Visual artist Filip Berte on his project for Performatik17

The visual artist Filip Berte spent a week in the Petit-Château, taking photographs with a stone camera obscura. Portraits of the building and its residents are the basis for his Un-Home/Moving Stones - Momentum #3 project at the Performatik17 festival.

Filip Berte describes the project he installed in Brussels asylum centres as "a critical moment of introspection". Sounds cryptic. "The idea of my work is to penetrate into places that are usually pretty well closed off," he explains. "I want to make what happens more public, in this case offering a reflection on the refugees in this city and the attitudes we take to them. Just before Performatik, I spent a full week in the Petit-Château, Belgium's largest and oldest reception centre, which houses about 750 asylum-seekers."

"The place fascinates me for two reasons. First, because of the historical transformation: always accommodation for temporary residents, it went from being a military barracks to being a prison to being a reception centre. Second, because of its key location on the old edge of the city. Where in the past soldiers protected the city from negative influences from outside, the canal district is still under close observation today. Using postcards from the archives, I want, among other things, to transpose the historical situations in and around the Petit-Château to new photographs. Elsewhere, there will be a second intervention, which is still secret."

Un-Home/Moving Stones - Momentum #3, which you can see and experience in the Kaaistudios and at Workspacebrussels, is both an exhibition and a "lecture-performance". What should we expect?
Filip Berte: I would prefer to call it a lecture-exhibition. Specifically, I'm showing the results of the work in the Petit-Château. I describe my working procedure, my intentions, my position, and various ways of looking and of creating an image. The meta-stories figure too, both big and small. But there is nothing written out: it's all about spontaneous encounters with the public. At Workspacebrussels, they also get to see inside my studio and darkroom. I want visitors to leave with questions and I hope to "shift" something in their attitude to newcomers to the city.

You produce photographs with a homemade camera obscura made of...stone.
Berte: It is a metaphorical object, an enlarged version of a piece of calcium carbonate rock I took from the caves of the Swiss-French border town Vallorbe, which is also known for its asylum centre. For me, the idea of the cave symbolises an in-between situation, a limbo between two places. Asylum-seekers, too, after all, find themselves between two realities: between acceptance in the new country and returning home.

My outsize camera-stone, in itself a kind of cave, has two openings or eyes that allow me to make two photograph images at the same time.

This is the third time that you have organised a Momentum, as you call these interventions. After the Vallorbe asylum centre in 2015, you did it last year in the Peeterskasteel asylum centre in Scherpenheuvel. How did you go about things at the Petit-Château?
Berte: Time is essential for making an image with this camera. It varies from a few seconds to some hours, depending on the light available and the photosensitivity of the film. So people have to stare at the hole in the stone for quite a while. Those personal prints contrast strongly with the neutral photography of identity cards and passports, and especially with the biometric photograph of the face that is taken of every asylum-seeker. Alongside individual portraits and photographs of the temporary reception centre, I also take a group portrait. In the past, by the way, those moments were received very positively: I always had too many candidates.

You want to carry out this project all over Europe. What places are on your agenda?
Berte: The current ones are Greece and Poland. With the stone, I want to spend a month travelling from the Turkish coast to Lesbos and then Piraeus, finishing up on the border with Macedonia. Last summer, I did humanitarian work in Thessaloniki. The aim is to take pictures in various camps with the stone. In Poland the situation is more difficult: the mood there is particularly hostile to refugees.

Is the junior minister for Asylum Policy and Migration, Theo Francken, invited?
Berte: He is very, very welcome. So he is hereby invited.

> Un-Home/Moving Stones - Momentum #3. 25/03 > 01/04, Kaaistudios & Workspacebrussels, Brussels