Jonas Vansteenkiste

Following a residency at the Emile Van Dorenmuseum, Jonas Vansteenkiste created the project Orarum Fracta, Fractus Domum, a contemplative body of work that examines the layered relationship between landscape and dwelling. The starting point was the duality Vansteenkiste perceived during his stay: the idyllic beauty of the natural environment on the one hand, and the fractured, sometimes haunting presence of human-made structures embedded within it on the other.

This duality—between nature and culture, between the untouched and the constructed—resonated deeply with the artist. It led him to explore not only the physical but also the emotional and psychological rupture that occurs when the landscape becomes inhabited, altered, and domesticated. The house, often seen as a symbol of safety and belonging, here becomes fragile, fractured—its presence in the landscape both invasive and intimate.

The installation Fractum Domum (literally “Broken Home”) stages this tension. A sculptural structure, it reflects on the instability and vulnerability of our domestic spaces—spaces that are often emotionally charged, filled with memory, trauma, or displacement. Rather than a secure shelter, the house becomes a metaphor for rupture and the complex entanglement of human presence with the environment.

In response, Vansteenkiste developed Fractum Patria, the conceptual and material counterpart to Fractum Domum. While Fractum Domum focuses on the house, the constructed space of the individual, Fractum Patria expands the view outward—toward the landscape as a broader stage of collective memory and identity. The Latin word patria evokes notions of homeland, ancestry, and belonging, but paired with fractum it speaks of a broken connection, a disrupted terrain, a wounded place.

Fractum Patria takes the form of a "rozas"—an excavation or clearing in the earth. This sculpted void, inscribed into the landscape, suggests both absence and potential. Over time, nature is allowed to reclaim the shape: grass and weeds slowly grow back over the contours, blurring the edges between intervention and erosion. What remains is a faint imprint, a scar that gradually softens, absorbed once more into the terrain.

Yet traces linger—deliberate hints that the land has been shaped, touched, domesticated. These gestures point to humanity’s persistent impulse to mold the world according to its own needs and desires, while also acknowledging the futility of permanence. Nature forgets, but not completely. The landscape bears witness.

Together, Fractum Domum and Fractum Patria form a diptych: one reflecting the psychological interior, the other the physical and symbolic exterior. Vansteenkiste reveals how home and homeland are inseparably linked, and how both can be sites of fracture, transformation, and healing. These works do not offer answers but rather open spaces—voids, structures, scars—within which viewers can reflect on their own position in the landscape of memory, history, and belonging.