Jonas Vansteenkiste’s ceramic series La Fissure presents fractured façades inspired by the iconic Haussmannian architecture of Paris. Through these works, Vansteenkiste reflects on the socio-historical rupture initiated by Baron Haussmann’s 19th-century urban renovations, which radically transformed the medieval layout of Paris into the broad boulevards and uniform façades now emblematic of the city. While often celebrated for their aesthetic and infrastructural modernity, these interventions were also the result of mass expropriations and displacements that profoundly altered the urban fabric and its social dynamics.

Vansteenkiste approaches this transformation not merely as a historical event, but as a form of collective trauma—one that left a lasting fissure within the city’s material and psychological landscape. The cracks and disruptions in his ceramic façades function as metaphors for the lingering effects of this urban violence. They render visible the tension between surface and structure, monumentality and fragility, suggesting that beneath the ordered symmetry of Haussmann’s façades lies a history of rupture and dislocation.

By translating this socio-political rupture into sculptural form, Vansteenkiste engages in a material form of memory work. His ceramics become sites where the city’s traumatic past can be touched, examined, and reimagined. The fissures in the clay do not merely symbolize damage—they are active sites of meaning, pointing to the ways in which historical violence continues to inform contemporary behaviors, spatial experiences, and modes of urban inhabitation. In doing so, La Fissure offers a critical reflection on architecture as both a physical and psychological structure, shaped by—and shaping—the forces of history.