In Situ – fabienne leclerc is delighted to present Patrick Van Caeckenbergh’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery, thereby celebrating thirty years of collaboration.

By mobilising and diverting encyclopaedic, genealogical, and ethnological objects, Van Caeckenbergh’s sculptures and installations propose a playful disruption of the forces of nature. His strange objects are attempts to evoke Ergriffenheit , a German philosophical term describing a state of being seized or overwhelmed by the world. According to Frobenius, the German ethnologist and archaeologist, this primal experience gives rise to forms and to cultural play (Kultspiel).

In the exhibition, game boxes, appropriated toys, and various cosmic mechanisms, whose underlying logics remain to be deciphered, reconnect with the idea of Homo ludens (the playing human), and with the notion of play as a genesis of humanity . The playful structures Meccano, Ma Bête Noire, and Unité d’Habitation become parables inspired by social…