were full of charts, often about the COVID-19 pandemic that was raging and spreading at the time; about the presidential election that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won on 7 November 2020, which incumbent president Donald Trump refused to accept, making unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud; about the complexity of migration flows in Africa and Latin America; about Asia’s major river systems at risk because of climate change.
Several weeks later, I photographed each dried autumn leave on the newspaper page on which I had initially put it, a selection of which formed the basis for twenty-eight textile designs, representing twenty-eight consecutive days or four weeks. I combined the photos with short text notes, which I cut out of leaves of white paper. These notes, anaphoric exercises in brevity, consist of short (autobiographical) bits I wrote myself and found texts about topics that matter to me, which I edited and polished until they felt right.
More later…
opening of my solo exhibition in Vienna with this work on 2 October 2025
1. Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, Hartley and Marks Publishers, 1992, p. 25
2. Virgil. Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid. Translated by Fairclough, H. R. Loeb Classical Library Volumes 63 & 64. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. 1916.
3. I dried them between daily bought (inter)national newspapers of that period in 2020, in six different languages (Dutch, French, English, German, Spanish and Italian) and a bi-monthly Dutch_language art newspaper.