An artist's book by architect, forester and refuge keeper Wim Cuyvers, examining the changing climate and the very definition of architecture through a photographic investigation of the landscape.
Res Nullius is the third artist book by Wim Cuyvers published by MASEREEL – centre for contemporary art (Kasterlee, Belgium). The book is about Le Montavoix, the terrain on which Wim Cuyvers has literally and figuratively been working for almost twenty years. The book consists of a collection of 200 landscape photographs, an axonometric perspective of the terrain and a number of texts that accompany the photographs. In the book, Cuyvers further develops the position that architecture is made up of those spaces that lead us outside instead of sheltering interior spaces.
However, a lot has changed in recent years: climate change is having a severe impact on the terrain. Ecological forest management will have to take a very different approach to that followed in the past. Lastly, there is the fact that we are living in a hyperconnected world. Cuyvers argues that the connected condition means that we are always 'inside'. With this book, he therefore heralds the end of architecture (as he had defined it). Le Montavoix is a danse macabre with the dying medium of the art of space.
Commissioned by MASEREEL within the framework of the inaugural edition of RHIZOMA – international biennial for contemporary art (May-July 2025).
Wim Cuyvers (born 1958 in Hasselt, Belgium) is a Flemish architect, artist and essayist. As a researcher of the informal public space, he created several installations in the public space over the past decades. He has been working as a forester on and around Le Montavoix in the French Jura since 2009.
