​In Fluctus, Jonas Vansteenkiste constructs an evocative installation that stages a moment suspended in time: a landscape and a solitary house caught in the stillness of a flood. The title, Fluctus—Latin for “wave” or “surge”—already suggests an oscillation between movement and stillness, force and quietude. The scene, composed with surgical clarity, evokes not the violence of a disaster in progress, but rather the psychological aftermath—the residue of an event that has already taken place.

The installation plays with the uncanny familiarity of the domestic. The house, a recurring archetype in Vansteenkiste’s oeuvre, stands partially submerged. The surface of the water, glassy and reflective, functions as a mirror—both literal and metaphorical. As in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1957), the house is not merely architecture, but a mental and emotional construct, a container for memory, security, and identity. Here, however, it is untethered from stability and caught in a liminal state between destruction and recovery.

Importantly, Fluctus situates itself within what philosopher Homi Bhabha would call a "third space"—a threshold where meanings are neither fixed nor resolved, but suspended. The work resists clear temporal location. We are not shown the catastrophe itself, nor the renewal that might follow. Instead, Vansteenkiste chooses to visualize the "in-between": the moment of inertia, powerlessness, and emotional exposure that lingers when structures—physical and psychological—have failed but not yet been restored.

When rain activates the installation and floods the table further, this gesture collapses the boundary between viewer and event. It reminds us that environmental and emotional trauma is not always sudden—it can be cumulative, invasive, and slow. The natural elements are not dramatized but domesticated, becoming part of an uncanny interior landscape. The familiar is made strange.

Fluctus also resonates with the concept of the traumatic sublime: the aestheticization of trauma that both distances and implicates. The calmness of the scene intensifies its emotional charge. The still water reflects not just the image of the house, but our own gaze, implicating us as witnesses to a disaster that is both intimate and collective.

In this way, Vansteenkiste's installation becomes a meditative space—an aesthetic holding environment in the Winnicottian sense—where loss, fragility, and reflection are allowed to coexist. Rather than narrate catastrophe, Fluctusrenders its psychological and spatial echo, asking what remains after the wave recedes, and how we inhabit the silence that follows.

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