Charlotte Frenay
Fugitive Pages

Fugitive Pages began as a gesture anchored in Black History Month. As the artists’ book collection was explored, a rupture emerged: out of nearly two thousand books, only five could be identified as authored by African-descendant artists. What began as a necessity became a site of transformation. With the support of the Kunstenbibliotheek, 1M³ expands beyond the existing collection, welcoming books already present alongside new commissions intended to enter it, not as symbolic corrections, but as required gestures. 

Guided by the thought of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, this cubic metre operates as a site of fugitive planning: a space that inhabits the academy without fully belonging to it. Moving quietly through its gaps and constraints, it cultivates forms of study, care, and connection that resist, expand, and seek to do better, working within institutional power without seeking its recognition. 

Within the space, these shelves function as a parallel network for learning, circulation, and knowledgemaking. The books are not silent; they carry weight, absence, and the promise of continuity. At the centre sits a measured void: a shelf holding exactly the number of books initially present, rendering a glass ceiling visible and making countable the invisible barriers that shape the limits of recognition, authorship, and institutional space. 

Across the vitrine, voices converge – diasporic, African, American, British, Francophone – entering into dialogue. The book becomes a site of circulation, a place where histories meet without hierarchy. 

Visitors are invited to leave traces: names, references, absences still felt within the institution. Each note gestures toward future acquisitions, toward presence yet to come. 

This vitrine does not claim completeness. It insists on attention, on making absence felt, on building a library that listens, shifts, and grows in relation — a space of care, reflection, and collective possibility.

Charlotte Frenay

Charlotte Frenay is a Brussels-based researcher working on alternative archival practices. She holds a BA in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths, University of London, and later completed an MA in African Studies at Ghent University. She is currently enrolled in the postgraduate Curatorial Studies at KASK & Conservatorium for 2025–2026.

Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, this 1M³ space transforms the notion of creative space into one of collective visibility. A bookshelf is personal yet a place of prestige, carrying cultural weight and authority. Within this space, women’s voices take their place in public view. Together, they remind us that both knowledge and space must be continuously reimagined and reclaimed. In the context of a bookshelf, fiction represents the imaginative dimension of knowledge, the realm of what could be. Over time, the bookshelf shifts and reshapes itself. What is visible and what is concealed remain in constant conversation. The shelf becomes a living archive of thought, curiosity, and care. 

Eline Adriaensen is an architect based in Antwerp and Ghent. She holds a Master’s degree in Architecture from the University of Antwerp, complemented by an exchange program at the Umeå School of Architecture in Sweden. 

At the moment, she is participating in the curatorial studies postgraduate programme at KASK & Conservatorium.

Peeping (noun, verb)
The act of secretly or furtively looking at something, often through a small opening or from a hidden position. It typically implies curiosity, mischief, or voyeurism.

Peep Show is an exploration of intimate gazes and the fragile tension between what is visible and what should remain hidden. It transforms twelve windows into peep holes, inviting visitors to engage in a quiet, yet playful act of looking. A curated collection of texts, photographs, objects and personal ephemera uncovers intimate fragments of life. It provokes a reflection on the thin line separating observation from voyeurism, reconfigurating the act of peeping into a deliberate, poetic inquiry. In this realm, the line between observer and observed gets blurred, asking us to embrace the inherent vulnerability of our curiosity.

Marie Cathérine Stalpaert is born in Antwerp, Belgium. She is a graduate in architecture from the University of Antwerp and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville. She is currently participating in the curatorial studies postgraduate.

The more or less sign (±) is a mathe-matical symbol used to indicate precision in an approximation, or as a shorthand in the notation of a quantity with two possible values.

The symbols “±” and “∓” are used in chess to assess the positional advantage of a player. In chess, the“±” sign indicates that the White player has a better position than the Black player.

Léane Lloret was born in 1999 in Grenoble, France. A graduate in fashion and costume history of the Ecole du Louvre – Palais du Louvre, Paris, France she is specialized in contemporary artist’s books. She takes part in the Curatorial Studies programme at KASK & Conservatorium, Ghent, Belgium for 2024–25.

When an unknown back door turns a vitrine into a window, or a square pierces empty pages to expose a text printed on their backs, our surroundings are revealed as ways to see the world through. Glimpses of the street can be caught between parked cars as the bus goes by, figures can be grasped in the nearly closed curtains of a living room. At the edges, and the ends, and the backs, and the gaps, there is a life in passing motion.

A World Seen Through is a guide towards these gaps, a selection made for ways of looking and hiding. Use these as your glasses, your binoculars, your telescopes, your windows, your doors, your cat flaps, your eyes cut through a newspaper, the bottom of your beer glass, the gaps in your fingers with your head in your hands. If you listen at the open window, the cars and birds are coming in.

Jean Watt is studying on the Curatorial Studies postgraduate programme at KASK & Conservatorium. She runs the site-specific curatorial project, A Place to Rest, situating artworks in unusual spaces.

“If you’re looking for something here let me point you in the right direction…”
Paul Bailey curated a new selection of artists’ books in our 1M3 vitrine, whilst thinking on the words by Fred Moten.

In 2015, 1M3 was established as an exhibition space for artists' books from Kunstenbibliotheek's collection. A guest curator is asked to make their own unique selection and present them in 1M³'s showcases.

• In 2015 1m3 was initiated as an exhibition space dedicated to artists’ books from Kunstenbibliotheek’s collection. A guest curator is asked to make her/his selection from the library and present it within the vitrines of 1m3.

How many pantomimers have we seen and thought they had nothing to say? Some shadows cametogether to find some sort of a lie to agree on. One of them asked: “How could they know it is a lie, if we protect it with silence?” That evening shadows, faces and texts met up behind a glass door. They had this idea for the first time ever, when no-one could imagine colours. The idea that might start a lie that would last forever.“Making up a story that is never going to be told by words will kill them over and over!”

Pantomime of Nostalgia is a story that is not possible to tell. A wordless story, about something that is made up. Some stories make up themselves not for us to tell, but because there is no other way for words to come together. I let my stories be free. In this showcase, all the images chosen are based on intuition and emotions. I wanted to look at the glass, trying to see through my own reflection. Yet I wanted to look into a pair of eyes that seemed to hear all that went on, behind the glass door.

With After a brief history of artists’ publications we browsed Kunstenbibliotheek’s artists’ book collection and selected works which refer, appro­priate, sample or wink to what was made before.

“It’s not that I don’t think that the word originality means anything or has no meaning,
I just think it’s gotten a very narrow meaning lately. What I think about in terms of my work isbroadening the definitions of the word “original.” I think originality as a trope*. There is no such thing as an ahistorical activity (I mean history
in terms of one’s personal history, too).”

Sherrie Levine interviewed by Jeanne Siegel, originaly published in ARTS Magazine, Summer 1985

* A trope is a word used in a nonliteral sense to create an image. Trope refers to different types of figures of speech, such as puns,metaphors, and similes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Anna Haifisch & Stefanie Leinhos, Gnocchi, Gnocchi, who’s there?. Berlin: Colorama, 2020
• Olaf Nicolai, The Bauhaus Files: die Geschichten Unschribener Bücher Episode 1 bis 3. [s.l.]: Spector Books, s.a.
• Claudia de la Torre, Ten (unknown) Gaso­ line Stations. Berlin: backbonebooks, 2012
• Warja Lavater, Roodkapje: naar een sprookje van Perrault. Utrecht: Uitgeverij Het Spectrum, 1973
• Christian Marclay, Index. Zürich: Patrick Frey, 2021
• Elisabeth Tonnard, In This Dark Wood. Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 2008
• Astrid Seme, Baroness Elsa’s em dashes. Wien: Max Pezinger Books, 2018
• Hans-Peter Feldmann, Album. Koln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2008
• Batia Suter, Parallel Encyclopedia. Amsterdam: Roma Publications, 2007
• Sophie Nys, Alas. Gent: Grafische Cel LUCA School of arts, 2021
• Elizabeth Lebon, The Book of Ghost. Geneva: Boabooks, 2018

Ter gelegenheid van de oppensioenstelling van Katia Ballegeer bibliothecaris – archivaris van 1981 tot 2023 wordt de bibliotheekcommissie in de kijker gezet.
De unieke schetsboeken, in de typische stijl van Geert Clarisse, zijn een sprekende, levendige getuigenis van hoe geanimeerd het eraan toe ging.

Tot de leden behoorden:
K. Ballegeer, P. Beyls, N. Bourdeaud’huy, I. Castelein, G. Clarisse, K. De Bondt, A. De Mey, J-M Demeyer, J.De Mulder, P. De Smet, W. De Temmerman, H. D’Haeyere, D. Dobbelaere, B. Hinderyckx  E. Huygelen, S. Laget, N. Lannoo, D. Libens, D.Liefooghe, S. Maes, R. Martin, E. Muyllaert, N. Lannoo, J. Opstaele, S. Paridaen, M. Popelier, K. Sonck, E.Ubben  ,E.Vanacker, D.Van Gogh,  F. Vanderbiest, H. Van De Walle, B.Vansteenkiste , G. Vercaemer, E.Verschoore, K.Vuylsteke Vanfleteren