Lara Finkenstädt
City Girls

On March 16th, Lara Finkenstädt will present her sound installation City Girls. The recorded text will drift through the exhibition space, exploring "the ubiquitous figure of the girl as a self." Drawing on her research and visits to several Art Nouveau houses in Brussels, Finkenstädt seeks to immerse herself in the lives once lived there, constructing an abstract world that shifts between layers of time and place.

Lara Finkenstädt (°2001) is an artist based in Offenbach, Germany. Her practice spans slideshows, installations, and writing, often exploring the intersection of personal and public histories. Using visual and textual found footage, her work maps the movement of women through cities and interiors. Her arrangements, often reminiscent of mood boards, organize images in a way that blends collage with archival methods.
City Girls, transcript of the sound installation shown at KIOSK

The House for an Art Lover

This work is spread out in the manner of a tapestry, giving spectators the impression that they are standing at the edge of a wood;

The scenes depicted (...) represent the celebration of the senses when the fruit harvest is gathered at the end of summer. The wall on the left hand side shows apple trees in blossom, followed by images of fruit gathering, and cider pressing. The ceiling echoes this flowery scene. The wall on the right hand side shows a female lute player together with a woman dressed in an orange tunic, holding a glass of beer in her right hand and a jug in her left. Another woman, dressed in green, is seen dozing at the foot of a hop plant. Hop cones, which are harvested at the end of summer, are used both to brew beer and, at the same time, to relieve sadness.

The dining room of the Cauchie house was painted a deep red color. Built-in cabinets in the same colour featured lilac glass doors and accents. A big window facing the courtyard was made of blush pink stained glass. All this was overpainted, destroyed or otherwise changed by Lina Cauchie and her daughter after her husband's death.

The showroom or sitting room features a mural with sentimental tokens, two hearts with the initials of husband and wife interlaced and the year 1905, the date of completion of the house. The rest of the painting is adorned by grapes and pears, in lilac, yellow and beige.

In her home with lilac carpeted floors, typing something on her typewriter, in her 1910s outfit in the 1970s. Clarence Lispector writes about a typist..

I see myself mirrored in the archive and in the library and in my grandma‘s house..

The dwelling is adorned by a rose garden and walled off from the street. The garden reaches behind the house and ends with a mail box....

On my first day here I buy a silk nightgown, and hang it on the outside of my built-in wardrobe, dreaming of walking down the dark wooden central staircase, ending in a suspended gallery forming the upper landing.

I set up the postcards I brought as decoration next to my window and sit and read Cafe du Reve.

Architecture and Cityscapes

A mere description as writing, an observation of style. It has been a starting point, time again and again...

Her heroine occupies a room „painted purple, with purple Lurex threads in the curtains and bedspread.“

Hotels belong not only to tourism and to aesthetics, but to language, with its revolving doors and dumbwaiters, its metamorphic keys.

Lillians house was beautiful, lacquered, grown among the trees, and bore the mark of her handiwork all through, yet it did not seem to belong to her. She had painted, decorated, carved, arranged, selected, and most of it was made by her own hands, or refashioned, always touched or handled or improved by her, out of her very own activity and craftmanship. Yet it did not become her house, and it did not have her face, her atmosphere. She always looked like a stranger in it.

- The great hall of the Palais Stoclet, view of the fountain bay window.

Suzanne Stevens or Madame Stoclet sitting by the fountain in her home. She looks onto the water.

- Views of the Hotel van Eetvelde, decorated for the wedding of Edmond‘s daughter Germaine in 1912.

The winter garden is bathed in velvet light of pink and green stained glass.

The sun is setting in Brussels, standing on a rooftop touching the stone sculptures on the very tip of the building.

The palette he composed with wood from France and abroad, resembles that of a painter. Oak, walnut, ash, elm, holly, plane, chestnut, cherry, pear and beech provide the soft tones and the enveloping range of grays; they serve Majorelle in calm and deliberately monochrome compositions.

Rosewood provides the delicate colors and patterns of the flower. The tender yellow lemon tree, the silver maple, the purple amaranth, dear to Cressent, the jacaranda wood, the red satin, the amourette, the orange clairembourg, the black or green ebony, the red or black palm, ... constituted for him, among the foreign essences, the most extensive colored swell, where his painter instincts could flourish.

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Tearooms in Glasgow and female designers..

The Ladies Rooms were a particular success, newly allowing respectable women to get out and meet together without male company. Unlike cafes or tea rooms in other cities, there was no intrusive supervision and those having tea had an assortment of scones and cakes to hand,

A bouffant is a type of puffy, rounded hairstyle characterized by hair raised high on the head and usually covering the ears or hanging down on the sides.

As you can see, there are no framed pictures on the walls here, and the environment is practically monochrome. In France, this type of room is known as a „ladies‘ room“, the idea being that it allowed their outfits to shine.

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Hôtel Danckaert, also known as Villa Dewin, was designed in 1922 for Jean Danckaert, a Brussels industrial engineer. The adjacent building was later designed as his son‘s residence. There is no information on his wife Marguerite Héloise Marie Quillet. The interior furnishings and decoration of the Villa were developed by the famous Ateliers d’Art De Coene.

The old cherry tree is a catching point in the garden, and echoes the cherries represented on the stained glass windows of the villa. The backdrop with various species (linden, maples, Canada poplar) creates intimacy.

The difference between a house and a Palais is to be felt in the body. Interior spaces made for the individual are able to be navigated seamlessly--without fear. To navigate through a palace or courtyard is to move as a collective body through a large open space.

The dining room door is adorned with opalescent glass whose tint changes according to the intensity and incidence of light.

The large entrance makes way for the Carriage.

The entrance hall with its central staircase is adorned by the Pointillism mural „Reading in the park, an autumn afternoon“, which forms a window to the outside.

The house is kept in Jewel Tones, the cloakroom features yellow glass with ribbed surfaces. It shimmers with a blue tinted glow.

Shades of blush pink

Rich caramel hues

Sitting on carpets that shimmer from the light shining through the stained glass doors and sitting by the fountains sustained through immense wealth.

Historically some rooms in the house were fitted either for the public or the private sphere. The Hotel Solvay is furnished with a winter garden laid out between rooms on the central staircase, marble shelves featured exotic plants in the past.

Brussels was constructing new parts of the city while Art Nouveau was fashionable. Industrialists came from the Country to the City and built winter gardens for their homes.

The house incorporates different types of wood. Some reveal the family‘s ties to the Congo, where their wealth was extracted from: mahogany, bilinga, okume, violetwood, ash, padauk, pitch pine.

A warm brownish tonality with horizontal light coming in.

Roses and Chestnuts

Opalescent glass, colored with metal oxides (cobalt, iron, manganese, copper)

Maria Sethe, a musician in her cottage.

She was painted by Van Rysselberghe in 1891, sitting at her harmonium. Seen from her profile, her updo hair style mirrors the snail embellishment on the head of the string instrument in the background.

She made her first trip to London where she came into contact with artists and the designers of the Liberty fabrics at the famous liberty Department store, housed in a tudor style building which would inspire the Cottage Bloemenwerf. She also immersed herself in the emerging Arts & Crafts movement. During a subsequent trip, she collected fabric samples and wallpaper patterns for her husband.

Sèthe designed the flower garden and the wallpaper, among other things.

#homestaging

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The role of Horta’s first wife, drawing teacher Pauline Heyse in his work.(...)

The woman on the right of De Vreese is called Pauline Heyse, who married Victor Horta in 1881.

At the time of the photograph, she had been sharing the sheets with De Vreese for ten years; Horta, ... , knew nothing at that time.

(...) As if possessed, he drew and re-drew every detail down to the last curl .. for the stonemasons or the blacksmiths.

That is also what you get when you deprive your young, graceful wife (...)

It is said that Mrs. Heyse had other lovers, or other men had Mrs.

To them, history was only an intimation. Things were like palimpsests (...) They were sure that everything hinted at something transcendental.

His wife Suzanne Stevens was the daughter of a Parisian art critic and collector, and the niece of a painter. Through these connections to the art world, they were introduced to the avant-garde art circles of Paris and Vienna..

The van de Velde Villa (Bloemenwerf) is overgrown as to hide the facade, from the back road I can see its bright green moss garden reflecting in the sun.

The Bois de la Cambre, is linked to the rest of the municipality by the Avenue Louise/Louizalaan, which was built in 1861, at the same time the park was laid out. The park forms a natural extension of the Sonian Forest, which extends deep into the city in the southeast of Brussels.

THE THE forest!

...This no doubt explains why acorns and oak leaves were so often used to represent the De Coene firm.

... Ending in his late Art Deco masterpiece (...) The Stoclet Palace’s influence can be felt in all his buildings.

Parks are associated with the wealthy because they moved to the city from spacious country homes and needed a place to enjoy their favorite pastime.

the decline of formal reception rooms in domestic architecture in the 20th century...

...other reception rooms, such as a morning room, a 19th-century designation for a sitting room, often with east-facing exposure, suited for daytime calls.

In 1865, an architectural manual in England defined „drawing room“ in this way:

This is the Lady‘s Apartment, essentially, being the modern form of the Lady‘s Withdrawing-room, otherwise the Parlour, or perfected Chamber of medieval plan. If a Morning-room be not provided, it is properly the only Sitting-room of the family. In it in any case the ladies receive calls throughout the day, and the family and their guests assemble before dinner. After dinner the ladies withdraw to it, and are joined by the gentlemen for the evening. (...)There is only one kind of drawing room as regards purpose: there is little difference, except in size and evidence of opulence, between that of the duchess and that of the simplest gentlewoman in the neighborhood. ...

The villa moves closer, the perspective changes as I approach, I‘m greeted in the marble entrance hall with a metal radiator cover embellished with grapes and vines... cherry stained glass window details and an oak staircase.. I‘m walking on soft velvet carpet...

A little tired, the groceries stretching out her new knit sack, she boarded the tram. She placed the bundle in her lap and the tram began to move. She then settled back in her seat trying to get comfortable, with a half-contented sigh.

... The tram went swaying along the tracks, heading down broad avenues. Soon a more humid breeze blew announcing, more than the end of the afternoon, the end of the unstable hour.

She breathed deeply and a great acceptance gave her face a womanly air. ...The tram would slow, then come to a halt.

...There was no one in the garden. She put her packages on the ground, sat on a bench along a path and stayed there a long while. The vastness seemed to calm her, the silence regulated her breathing. She was falling asleep inside herself.

...From where did that half-dream come that encircled her? Like a droning of bees and birds. Everything was strange, too gentle, too big.

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time moved abnormally in hotel women. several decades coexisted without quarrelling.

The typewriter is credited with assisting the entrance of women into the clerical workplace (...)

When Remington started marketing typewriters, the company assumed the machine would not be used for composing but for transcribing dictation, and that the person typing would be a woman. The 1800s Sholes and Glidden typewriter had floral ornamentation on the case.

The passage I stumbled on spoke of sacred time as architecture - not built of stone and mortar but of ritual and attention...

Abstract Entities

Abstract Entities, Thomas Hitchcock's first institutional solo exhibition in Belgium, delves into the intersections of Art Nouveau and Europe’s fin de siècle cultural period and contemporary technological developments. Situated within the context of today’s global capitalism and digital shifts, he critically examines and juxtaposes themes of exploitation within a broader movement of retreating into interiority and dream-like realms.

Hitchcock’s newly created sculptural installation, within KIOSK’s former anatomical theater, also functions as an open platform for temporary interventions by Belgian art students. A multitude of different interventions across several media will take place throughout the exhibition period, including performances, music, collective readings, talks, workshops, discussions, body practices, poetry, and screenings – starting with the first contributions during the opening.

This exhibition was produced in collaboration with Phileas - The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art, and with the support of the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport (BMKOES) of Austria.