Duo exhibition Eldorado with Ane Vester, Queens Brussels, 2025.
When we conceived this exhibition, Ane Vester and myself created a kind of ménage à trois with the house Queens Brussels, full of ghosts and with a strong identity.
“The exhibition A Place Apart brings together the poetic worlds of Ane Vester and Lucile Bertrand with the house Queens Brussels. [Their] artworks subtly draw attention. Attention to the private house and the traces of its past, attention to presence in space but also to the absence of space, attention to the destructive past and present.”
Roxane Baeyens, excerpt from
the press release, September 2025.
Sound installation They used to sing, 2020.
3 soundtracks, 2.30 hours each.
3 mini-SD + 3 mini-speakers.
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Beirut, 2000.
12 cubes, plaster + pigments, 23 cm each side.
Table: wood panel 78 × 202 cm + wood trestles.
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Film Les inoubliables (The Unforgettables), 2024.
Excerpt – scene 4, Wars – subtitled in English, 12 mn.
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Chanter comme des oiseaux 2 (Singing like birds 2), 2025.
Reproduction of drawings on printed paper, 29.7 × 42 cm each.
Music stands, variable heights.
Diptych The Sea/The Sea, 2017.
Gouache and printed paper on Canson paper, 158 × 108 cm each.
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Photos, 2025.
Pigment prints on Archive paper, 28 × 38 cm each.
Table 100 × 100 cm, trestles.
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Queens Brussels. View of the decorated stairwell – late 19th-early 20th century –
based on painted elements from various Egyptian tombs.
Queens Brussels. Detail of the decorated stairwell.
The three soundtracks of They used to sing – featuring bird songs and extinct human songs –
have been discreetly placed on different floors of the stairwell.
Queens Brussels. Detail of the decorated stairwell.
The birdsongs and human voices can be heard randomly, between intervals of silence of varying lengths.
Often solitary, songs sometimes arise at the same moment and seem to respond to each other from one floor to another.
Lucile Bertrand and Ane Vester as a duo.
Photo Naïk Hellers, Queens Brussels
1st floor. Beirut.
On the wall, artworks by Ane Vester.
Made up of 12 cubes made of plaster and pigments,
Beirut evokes the city that has endured, and continues to endure,
periods of war and conflict alternating with periods of reconstruction.
Partially renovated, Queens Brussels has preserved the varied styles of the original house.
This room connects to a living room, where an excerpt from the film Les inoubliables (The Unforgettables), about wars, is screened.
Empire-style living room. Screening of scene 4 (Wars) from the film Les inoubliables (The Unforgettables).
Les inoubliables (The Unforgettables), still from scene 4 (Wars).
Hands manipulate personal and press archive images while women's voices recite poems about war in different languages.
This room connects to another living-room with a different style,
in which Ane Vester displays an artwork based on her color archives linked to places she has known.
2nd floor. Music sheets from the series Chanter comme des oiseaux 2 (Singing Like Birds 2), displayed on music stands,
shares the space with artworks by Ane Vester on the walls.
Chanter comme des oiseaux 2 (Singing Like Birds 2).
This new series of musical scores focuses on endangered or even extinct bird species in Europe.
For this space, together with Ane Vester, we have decided to combine artworks that are characterized by verticality and lines.
Bird songs are transcribed using texts describing the type of voice to be imitated and drawn symbols indicating modulations and pitch.
Chanter comme des oiseaux 2(Singing Like Birds 2).
A third partition is placed under the staircase leading to the upper floor.
Placed on the floor against the wall, the diptych The Sea/The Sea
depicts two opposite routes – holidaymakers on one side and migrants on the other –
which took place during the same summer between the Greek islands and the Turkish coast.
These two drawings were based on accounts given by real people.
2nd floor. Four Photos placed on a table echo Ane Vester's artworks on the walls.
In the works installed in this room, which respond to one another,
we each evoke in our own way a relationship with architecture and places, that of Queens Brussels among many others.