"Dreamers"
installation 2018
Light box
On the architecture of longing and the poetics of imagined shelter
“I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1957)
Jonas Vansteenkiste’s installation Dreamers finds conceptual kinship with the writings of Gaston Bachelard, particularly his phenomenological study The Poetics of Space. Bachelard's insight that the home is not merely a physical construct but a psychic space—a vessel for intimacy, memory, and the imagination—resonates deeply in this work. The house, in Bachelard’s view, operates as a “second skin,” a space of protection that simultaneously enables and contains the act of dreaming.
In Dreamers, fragments of rooftops are suspended or placed against the open expanse of a blue sky, creating an uncanny tableau in which the sheltering function of the home is evoked through its most iconic upper threshold: the roof. Yet these rooftops are dislocated, disconnected from the base structures that would ground them in physical space. What we encounter are not complete houses, but architectural remnants—symbols of homes imagined, remembered, or longed for.
This deliberate fragmentation evokes a condition of in-betweenness. The rooftops hover between presence and absence, form and dissolution, permanence and ephemerality. They are metaphors not for homes as they are, but for homes as they might be—expressions of desire, memory, or projected futures. In that sense, Dreamers stages the architecture of longing: the poetic and psychological space between what is and what could be.
The attic—implicitly referenced through the elevated position of the roofs—functions here as a potent metaphor. In both literature and psychoanalysis, the attic often symbolizes the unconscious or the space of repressed memory. It is where we store what we cannot let go of, and what we do not know how to integrate into the present. Vansteenkiste’s dreamers are thus not passive figures of reverie, but active archivists—constructing and reconstructing their psychic dwellings through fragments, much like we arrange and re-arrange the contents of an attic to make sense of the self.
Furthermore, the work draws attention to the instability of the concept of “home” in contemporary life. In showing only the roofs, Vansteenkiste highlights the fragility of the domestic ideal—its susceptibility to displacement, abstraction, or collapse. The absence of walls or foundations suggests that these shelters exist more as ideas than as concrete realities. They are aspirational, even utopian, yet vulnerable to fragmentation.
In this way, Dreamers articulates a fundamental duality: the home as both haven and illusion, as both real and imagined. The installation invites viewers to consider their own relationship to the idea of home—not as a fixed place, but as a mutable psychic structure shaped by memory, longing, and social condition. It challenges the viewer to ask: What does it mean to dwell? Where does one truly feel at home?
Dreamers is thus not merely an installation of sculptural elements, but a phenomenological space in itself—one that materializes the inner architecture of hope, memory, and dream. In doing so, Vansteenkiste continues his larger project of examining how spatial forms mirror psychological states, and how the built environment becomes a repository of our most fragile human desires.
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