Jonas Vansteenkiste

In the installation Façadism, artists Jonas Vansteenkiste and Veerle Michiels present an archive of historical façades on a reduced scale, cast in pewter. These miniature sculptures recall the kind of souvenirs commonly found in tourist shops of historic cities—facades transformed into portable relics of collective memory. The material and form are not incidental but conceptually loaded: the work opens a critical discourse on the tension between heritage preservation and the commodification of the past.

The title Façadism refers to an architectural practice in which only the street-facing façade of a historical building is preserved, while the structure behind it is entirely demolished and replaced by new construction. This process, often justified as a compromise between conservation and urban development, ultimately reduces built heritage to a surface spectacle. What remains is an aesthetic shell—a scenographic illusion of continuity, while the substance and historical integrity of the building are erased.

Vansteenkiste and Michiels make this issue tangible and situate it within a broader cultural phenomenon: the “Disneyfication” of the urban environment. Much like in theme parks, cities are increasingly shaped into curated, stylized, and controlled representations of history—designed to foster tourism and consumerism. Within this paradigm, urban artifacts lose their historical depth and socio-cultural context, becoming visual clichés stripped of their original function and meaning.

The choice of the souvenir format is deliberately ambivalent: it embodies both the longing for memory and attachment to place, and the banalization and commodification of that same memory. By presenting the façades as miniatures, the artists not only reflect on the physical scaling-down associated with tourist consumption, but also the symbolic reduction of meaning—the architectural fragment as emptied signifier.

Façadism thus operates as a critical archive: a compressed collection of symbols of an urban past increasingly under pressure from economic, neoliberal, and aesthetic forces. The work invites reflection on issues of authenticity, urban identity, and the cultural logic of spectacle in the globalized city. Rather than evoking nostalgia, Vansteenkiste and Michiels present the façade as a rupture point—a site where past and present, surface and structure, memory and loss intersect.